Huzzah and hey-nonny-nonny! Denver Water is giving us a third day of watering each week. Folks in my address cohort will be able to water Wednesday, Saturday, and now Monday as well.
Rrg. Missed the Monday this week.
Reservoirs have filled up substantially further than expected. As well, with the heat, violations have also spiked.
On Sunday, use hit 359 million gallons, well over the average daily goal of 197 million gallons a day, according to Denver Water spokeswoman Trina McGuire Collier.
“People are definitely using more,” said Mcguire Collier, but that’s still much less than the 500 million gallons a day people used to consume before the drought hit.
To date, Denver Water customers have reduced overall consumption by about 28 percent, McGuire Collier said.
While some other Front Range communities have gone back to all-volunteer restrictions, Denver Water has (wisely, I think) kept some level of mandatory restrictions in place.
You know what? I wish California adopted that policy. I thought it was one of the best ideas while living in Colorado and always wondered why CA didn’t do the same thing.
I think California (at least in the south) will eventually have to do it. Too many people, not enough water, esp. if the excess Colorado R. water they’ve been absconding with actually gets used by other thirsty states.
Problem is, it won’t be popular and it won’t be easy, and by the time the political will is gathered up to do it, the restrictions will probably have to be far more draconian.
As a related side note, with the road expansion, the sprinkler system at the Denver West business park got well and truly thrashed. Even if they’d been allowed to water, with the drought, they couldn’t have.
Well, they’ve been working on that system for the past month or two, and now they’ve been ripping out the poor brownish shreds of lawn remains, and laying new sod.
I think that’s a mistake, frankly — some more drought-resistant ground cover or shrubbery would be a better choice — but it will be nice to see more green around us. For a while, at least.
Are you involved with the rolling blackouts? One of my LJ friends in your area mentioned that she was part of them.
Haven’t had any problems yet. I know there were some blacked out areas more centrally in Denver this afternoon, but I wasn’t affected in any of the places I was.