Click on this link to get per capita water use, by county, for California.
The lowest use is San Francisco county @ 108 gallons/day; the highest use is Mono county @ 470 gallons/day. Note that use includes swimming pools, tap water and agricultural inputs. Thus, San Francisco may not "use" that much water, but they consume far more than 108 gallons/day through food that comes from different places. It's called "virtual water."
Bottom Line: This map is a good first step towards understanding water consumption.
hattip to JWT
Thursday, December 11
California Water Use Map
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4 comments:
This looks to me to be largely a map of population density; where population density is high (along the coast, some of the larger inland cities), water use per resident is lower. In the less populated areas (Inyo County, which is made up largely of Death Valley National Park), it's high. I'm certain that a lot of this has to do with agriculture, but it may also be that people who live away from all the niceties of cities have needs for more water/person (a park for each town of 1000, rather than a park for every 10,000 people in town, perhaps). Otherwise, I have a hard time understanding why Fresno isn't much higher in water use.
The so-called "water shortage" is behind 50+/- yrs of altering the water infrastructure in preparation for water diversion. I was employed by one of the ringleaders.Click on this link:
http://www.myspace.com/marlalk4
Actually, the map shows the per capita usage MINUS use for industry and irrigation. So this does not include agricultural usage. See: http://www.sacbee.com/1098/story/1431106.html and check out the footnote.
There is definite correlation with population density, however, I wonder about the correlation with things like average lot size (how much lawn to water per resident), number of pools per capita etc... just thinking of some things that consume a lot of water for urban residents.
Per-capita water usage in California is more than 1,000 gallons per day, if anyone needed any assurance that the map really does exclude industrial and agricultural use. If they didn't, then at least some of the counties would logically have to use thousands of gallons per person daily. The differences shown here have mostly to do with how much gets used watering yards and washing cars (not so much of either in San Francisco) as well as some things like the quality of plumbing.
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