It’s a rainy Monday here in California, and the morning began
with the kind of steady downpour that fills the gutters to the brim and almost
banishes the reality of water as a finite resource. Almost. A quick look at the front page of the
newspaper tells a different story.
In Los Angeles County, homeowners on the outskirts of Lancaster are
caught in a bind: what was billed as an up and coming gated community has in
fact turned into a water-short ghost town, complete faucets that barely trickle,
toilets that take up to four hours to refill, and only 23 of 35 homes occupied
on a development that originally planned to include 425 residences. The story is a perfect combination of
the housing market meltdown and our increasingly fragile infrastructure
system.
There are plenty of other similar stories to be found
because, whether you like it or not, we are in the middle of a water
crisis. You can blame it on climate
change or aging infrastructure or green-lawn addicts, whichever devil you choose
the outcome is still the same: a diminishing supply struggling to meet an
ever-growing demand. The
problems we face are complex, expensive and myriad, and unfortunately, no quick
fix will help.
So how do we solve our water problems? Asking the right questions is a good
place to start. How do you know
what the “right” questions are?
Look at what your colleagues are asking. What are other utility managers
concerned about? What complaints do
your customers have? What issues
are hot topics for the talking heads and politicians crowding our airwaves?
But what if the answers to those provoke another volley of
more complex queries involving the anticipated consequences of picking one
solution over another? How do you
develop a plan of action? And is
your organization flexible enough to adapt to unexpected obstacles that are
guaranteed to flare up along the way?
In Lancaster, there’s been lots of finger pointing, but no
real solutions. Both the developer
and L.A.
County’s Waterworks District 40 are laying blame on the other’s doorstep. Was water promised and not
delivered? Were the prerequisites
agreed to and then never met? Is
there even really enough water to sustain 23 homes, let alone 425? And while those Lancaster
homeowners are suffering now, I wonder if they an isolated incident, or can more
and more communities across the country expect to find themselves in similar
situations?