Haefele: How state stands in the way of saving water

By Marc B. Haefele

E-Mail

Comments (0)

Text Size:

tool goes here

During a prolonged drought in the early 1990s, Los Angeles' Department of Water and Power and Department of Public Works conducted an ambitious experiment. In eight homes, they installed "gray water" equipment that diverted the outflows from washing machines, showers, bathtubs and bathroom sinks to irrigate lawns and gardens.

Participants in the program were happy with the results, and the test officially was proclaimed successful in a research report that found the installations reduced water consumption by about 50 percent per household on average. No human disease pathogens were found in the outside drainage areas.

Now, drought is back, the report forgotten, and here we are again, facing another statewide water shortage, river flows at record lows and Los Angeles residents facing mandatory 15 percent usage cuts. So what happened to the simple plumbing trick that could save so much water? State health and housing officials, asked in 1992 by the Legislature to draw up a permit code to regulate and legalize the use of so-called "gray water," presented a statute so laden with regulations that few Californians have installed systems.

In the entire state, an estimated 200 legal gray-water systems have been built. The draconian permitting process has driven gray water underground.

As many as 1.7 million gray-water outlets are running illegally in California, according to Santa Barbara gray-water guru Art Ludwig, whose Web site, www.OasisDesign. net, is a leading resource for gray-water research, lore and history. None of the owners has been prosecuted.

At the heart of the official obstructiveness in Sacramento is bureaucracies' unproven suspicion that gray waste water carries disease. "They miss the big thing — pollution by industry — and focus on this," Ludwig said. He says the Centers for Disease Control have found no human disease transmissions from gray-water irrigation.

Steve Bilson, a San Diego County gray- water expert, suggests that state officials were overly cautious because of major ground- water pollution issues of the early 1990s — such as factory-site perchlorates and MBTE from gas-station storage tanks.

Water expert Larry Farwell, who participated in the state safety discussion in the 1990s, said, "Nothing is cuter than two kids bathing in a tub together, but once you pull the plug, they say you have toxic waste." He estimates that extensive gray-water recycling could reduce the state's residential water use by more than 16 percent.

State Sen. Alan Lowenthal calls his new bill to revive gray-water irrigation the "Shower to Flower" law. The legislation, introduced in January, is going through a state health and safety agency review similar to the one that gutted its predecessor. "This time we hope we can convince the Building Standards Commission," Lowenthal said.

State officials recently quoted by the Los Angeles Times said that there was little research to prove gray water safe. They apparently missed Los Angeles' 1992 study, which did exactly that. There's a pending $450,000 "Long Term Effects of Landscape Irrigation Using Household Graywater" study by the Virginia-based Water Environment Research Foundation whose full results are due in 2011.

The basic appeal of gray water is its utter simplicity. Just pipe your washing machine, bath and bathroom sink outflow onto your lawns and garden. They flourish, as detergents and organic dirt particles become plant nutrients.

Arizona, Texas, New Mexico and Montana have much more generous laws on gray-water irrigation. "The state's challenge is this time to do gray water right," says Peter Gleick, of the prestigious Pacific Institute. "We have to match the quality of water available to our needs. We can't go on using scarce potable water for everything."

Dry is becoming California's future. We've long assumed that our drought years would, after seasons of parched lawns and scrimping, be followed by plenteous rains and even flooding; that reservoirs and leftover snowpack would always return.

Now, in the grip of a global climate shift, we are learning better than to count on this. Dryness could become permanent in places where it's long been cyclical, whether it's in Argentina's Pampas, Australia's southeast or, in years to come, the great state of California — where our river outflows no longer can support several fish populations and where Colorado River allowances are shrinking like the flow of the river itself.

Haefele is a commentator for Southern California Public Radio and writes for Nomada magazine of Buenos Aires.

LOS ANGELES TIMES