California Targets Private Property With Latest Water Well Fees, Charges: Report

   / California Targets Private Property With Latest Water Well Fees, Charges: Report #101  
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Timber sales do not help the fuels problem. In a timber sale you take the biggest trees because they make more 2x4s. But those are also the trees that survive fire the best. To restore forest health we need to thin out the small stuff and do way more controlled burns. The trees that get thinned are often not good for lumber. We need ways to use them like pulp mills and biomass plants. Even if we have to subsidize those, we can still extract some value from the thinning slash.
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It depends on the timber sale. In NC, and I would assume much of the South East, timber can be cut to thin the forest, take out the more mature trees or clear cut. Thinning can be done to remove densely growing trees, I always see this with pines. The smaller trees, roughly 15 years old, are chipped up and sold for wood pulp or pellets. This allows the remaining trees to grow faster and larger. Eventually, the larger trees will be cut but it still might be a selective cut where only some of the trees are removed. Then there is clear cutting where almost every tree is cut and sold.

The bigger trees often are used for veneer so my forester told me.

NC has regulations and law to allow prescribed burns which seem to be effective. The native Americans are supposed to have set forest fires to clear out the under growth to make it easier for hunting and traveling. Saw something about the native people in Australia doing the same thing. Course, "modern" people put a stop to this but now seem to realize the importance of controlled burns...

Later,
Dan
 
   / California Targets Private Property With Latest Water Well Fees, Charges: Report #102  
Please don't move here!

"Nobody goes there anymore, its too crowded".

And there's no more water for new development. Las Vegas and Phoenix seem like they are in even worse shape, water expected to completely run out within weeks. Deserts aren't suitable for large populations!
 
   / California Targets Private Property With Latest Water Well Fees, Charges: Report #103  
Only wish I had a well metered or not.

Several expensive local attempts failed...

Lake Tahoe has mandatory rationing and it also has one on the largest fresh bodies of water...
 
   / California Targets Private Property With Latest Water Well Fees, Charges: Report #104  
The land/soil around Lake Okeechobee, which used to be part of the Everglades, has been disappearing since the canals were built to drain the swamps.

The land is not lowering, the soil is just disappearing. ... I wonder if any of the CA land height changes is from soil loss.
I don't think we have soil loss from runoff like you describe, or from blowing away like Depression-era Oklahoma. We do have farmland, roads, particularly levees, sinking and unstable because they overlay what was bottomless Tule swamp muck.

Kinda related - my ancestors arrived in California by covered wagon and homesteaded land. They improved raw land, sold to newcomers at a profit (a California tradition :)), repeated a few times. Their ultimate prosperity was when US Corps of Engineers drained the Tule swamps vicinity of Lemoore (Later a NAS, S of Fresno, southern San Joaquin Valley) and they farmed enough land to give nice farms to most of their several sons. The second photo I posted above showing subsidence, shows that vicinity today 150 years later.
 
   / California Targets Private Property With Latest Water Well Fees, Charges: Report #107  
I have maybe 2 acres of lawn. None of it has been watered in well over 15 years, other than a few small sections that were reseeded after some digging. It's all green as can be and needs mowing every week or so unless we get into a dry spell.

There is absolutely NO way I would pay for water to spray on a lawn, even if it was just electric to run a well.

I was in town yesterday for the first time in weeks. I passed two homes with sprinklers running. From the spray pattern, all of the heads looked like normal heads that should be rotating. Not a single one of them was out of 40 or more ... not one. Water was just flowing out into the street and down the drains.
I'm guessing the heads are gear drive and rotate slowly. Would be very odd if none were rotating.

This is what our lawn would look like by mid summer if we didn't irrigate in a normal year:
 

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   / California Targets Private Property With Latest Water Well Fees, Charges: Report #108  
I dug down to see where that came from.

In summary every water agency in the state was required to create a plan to deal with the water demand greatly exceeding supply.

That memo was one agency in desert-climate Southern California notifying ag-business water users that they need to report usage, and fees will eventually be invoked to limit use of the disappearing resource.

This article explains the overall situation.

Note the article describes the already huge impact on commercial ag - a major part of California's economy - resulting from the present shortage.
 
   / California Targets Private Property With Latest Water Well Fees, Charges: Report #109  
That memo was one agency in desert-climate Southern California notifying ag-business water users that they need to report usage, and fees will eventually be invoked to limit use of the disappearing resource.
One could get rich selling dehydrated water in large tankers.
 
   / California Targets Private Property With Latest Water Well Fees, Charges: Report #110  
If the treated wastewater were not flushed into rivers then into the ocean but back into the aquifers it might help
Some areas in California are putting water back down the wells during the rainy season to recharge the aquifer. Lack of regulation is limiting that. Why go to all the trouble and expense of recharging an aquifer if the golf course a mile away is going to pump it out for free?
 
 
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