A good column about water supply in this morning's Bee, and though I don't agree with his assumption that any option to increase supply can be taken off the table, it is an issue that will have great impact upon the Parkway in the future....
Dan Walters: As population, water demand grow, the supply is less certain
By Dan Walters -- Bee ColumnistPublished 2:15 am PDT Sunday, August 21, 2005
Mark Twain may or may not have actually said that "whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over," depending on which historic authority one believes, but it was an accurate description of 19th-century California - a time and a place with which he was intimately familiar.
Southern California ranchers and Northern California gold miners battled over water rights constantly because of the state's peculiar hydrology - and while the identities and motives of contestants have evolved, their legal, political and economic struggles are shaping 21st-century California as well.
We know that California has 37 million people now and will continue to add population at roughly 5 million to 6 million per decade. That growth, water authorities say, will increase urban demand by 3 million to 4 million acre-feet (an acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons) a year by 2030, depending on how successful voluntary and mandatory conservation programs may be in curbing per capita use, now more than 200 gallons each day.
----read more http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/columns/walters/story/13453269p-14294306c.html
