Posted by michaefe 3 days ago
My wife grew up in the Bay Area, and was told the same.
But her family is from Sacramento. Up until about 15 years ago, everyone in Sacramento paid the same for water (based on square footage of your home). There were no water meters. So they didn't conserve. They ran the sprinklers in 100 degree heat for hours, they washed sidewalks with water instead sweeping, and all the other things.
But when the meters came, her Uncle blamed SoCal for "stealing his water". He complained every month when the bill came about how he has to pay more now because of SoCal.
NorCal, including Sacramento, is on the western side of the Sierras.
So unless they planned on pumping the water over/under the mountain range that surrounds it in every direction except for towards LA, that water was never available for any NorCal city to use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Aqueduct
Would be interesting to see the relative amounts of use by LA and by agriculture in the Central Valley though.
But SoCal isn't only LA. LA itself gets a bit less than half of their water from MWP, which manages the water from the SWP and the Colorado. About the same amount it gets from the the eastern Sierras. These are supposed to drop to ~10% of LA's water supply as recapture/recycling projects complete.
Or computed the other way around, LA only has rights to ~20% of the water managed by MWD. Of course water supply, distribution, and rights are all blended and traded around all the time, but generally speaking it's not "LA" using up that water from NorCal, the consumption is significantly more from the cities and farms that came after.
https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/
tl;dr: Urban water use is tiny. In NorCal, the vast majority of the water flows unimpeded to the sea. In the Central Valley, most water is used for agriculture. Agricultural water use in any one of the 3 major basins in the Central Valley is more than all urban areas in California combined. Unsurprisingly, urban use is the primary one in the SF and LA areas, but the absolute totals are very small compared to total CA water supplies.
But really, California (and really the entire Western US) needs a water rights governance overhaul. Right now the focus is all on urban water use, which is practically negligible compared to the agricultural water rights usage.
Meanwhile, San Francisco drinks clean glacier water that a valley in Yosemite was destroyed to provide this and they refuse to repurpose a downstream damn that has enough capacity to do it.
Physician, heal thyself.
Now that we have moved to a 2 floor detached home (also in San Jose) we do not have that issue, and everything is gravity fed.
Larger buildings tend to have multiple independent systems
My city runs on surface water, so we have treatment and then pump to storage tanks. You would have to be out for quite a while to run the city out of water, though - the tanks are large.
The aqueduct water is specifically purified by the Los Angeles Aqueduct Filtration Plant. That plant is gravity fed, but it doesn't operate without power.
LA just has the advantage of having mountains in the city, so it's cheaper building more elevated water storage so the capacity lasts longer during power interruptions (which are also not as common or extended as they are in the east). They will still eventually run out if they're not replenished by powered pumps.
You can't have a city of millions of people and have the water be potable from the tap without testing and treatment
> New York City’s water (including drinking water) is unfiltered, making it the largest unfiltered water system in the country. Were New York to begin filtering its water, it would cost the city approximately 1 million dollars per day to operate the filtration plant.
They have hundreds of sampling stations to check daily.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/01/nyregion/nyc-tap-water-qu...
This causes some issues for observant Jews, because the water technically might not be kosher.
https://oukosher.org/blog/consumer-news/nyc-water/
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/07/nyregion/the-waters-fine-...
Filtration isn't common.
EDIT: I'm a dork an grabbed the wrong URL. Changed URL to a PDF for lack of better.
A major metro doesn’t treat its tap water? Where on earth did you get that crazy idea?
<old URL deleted>
https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dep/downloads/pdf/water/drinking-...
I'll save some digging: "Even without filtration, the water is carefully treated to reduce the risk of harmful microorganisms."
The untreated NYC water has tiny crustaceans in it, which make it not Kosher, which is why thee bagels from a Jewish deli in NYC are so good. Go figure.
https://newsfeed.time.com/2010/08/31/drink-up-nyc-meet-the-t...
Tap water is treated (UV and chloride disinfecting), but is largely not filtered: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_water_supply_sys...
https://images.nebula.tv/5ba7e541-f57c-44cc-a91d-6a89bad158d...
It is an insane engineering achievement. A train literally running on tracks on a road that is floating on water!
It's also the wrong stupid technology. The trains are constrained on space because of the low-floor bullshit. It's the longest light rail in the country, it's too fucking long and slow. Even if we fully built out ST3 it can't handle more than ~20% of commuters. It can't be expanded with express tracks because it's built deep underground, so the commute is so much slower than the equivalent in other countries and will NEVER compete with the automobile except during peak rush hour. The northern stations are next to the freeway so over half the land that could be transit-oriented development can't be, and then what's left is devoted to parking anyway. Complete, total waste of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, built and planned by people who don't and won't ever use transit.
That 10x cost directly makes it so we can't build out our system properly and we keep building out car infrastructure because people would rather have a car and save 2 hours a day commuting.
Your other points aside -
Doing something no one else has ever done is the definition of an engineering achievement.
There isn't a set of best practices. There aren't a bunch of off the shelf parts, there aren't any contractors who can help you out because they've done it a dozen times before. It is an original engineering challenge.
Pulling it off is by definition an achievement.
That said, 100% agree about the station placement. Heck the stations that are well placed were poorly designed, they should be profitable by including commercial real estate and residences, with the revenue from both going to Sound Transit to pay for the system.
But no, we didn't do that and I can't even get a cup of coffee, in Seattle, at our light rail stations.
I'd be happy about the light rail expansion if they weren't talking about delaying the Ballard line indefinitely. :(
(more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47457884)
Also I love when they refer to it as the "_First_ California Water Wars" in a grim realization of the future of water scarcity in the West
We could end all California water scarcity talk today, with no impact to food availability for Americans, by curtailing the international export of just two California crops: almonds and alfalfa.
Alfalfa is also a staple for crop rotation, so any farming operation will still grow some alfalfa to maintain rotation for good soil health (or during bad condition seasons since it's hardier to poor conditions and not a permanent crop).
If alfalfa cannot be exported (through policy or economic conditions), the low price attracts more livestock production in-state (which would be even worse for water use).
Those things makes it a hard crop to target for sustainability and export.
the old mechanic arts / controlling new forces / build new highways / for goods and men / override the ocean / and make the very ether / carry human thought
the desert shall rejoice / and blossom as the rose
Or, rewritten for the Los Angeles Aqueduct:
the desert shall wither / and blossom in a plume of dust [1]
[1] https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-06-19/owens-v...
> Their analysis found that putting solar panels over the 4,000 miles of California’s open canals could save up to 63 billion gallons of water annually
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/solar-panel-cove...
To put it into perspective, 63 billion gallons is 193340 acre-feet, which is 0.5% of california's water use (a bit under 40 millions acre-feet). That's a tenth the water consumption of lawns, which is 1/15th the water consumption of agriculture.
Most of the video content has the correct coloring, from my experience observing the aqueduct.
Desalination is dominated by operating costs.
The most efficient commercial desalinator for boats is 32 Watts a gallon.
[0] p2 of https://cwc.ca.gov/-/media/CWC-Website/Files/Documents/2019/...
For a rough estimate for replacing agricultural uses too ~6x that urban figure at least then weep at the amount of pumps you'd need to bring that water up and inland to the farm lands from the coast. At least for replacing urban use most of the population lives on/near the coast where the water would be produced.
Intermittently. Essential services like water (with expensive fixed costs) aren’t a good fit for absorbing variable supply.
> Power for a project like this isn't the issue
California has the country’s most expensive power [1] in part due to policymakers constantly assuming it’s free.
[1] https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/
