This is disturbing; the journalist is advocating the outing/doxxing of a private citizen who is breaking no laws whatsoever (at least as far as I can tell from the story). In the internet bully culture we have, that's incredibly irresponsible.
If there's something wrong with an individual using so much water (and there may very well be), then the right response is to change the laws, regulations, or rates to charge more or even to prohibit said water use; not to shame an individual who is acting legally within the system.
I agree. After all, it's not as if this property owner isn't paying for the extravagant water usage.
And if you think that $90,000/year isn't enough to reimburse society for this water usage... raise the damn prices. And if you think raising water rates would unfairly hurt the poor... take the increased revenue and hand it out as a per-capita water tax rebate.
"it's not as if this property owner isn't paying for the extravagant water usage."
That's kind of the problem though, he isn't. Water is notoriously subsidized. It's hard to make the case that 12 million gallons of clean water would only cost $90k. The system kind of has built into it this spirit of "everyone needs clean affordable water". There was no limit put in place, so there's some people taking crazy advantage of it.
>That's already in the works at LADWP, which could go from a two-tier system to four tiers. Marty Adams of the DWP told me that in the case of the highest user in Bel-Air, the $90,000 annual cost of water would rise to about $125,000.
Instead of tiered, there could be a progressive multiplier, e.g. a multiplier equal to the gallons used: 1 gallon = $1 ; 10 gallons = $100; 100 gallons = $10,000.
Water use squared doesn't really make sense as a charging scheme. There should be a per-gallon rate that everyone things is plenty, and that (or a small multiple) should be the max.
What does "multiplier system" mean? If you're multiplying by gallons, then you're measuring water use squared. If you're multiplying by fixed numbers, that's just a complicated way of doing tiers.
On the one hand, no, being crazily abusive of the situation IS his/her fault. Legal does not imply moral or ethical, for good reasons. We legislate the minimum necessary because more restrictive legislation would harm people who have valid reasons/exceptions. Then we rely on social pressure to encourage people to not abuse that gray area.
So we have someone blatantly abusing the system.
(And while I tend to give people extreme benefit of the doubt, I have troubles believing that someone is ignorant of the drought and their relatively high water usage - if it's not the property owner, then it's someone maintaining the property that hasn't raided the issue)
I am not at all a fan of mob justice - but at the same time to ignore the role of social pressure in maintaining a balance is to invite a society I don't want to be part of: where everything not explicitly illegal is therefore endorsed.
Mob Justice can be a terrible thing: it's applied unequally, tends to ignore subtleties and justifications, and is hard to put back in to the bottle. At the same time, the law can not be the only determination of what is "right", "good", or "encouraged".
We need to find some middle ground, where society can disapprove, and the disapproval has weight but not so much weight as to strangle or suffocate someone that doesn't conform.
Agree that harassment isn't the way to go about this, but I think we can put a good amount of blame on the individual here - selfish water usage doesn't seem like a great idea in California.
See my post bellow estimating how large their lot should be assuming golf-course irrigation. I came with ~5 acres
This individual is a jerk, no doubt, but 5 acres is small, so their overall usage compared to the total for LA county isn't very significant. LA county as a whole is abusing water.
I'd suggest a tiered pricing scheme. Current rates for water usage bellow what 99.9% of what the LA uses (to make it politically expedient), and two orders of magnitude larger otherwise.
How is this not completely the fault of the person using such extraordinary amounts of water? Are they not an adult? Do they not have full control over their actions?
LA literally steals water from Mexico (see Colorado river and the fact that it doesn't flow into Mexico anymore). So this author's holier-than-thou attitude strikes me as a bit rich: Angelinos are water abusers[1] in general and without exception. They're just sour someone's better at wasting water then they are.
That being said, I don't support this gentleman's water usage. But I would increase the water price high enough to hurt everyone into conservation.
[1]A city abuses water when they use water beyond the capability of it being replenished. So it's much harder to waste water in T.O. than in LA.
Then change the law so that authorities within rule of the Law address the issue. Outing people, be they gun owners in NY state or water abusers in LA is harassment.
This is not that different from J. Edgar Hoover threatening to "out" homosexuals who didn't do his bidding in the 50s; at the time homosexuality offended the sensibilities of people in the same way that water wastage offends some today.
We might agree with the merits of limiting water use, and celebrate our advancement in the treatment of sexual minorities (I do for both), but harassment outside of the Law is abuse.
A "simple" solution would be to use a system like we do for our taxes where the first X amount is completely subsidized, the next Y amount is less subsidized, the next Z amount is even less subsidized, etc...
Exactly. And then just make these tiers be per occupant, and perhaps per square feet of land area if you're feeling generous. It can just be two tiers too. Either you're within the limits of what seems acceptable to a person living on a certain amount of land, or you're not.
Its not even necessary. Do you realize how insanely, ridiculously cheap metered water service is?
The current price for water service in San Francisco is $5.45 for 748 gallons or less than one cent per gallon. If they tripled the meter price for everyone the poor could still afford everything they need to shower, drink and cook. Only very heavy users would be affected. Source: http://www.sfwater.org/index.aspx?page=168
That price per gallon is very high compared to the rest of the country. Water is cheap, even during a drought. The problem is the pool of water is shrinking as the population expands. People worried about that should leave the area to almost anywhere in the country where water is even cheaper and not a shortage.
The "standard" for water billing is $ per 1000 gallons. Why, I donno. They're paying $7.50, I'm paying a mere $1.69 as a residential drinker. Sewage fee is much higher than actual water cost... I can get an extra meter for irrigation water and pay much less, because the expensive to operate and expensive to expand sewage treatment plant does not process irrigation water. Most of my "water" bill actually goes to the sewage plant. Water is almost too cheap to meter in the east... sewage, on the other hand, is expensive to treat, and sometimes I think its the only reason we have water meters...
I'm not sure its reasonable to assume something that costs 4x "normal" long term sustainable pricing is being subsidized, unless the true cost of living in a drought is 10x or 100x or whatever and the .gov is subsidizing it somehow as a service to the poor. More data would be necessary to come to a conclusion.
I may be wrong but I think due to Prop 218, it's illegal for municipalities in California to charge more than the "actual cost". For one thing, this means that tiered water pricing will always get challenged.
There seems to be a pretty easy workaround for that, stealing a page from the private enterprise playbook. Municipal water districts could sell their water rights to another entity. The water-rights-holding entity can then charge the municipality an arm and a leg for the water, which can then charge their customers for that cost.
To further drive the Howard Jarvis people up a wall, make sure the rightsholding entity is a secretive private company based offshore with no corporate records of any kind.
Clean water shouldn't be à commodity like any other, but it's easy to imagine a system where luxury water use above a certain limit is charged at high or even progressive rates.
Also, if there is a shortage of water then impose some limit, and if there is no limit then the shortage can't be that severe..
Clean water certainly should not be a commodity like any other. It should not be allowed, for example, for someone to corner the market for water. I would say water is in fact a commodity _unlike_ any other.
Corner the market on water? One of the most common compounds on the planet earth?
The price of metered water in San Francisco is $5.45 for 748 gallons. I am having difficulty imagining how any conceivable price increase could either deny the poor enough water to drink, cook and shower or open the door to a monopolist to seize control of all of it.
> One of the most common compounds on the planet earth
If the price of water coming in the one pipe that leads to your hose would be hiked by 100x, you would proably be upset. It's both very difficult to provide a functioning market because of infrastructure, and people would pay almost infinitely for clean water.
Maybe. I'd have to think about it. Water is singularly unlike any other commodity, though, because of its positive external effects on society. As an example I give you sanitation. Do you want to ride on a bus full of people who do not all have running water at home, for washing their hands? Probably not.
I'm not sure that could be considered a commodity. Then again, a patent is a way to control the market to such a degree that something can't even become a commodity, so I guess it works in that sense.
Shaming people for doing things that are legal but nonetheless antisocial is the only way to avoid the situation where you have to make everything that's bad also illegal. It's a time-honored way of enforcing social norms and avoiding overly-legalistic social frameworks.
> Is it worth squeezing the cities when farms consume 80 percent of the water that people use in California, while they generate only 2 percent of its economic activity?
I may be missing some context here (didn't read the wp article you're linking). But evaluating farms based on the "economic activity" they produce just sounds all kinds of wrong.
Californian farms produce an incredible quantity of food, don't they?
In terms of dollars they produce quite a bit of value, because they produce premium fresh vegetables at times when they're out of season elsewhere, but you say you don't want to do that.
In terms of actual keep-people-from-starving-to-death calories, California doesn't produce a whole lot (that would be the Midwest and the Canadian prairie provinces). No one is going to die if fresh organic artichokes become unavailable.
Not just that.. I didn't fully read it myself, and it ends with this:
> In recent decades, farmers and cities have both made strides in reducing their water use. Already, the agricultural industry has embraced techniques like drip irrigation. Farmers are using about the same amount of water as they did in 1960s, but they have doubled the amount of money they get.
> The argument for focusing urban conservation may come down to practical concerns. It takes time and investment to make farms more efficient, and the state has already put money into encouraging farmers to buy efficiency upgrades. During drought emergencies, water use can be curtailed faster by simply telling people not to water their lawns.
> Besides, the cities are growing. Unless wasteful practices (like grass lawns) can be untaught now, urban users will start to consume more and more of the state’s water.
Egg on my face, and apologies to anyone mislead by my being sloppy, that wasn't my intention.
Although I absolutely agree that Internet vigilante culture is a bit out of control, I'm not sure what else could be done here. There have already been numerous reports of Oprah getting tankers to deliver water to her home, little significant action taken to respond to the drought because apparently California all of a sudden decides that government has limits, and people who live in that neighborhood are not going to respond to anything but ridiculously steep rate increases. Sometimes people do douchbaggy things that are completely legal. Public criticism of their actions is fair game IMO and is also perfectly legal.
Call your state representative and let them know you want market pricing for water.
A 2011 study found that the average California household used used more than 360 gallons of water per day [1]. Let's round that up to 500. Each household gets 500 gallons per day at a price that covers the pipes, i.e. the price you pay today. Nobody cares whether you drink it, use it to water your lawn, or grow 92 heads of broccoli [2]. From the five hundred and first gallon you start paying a price that reflects the fact that fresh, potable water is a scarce and rival good.
At least the criticism should attempt to be fair. I have no idea what Oprah is doing with her water tankers or where they come from, but in Palo Alto, for example, getting water by tanker can be an entirely reasonable and even environmentally responsible thing to do.
There are places, Palo Alto included, which produce large amounts of recycled water suitable for irrigation but haven't yet built out the infrastructure to pipe it directly to users.
So criticizing people may be reasonable, but it's worth checking whether the criticism is justified first.
>>There have already been numerous reports of Oprah getting tankers to deliver water to her home
If those tankers bring water from a place where water is plentiful, that actually sounds like a very reasonable thing to do, and she should be praised, not ostracized for it.
I don't really like the faux-investigative tone of the article either, but it's misleading to accuse him of calling for vigilantism. He drove around a rich neighborhood, concluded that he would not be able to knock on anyone's door and talk about water, and then suggested a tiered tax system so that luxury use of water is discouraged, while also noting that there are additional externalities such as runoff that aren't being accounted for.
The person emptying the complimentary bowl of lollipops into their bag isn't breaking any law, but they are breaking social expectations and making things worse for everyone else.
And yet, if you punch them in the face for it, you'll be arrested for assault.
If you think that wasting 36k gallons of water a day should be illegal, write to your representative, don't go looking for private citizens to "make an example of".
In the end, you'll be the bad guy, and the law will still say it's legal to waste that much water.
No one is advocating punching anyone in the face. The journalist is essentially advocating public shaming, i.e. "Hey, look at this asshole who dumped the whole complimentary bowl of lollipops in their bag."
I find the Hacker news response to this pretty interesting. I think you'll find that many/most programmer/engineer types will think about this from a "does it follow the rules of the system" perspective: He's following the law as it exists, so if there's a problem, the issue is with the system. Many/most other people, however, will approach this from a social expectations perspective: This person is acting in a socially unacceptable way, so they deserved to be shamed.
I'm not saying which way is better or right, but as someone firmly in the programmer/engineer camp, it's been important for me to understand how so many people approach the "rules" of the world from a very different perspective.
The "programmer/engineers" also seem to ignore how the laws get made, and how changes are opposed. This is an adversarial system. If your adversary can block progressive reform then shaming is really the only answer.
Also, stopping short of doxxing, it's simply useful for people to know that this level of private consumption exists.
>it's simply useful for people to know that this level of private consumption exists.
Why? How can we assume that this water is being wasted? What if the owner has a private hydroponics system, and they sell produce to farmers markets? It's legal, productive, and requires a lot of water.
Starting a witchhunt because a wealthy person uses a lot of water in a water-scarce area misses the point entirely, because we have no idea what the water is being used for. If there's a legitimate use for it, and they're able to pay, I don't see what the problem is.
If you're worried about water being legitimately wasted, work towards getting water usage regulated so we can determine which activities are wasteful, and which are not. Then, customers would be forced to explain water-usage like this, and could be penalized if it were deemed unnecessary.
We can't ask whether it's justified if we don`t know it's happening.
Investigating a potential problem requires recognition that there may be a problem. That's what's happening here -- investigation. I'm surprised you find that controversial.
Sometimes investigations start with the regulators, and sometimes they start with members of the public.
We shouldn't have to wait for the regulators to change the regulations before we're allowed to ask "what's going on here?" In fact, what reason is there to change any regulation if there's no perception of a problem, nor desire by anybody to see it changed?
You seem to be arguing that anything that is not explicitly prohibited by regulations should be acceptable to the public. If people can't regulate themselves to at least some degree, this means we'd have to explicitly codify all "good behaviour". This is unworkable, and frankly undesirable.
Often people feel morally obliged to avoid doing something for the common good. But as soon you charge a fee people will assume that that fee reflects the social cost and maybe start doing it a lot more.
Either don't charge money for something and use suasion to get people to use too much or charge enough that you're happy that they use as much as they can afford.
And we're in a drought. I don't care if they paid for the water, it is completely selfish for them to think they should be able to use anywhere near that amount of water.
Imagine it this way. Pretend all the water is being sold, no water rights, and the government is free to do whatever it wants within reason.
The government needs a certain amount of money to keep up infrastructure and maybe to subsidize households. It sells this guy 1300 gallons an hour at a high price, and uses that money to not sell a farm 8000 gallons an hour of discount water.
Now you have less water being used, and you send the rich purchaser a thank you letter.
If you charge for externalities, then buying more is not a bad thing. If you overcharge for externalities, it can even be a good thing.
So the question is not "is he using a lot of water", the question is what he's paying for, and whether externalities are being offset.
The price in California is probably too low today, but that could easily be changed.
A better example would be if a person came into a supermarket in the morning and bought all bread and milk so no one else would have any. It's legal,but most stores would probably have a policy against it.
You also pay for the lollipops. The key is that it's a finite resource with a relatively (3 stage, or whatever) flat rate. The price structure is not dynamic enough to account for the fact that at some point the value of the last drop of water approaches infinity.
The lollipops are a built-in charge with an assumption of only taking a couple.
If you take ten and explicitly pay a dollar, everyone is happy.
The water in California has a limited supply, yes, but the use is plenty elastic. If it was all worth a moderate price per gallon, there wouldn't be such an issue. The elasticity and constant inflow mean that a price asymptote is just not going to happen.
I heard a report on kqed, the local npr station and the team, wife and husband were quite excited about their next step in outing the users.
It does not seem to disgust them in any way, rather, they see themselves as heroes for doing avant guarde reporting and turning the tables on the powerful, etc. And the kqed producers were quite happy with the reporting.
I dont use much water and think it's very wasteful, but this public shaming and virtual mob mentality is disgusting, but their audience who suffer from a guilt complex, lap it up with vigor.
While I agree with you, I think the shaming and bullying has emerged from the sense helplessness people feel in being able to change laws or receive justice. These days the common belief (and possible reality) is that the rich dictate the laws and we're powerless to affect change. By publicly shaming, raising awareness/rage, and generating a large undercurrent of dissent, people have found they can affect change.
When I first read the article, I, too, wanted this person exposed. However, after reading your article, you are 100% correct in your analysis. It really is a type of internet-style doxxing, and you're also right in that this person isn't doing something illegal.
It's not illegal, but it is wrong in the moral sense. It is equivalent to someone parking in handicap spots and simply paying the fines. It's irresponsible and selfish, and a lot of people are cutting back to do their part. Someone coming along and abusing the system like this because of inefficiently low rates doesn't mean this person should be allowed to continue.
Aren't you using different standards for the journalist and the individual? if what the journalist is doing is disturbing, so is what the individual is doing.. if the individual is breaking no laws, neither is the journalist by outing him or shaming him. Both are acting legally within the system..
One action can be rectified, the other possibly not. Public shaming can lead to unforeseen circumstances (you are relying on the judgement of everyone who is informed, which can include unstable people), so shouldn't be taken lightly. Additionally, it's not like a small village, where once the corrective behavior is taken it's fairly easy to make sure people know. There's less incentive in the media to make sure the people that were informed about the problem are informed about the fix, so the punishment can continue long after the correction.
Just because it's not illegal doesn't mean it's not wrong. We are in one of the worst droughts in recent history. To do something so blatant and so selfish is completely something that should be shamed.
If your only argument is someone not breaking the law, then tell me this, is doxxing illegal? Based on my research, it is not necessarily illegal depending on context.
Water is not just a commodity or utility. IT KEEPS US ALIVE. Without water, we all die. If someone else uses more water, in this case, a hell lot more and meaninglessly wasting it, and in current CA drought condition, ultimately means less water for rest of us to drink and to keep us alive, then there's an advent problem. I'm sick to hear that people say that's OK because on one broke the law. It was like to be OK to discriminate people on basis of race and religion before the equal rights amendment. CA declared a drought state of emergency since early 2014. Doesn't that mean anything to anyone?
In some parts of the country, utility usage is effectively public knowledge (I'm guessing granularity varies a good bit though). Before we bought our first home, our agent advised us to call the local electric company to ask for past usage to know what to expect in utilities. They were happy to provide an average bill just off the property address.
My experience was with NYSEG[0], which is a private company as I understand it. I've heard similar reports from others in other parts of the country but can't answer specifics about them.
They did not provide customer information like names/phones, it was simply input address, receive usage. Of course, with property tax records and such, we already knew who owned the place.
Where I live (and I won't say), I can access a web page that tells me my utility usage as well as that of my neighbors. So, yeah, that's what I'm saying.
Is this a privately held company or one of those public utilities that is community based? Sorry, I don't recall the correct term. I can see in those instances it would public knowledge because if I recall correctly, every customer is a shareholder of a sort, or something like that.
I agree. If it's an issue, just implement a tiered system that charges extremely high rates for extremely high usage and be done with it... That's basically what Las Vegas does and it seems to be quite effective.
Laws are not the only topic of discussion in an open and free society. An open and free society may talk about any topic it wishes, including usage of shared resources.
Bradleybuda can read my response to their comment and the rest of the thread it produced (including this comment). If they have an example of what they claim they can point to it.
A few years back, Atlanta faced a serious drought (the two lakes it lives on nearly dried up). Some mansion was discovered to be running a seriously large decorative fountain - without recirculating the water (yes, it came in, got tossed in the air, then flushed down the drain) and wasting water on par with the above article; once published, the public outcry was deafening and recirculation pipes soon added.
Atlanta's situation is actually pretty interesting. Most of the water loss is caused by bad infrastructure (leaky pipes and sewers), and they have massively pissed off pretty much everyone in three states.
The city was/is using up a very significant portion of the Chattahoochee and its reserves and tributaries, causing severe issues downstream for Florida, Georgia and Alabama communities. They also injected sewage into the water, causing silting issues. Additionally, faced with shortages, the GA state legislature proposed to run a water pipeline from the other side of the state, essentially stealing more water from other GA sources further east (Savannah area, iirc).
Last I was paying attention, GA state legislature had filed a request to take more water out of the Chattahoochee, over objections from Alabama. Went to a Federal judge, who pointed out that Atlanta's use of water from Lake Lenier was actually illegal, in excess of the original authorizations put in place when it was constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers. Oops.
Driving through some of the more mansion-laden neighborhoods (Buckhead on e.g. Habersham Drive), you'll see signs near the curb saying things like "IRRIGATION WATER DRAWN FROM WELL". I presume those were meant to discourage torches & pitchforks.
I'm not sure the distinction is all that meaningful.
That part of the city was originally country homes for the city's wealthy folk back in the 19th century. So I'm sure a lot of wells were struck back in those days, probably modernized over time. The estates were big, though, so not a lot of wells-per-acre.
OK then as a crude engineering estimate to one sig fig it takes one kilowatt-hour to boil away a liter of water (Am I mis-remembering? That seems extremely low), and the sun is up half the time, and one kilowatt for one hour is exactly one kilowatt-hour. Also we'll assume lawns are 100% thermodynamic black bodies turning all sunlight into heat (LOL). At noon, to one sig fig, you get a hundred watts of solar energy per sq foot. One acre is about fifty thousand square feet to one sig fig. Finally we'll assume the yard is not slowly sinking underneath a freshwater lake... over any give 24 hour period every liter must evaporate or the inhabitants will have to learn to swim.
So the lawn (or whatever) is turning ten thousand kilowatts of solar energy into water vapor.
To get ten thousand kilowatts at noon would take about about a hundred thousand square feet, or about two acres. At noon.
I only live on a one acre suburban lot, at that continuous flow rate, assuming no runoff, the water level would rise rather rapidly over a couple weeks.
It seems believable on a five acre lot but from time to time its going to get rather swampy. Honestly I'd look for a ten acre lot.
This is assuming no runoff (unlikely) and no electrical heat (like a Jacuzzi heated by natgas boiling away water continuously). This is also assuming no wind beyond blowing steam away.
A "two or so acre" artificial lake would be a quite believable evaporation rate. Put another way, were you to find a depression in the dirt, and turn on a hose at that flow rate, the surface area of the puddle would stop growing somewhere around a couple acres.
Or, the really simple explanation - a big courtyard fountain, that doesn't recirculate. There's been examples of this in the past, fountain blasting away, and just draining the water.
The International Bureau of Weights and Measures standardized using thin spaces as a thousands separator and either a period or comma for a decimal separator.
I recommend not adopting the mindset of using a comma or period as a thousands separator, as all it will do is lead to confusion depending on which country you're in.
Not in the languages that I am familiar with. the big question is, whether it is before or after The Comma. The Comma does not need more qualifiers than that.
The original data is 11.8 million gallons per year. Converting that into liters, then dividing by 365 * 24, and applying 3 sig figs to that result we get 5100 liters / hour.
Can this be true (1300 gal/hour is 5m^3/hour 24/7.)? At first I thought it was impossible. They I crunched some numbers...
I don't think this is within the domicile. It must be for irrigation. So let's estimate how large the lot would have to be.
Bel-air is [google] 2.9 sq mi, or 1880 acres. A golf course [1](in Iowa, first example I found) uses on average 233 gal/acrehour on their worst month. So 1300 gal/hour is a lot size of 1300/233 = 5.3 acres. This is an upper bound [2]
5.3 acres? That's not necessarily a large lot! Especially if it's for the largest of all lots!
[2] Note that the numbers I used are specifically assuming a certain amount of rainfall, which California doesn't have. I'm too lazy to use the numbers given in the article to have a better estimate, but I used "conservative" numbers so the lot size is an upper bound
This is aggressively conservative. The evapotranspiration rate in California is 2x - 3x that of Iowa and the average rainfall is likely close to 0 inches in LA of which almost none is usable for landscape purposes. I would not be surprised if this much water is needed for a 2 acre or smaller sized lawn.
There's at least one 100+ acre estate back in those hills, but it's mostly wild. I dunno what the biggest irrigated lawn up there is. My guess would be less than 10 acres, but that's a guess.
Five acres is well with in the realm of possibility, almost certain.
The columnist, Steve Lopez, is known for these populist stunts. Sometimes, as in this case, it's kind of entertaining, but there's often little substance there. This is captured in the link above, by a very seasoned independent observer of LA, calling the above a "column gimmick."
One possibility is that it's not actually being used for anything. A broken pipe could leak that much water, and depending on the local geology it might reach the water table without anyone noticing.
I had a friend who was a "household manager" in Bel Air. Basically a full-time job just handling the administrative work of running a giant house and staff. While part of the job was to be sure money didn't get wildly wasted, I do kinda doubt they'd have known anything was wrong with the water bill.
-> A June 1 story by the Center for Investigative Reporting did not reveal the name or address, because the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power refused to turn over that information.
No, I'm pretty sure they're prohibited from doing so by law.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there a 'soft ban' on un-necessary water usage?
Just like when there's a drought, municipalities enact a 'burn ban', charging those who have open fires with heavy fines.
I would assume that in the midst of a serious drought, there would also be heavy fines associated with using non-necessary 'luxury uses' of water; such as filling a swimming pool or watering the lawn.
Just because it's in a rich area doesn't mean it couldn't be a typical leak.
I have had two properties I rented have a leak in the watering system for the lawn. The first one was spotted right away because of the increase in water usage, by the actual water supplier. Although this was in Vegas so they were pretty quick to identify problems like this. The other was a single family home and I spotted the telltale sign of a leak by a circle of grass growing greener and faster than the rest of the yard. I informed the owners of the likelihood of a leak and they had no idea. The leak was probably there for months if not over a year's time because they had never bothered to check for such things when their elderly mom lived in the house.
Now, imagine a rather large yard of a wealthy family who doesn't watch their water bill, nor care about it, and the watering system develops a leak or three over time.
Houses in rich neighborhoods have pools, and fancy pools with leaks may be cheaper to pay the crazy water charges than to have it repaired right away.
I'm not defending the person, just pointing out that the excessive water usage really isn't that excessive and could be caused by any number of things.
Water is not just a commodity or utility. IT KEEPS US ALIVE. Without water, we all die. If someone else uses more water, in this case, a hell lot more and meaninglessly wasting it, and in current CA drought condition, ultimately means less water for rest of us to drink and to keep us alive, then there's an advent problem. I'm sick to hear that people say that's OK because on one broke the law. It was like to be OK to discriminate people on basis of race and religion before the equal rights amendment. CA declared a drought state of emergency since early 2014. Doesn't that mean anything to anyone?
How about it's OK because it's not that much? Commercial users dramatically outweigh residential, even including folks like this.
The whole Cali drought situation is farcial, encouraging citizens to cut back private use while ignoring the real big users. Under what premise is it OK for a commercial user to have more rights to paid water use than residential?
I think it also plays into Californians' need to suffer, to pretend they're helping. A nice restaurant in SF I like makes a fuss about serving water, under pretense of a drought. As if that makes one shred of difference other than pretending to do something.
This 1.4 liters per second (or 1300 gallons per hour, or 11.8 million gallons per year) works out to 36 acre feet per year. California alfalfa uses 4 million to 5.5 million acre feet per year on about a million acres, so that's about six to nine acres of alfalfa.
That means that every single alfalfa farmer with more than nine acres planted is a bigger water hog than this constantly running garden hose or whatever it is.
That alfalfa doesn't even feed people. It feeds cows. How much beef do you need to eat to occupy nine acres? Probably several cows per year.
This feels like it could be a challenge similar to that DARPA challenge to spot all of the red balloons as fast as possible.
Not nearly as trivial as observing a conspicuous balloon, though. But I'd like to think this could be reduced to a tech challenge somehow, through ambient humidity detectors, or something ridiculously straight-forward like that.
Obviously with enclosed structures, and plumbing being what it is, it's probably not even close to being as simple.
If there's something wrong with an individual using so much water (and there may very well be), then the right response is to change the laws, regulations, or rates to charge more or even to prohibit said water use; not to shame an individual who is acting legally within the system.