Water restrictions tighten -- unless you're exempt, natch

Last night's City Council meeting was one for the ages down at City Hall Plaza (map). First, the large crowd at the meeting's call to order dwindled to just one person after the remaining attendees (i.e., seven of Duke's athletic teams and their coaches) left after the City recognized their championships last year.

And though that person was there to speak on the American Tobacco incentives and Golden Belt redevelopment plan, even with a member of the public present, the general business agenda was disposed of in perhaps fifteen minutes.

What occupied the remainder of the meeting? Water, water, water.

The H-S wraps up the main topics du jour -- the new ban on all lawn watering save for drip-irrigation, questions about getting state permission from DENR to bring the 500 million gallon Nello Teer Quarry online, discussion of how much water Durham has left -- in a lead story in today's paper.

One interesting angle that's been less explored so far was mentioned in a passing question from Mike Woodard during Monday's Council meeting, and coincidentally came in from a reader's email to me yesterday: what's up with the water exemption licenses?

 

We all know we're in stage III+ water restrictions use, but there's a small clause on the city website about an exemption:

 

 

 

Customers may secure a written license from the city manager (or his designee) to use water contrary to the Stage III mandatory conservation measures if it can be shown to the manager's satisfaction that the licensee's use of water will result in an overall thirty (30) percent or greater reduction in water use.

 

They even list the folks who have this magic license: http://www.ci.durham.nc.us/departments/wm/s3_license_holders.cfm

Who's on the list? No real surprises here. Construction companies like Barnhill, Bovis Lend Lease, and Triangle Grading (whose little 'oops' on the NC 98 widening project Monday warranted a whole story in today's Herald-Sun). This seems fairly understandable, since construction crews have to use some water in the process of grading and preparing building sites.

A trickier exemption is those for mobile water-based businesses like pressure washing and mobile car washes. On the one hand, you certainly don't want a small business to go out of business when their enterprise relies on water. On the other hand, I know I've winced when I've passed by the South Square SuperTarget during these restrictions and have seen the mobile car wash folks sudsing up the cars in the parking lot. (Commercial car washes, generally speaking, have on-premises water recycling systems that treat and re-use most of the water that's brought to bear in the car cleaning process.)

Then there are the unsurprising applicants: Duke, Treyburn, Hillandale Country Club, Northgate, GlaxoSmithKline. All with landscaping and grassy campuses.

My question along the whole gamut of applicants is: how, precisely, are these businesses reducing water the requisite 30%? Low-flow toilets and shower heads that have sprouted up? No giant ice statues of Disney characters for Sunday brunch at Treyburn? It's a really tough thing to imagine with pressure washing and car wash businesses, almost all of which use water intensively throughout their regular operations. Perhaps they take on 1/3 fewer customers, or agree to run the water less often when washing vehicles?

Note that should Durham go to a full Stage IV water restriction, a new application process obtains; under that situation, applicants would have to note how they would reduce their water usage by 50%.

...

One business that's not on the list: the Kroger at North Pointe, which for two straight days has had sprinklers watering the plants for sale by the business's front door, helpfully sending a stream of water down the parking lot's slope and into the stormwater system. C'mon, Kroger, it's not like anyone is buying plants these days if they can't use city water to plant 'em.

I asked the Kroger staff on duty why they were running their sprinklers against even the pre-Monday night restrictions rules; they just shrugged their shoulders and suggested I call the store manager today. (The shoulder-shrug is sadly a common occurrence at the North Pointe Kroger, also seen when you ask questions such as "Why is the Starbucks never open at its posted morning time?" and "Why are these expired foods still on the shelf?")

But I'm sure they're not alone. Anyone know of any other water scofflaws out there?

Comments

[Chaz]

yes, I know drought offenders -- the used car lot at the corner of Nations Avenue and Chapel Hill Blvd. (it may be called Walter's) insanely planted new grass a month ago and blithely waters away as much as they want. Between that and their constant re-washing of cars for sale, they send wasted streams of water trickling across Chapel Hill Blvd every weekend, at least. It drives me insane.

Who do we call to blow the whistle on these people anyway? This drought is no joke.

I did hear one great and easy trick to recycling water you can then use to water your plants -- a woman I know with three kids has a couple of buckets waiting near the tub. When she turns on the shower for them, she captures the water that sprays out before it reaches the right temperature for them to get in. That's probably at least eight buckets a day she keeps from going down the drain, wasted -- and that could keep a garden alive.

I'd love to hear from someone on how much plants can take by way of soapy water or dirty water and still thrive.

[barry]

During the last drought, we not only captured the cold water from the faucet, bu also as much of the grey water as we could for watering the garden. i wouldn't say it thrived, but we kept a lot of things alive until the drought broke.

this fall i've only got some lettuce and broccoli in the garden, so we've started again to capture the cold water, but will probably not try to catch the soapy stuff. i do have a drip system in the vegetable garden, but i'll be using the additional water for some of the shrubs.

i'm kinda glad now that my backyard landscaping project is a couple of months behind schedule. i had originally intended to be planting a lot of stuff this fall, which will now wait until the spring (i hope.)

[Bull City Rising]

Chaz:

To answer your question -- heck yeah, there's a way to tattle on water wrongdoers electronically. I didn't realize this when I posted the piece.

http://www.durhamnc.gov/departments/wm/water_report_form.cfm

[durhamfood]

From one of the articles: "She said about 3,000 gallons of water were lost. That is roughly what a family of four would use over a five-day period,"

How exactly does a family of four go through 3,000 gallons in 5 days? That's 150 gallons per person per day! That has to be a mistake...

[Michael Bacon]

Well, using a non-low flow shower head that puts out 6 gpm, four family members taking 10 minute showers each day would use 1200 gallons. Old toilets easily use 5 gallons per flush -- figure maybe four flushes per person per day, that's 400 gallons. Add in laundry, dishwasher, and lawn irrigation, it's not hard to get to 3,000.

[miles]

Don't pick on Hillandale "country club." Unlike private country clubs that have the budgets to blow on fixing tees and greens, Hillandale probably takes it on the chin when their grass dies. Since Hillandale is a public course, it offers people without the disposable income to belong to an exclusive club reasonable prices for a decent round of golf. Hillandale should also get a little more credit for its history, being one of only a few courses open to African Americans back in the day.

[durhamfood]

Hmm. Maybe a good way to cut on water use would be to require people to wear dirty clothes and wash dishes by hand...

[Bull City Rising]

Hi Miles,

Just to be clear, I wasn't necessarily meaning to pick on Hillandale or any of these groups. I think it's interesting to see where the exemptions are, that's all. I *do* want to know how these organizations are conserving 30%, which is after all the real underlying goal here.

The only one of the above entities that I consider a scofflaw, really, is the Kroger that's watering its parking lot, without an exemption.

[Chaz]

You now, even *with* an exemption, I'm going to take a bold step and go on record as saying that Kroger should not be allowed to water its parking lot, period. In my opinion, that parking lot is big enough.

[Michael Bacon]

DF: Heh. Funny idea.

But just to be pedantic, I have to point out that low flow shower heads would cut that gpm rate to 2.5, and newer toilets use only 1.6 gpf. I have a front-loading washer which cuts water usage by over 1/3, and have been using "flush" water (waiting for it to get hot) to water my plants and trees.

But I have a very hard time keeping my showers short. Still working on that.

[barry]

I lived in Stockton, CA during a 7 year drought period from 86 - 93. When we bought our first house in 1990, it had been vacant for over a year. We got our first water rationing statement, alloting our monthly usage basded on the previous year's usage: 0 units of water per month.

We appealed, and got our new allotment, based on a family of 4, with 2 small children, and a 1500 square foot house.

Our new allotment was 28 units per month. A unit is approximately 750 gallons. Or about 175 gallons per person per day. And that was under the most severe rationing restrictions. Our typical use during the 3 years we lived in the house was 6 - 8 units per month.

Washing dishes by hand, depending on your technique, may very well use more water per dish than running a filled dishwasher every third day or so.

[Will]

I'm no expert - hince why I'm asking this question - but why are we not talking about regional growth and how it can stress the water supply? Granted that doesn't help where we're at today but shouldn't we be discussing how this might impact us in the future? Seems like we're just going to give water conservation a bunch of lip service and cross our fingers that someone near the watersheds does a rain dance. Where are all those Hurricanes the NWS forecasted - a tropical storm sure would hit the spot right about now, right?

Will

[Chaz]

If Barry is from California, he's definitely the one to answer that question, Will! I think they've been coping with that problem for decades. All I will say is that I think it is about time we started considering the impact that development has on the natural resource supply to be every bit as important as examinig the impact it has on neighborhood integrity, infrastructure, taxes and city services.

[Barry]

i only lived there for 7 or so years. it rained basically every day for the first month after i moved in, and then rained again for the last month before i moved here. despite that, California's system of reservoirs and viaducts is such that very little water goes unused between the mountains and the sea. And i don't think you can say that, except for a relatively small number of communities, water has been a limiting factor in growth in California. I'm not sure how they do it.

One of the points of my anecdote was to illustrate that even in drought conditions mandating water rationing, the amount of water i was allowed to consume was significantly greater than my needs. Water was also, believe it or not, significantly more expensive in Durham than Stockton when i first moved here, or at least my water bills were significantly higher than they had been for about the same amount of usage.

As far as development here goes, see my post yesterday afternoon at my place:
http://dependableerection.blogspot.com/2007/10/drought.html

This should be a huge wakeup call for anyone advocating a pro-development position in any of our local governments.

[merry]

Regarding exemptions for the big corporate users, the company I work for (not in Durham and not on this list) uses post-consumer water to water lawns. It's quite possible that some other places like GSK etc. do the same.