Post 69—Once more—Water

                    

Yes, once more: Water, that precious stuff we don’t think enough about.  

In previous posts I have indicated that too many people, that is, too many consumers of our piped water systems, are irresponsible in their use of water and fail to take measures to curtail its use.  While most of the time this may not be a threatening problem in our rain-forest province of British Columbia, in our current year of 2015, it did become a problem for all its residents because of a serious drought.   Fortunately, by early September, the crisis was over. In just a few days we had so much rain that it exceeded the normal average. Well, that’s our BC for you, a province we simply love to live in—and sometimes almost drown in!

However, before going any further, I do want to help spread the good news that, though there are plenty of irresponsible consumers—“rogue” users, as some call them—the Chairman of Metro Vancouver Utilities Committee, Darrell Mussato, announced “that this past decade, per capita water consumption has been falling.” During our 2015 crisis, Metro residents and businesses cut their consumption down to a level that the reservoirs had enough water to bring us to the fall even if there is no significant rainfall during that time. The subheading to his “Letter of the Day” was, “If the trend continues, supply will be ample for years to come” (VS, Aug 12, 2015).  That is good news, great news, in fact. It speaks well of consumers that, when pressed, many respond enough to change the direction of things. I am grateful that so many consumers are responsible and I want to publicly acknowledge it here. 

Mussato then writes a paragraph about the measures authorities are taking or planning to take in the near future to ensure adequate supply for a growing population. They will take into “account population growth, climate change, ecological health and the ongoing prosperity of the region.”  They plan to spend 1.5 billion dollars to expand our capacity for the future.  As a layman on the topic, this all sounds very encouraging to me and I wish the Committee every success in their careful planning.  So, both  responsible consumers and and a responsible public Committee. I sometimes shudder at what often appears to be inept and careless government authorities at various fronts, but I seem to have no reason for shuddering at the water front. That sounds hopeful for our future Metro.

One conservation measure that is under vigorous debate on both the positive and negative sides on the part of Metro members is that of water meters.  Some are already using them; others feel it to be too expensive—“incredibly costly,” as the Mayor of Coquitlam describes it. According to a regional engineer, it would “cost in excess of $10 million to install meters in 70,000 …homes in Burnaby and more to read the meters, bill residents and maintain the infrastructure” (Kelly Sinosky, VS, July 13, 2015).  That would be around $142 per unit installed. That’s cheaper than I had expected. Doesn’t seem that bad to me. Quite doable as far as I can see. I have always thought that each Metro community might borrow funds and charge each customer a couple of dollars a month to repay the loan. 

But it looks like that is not an acceptable arrangement to some. However, Metro does charge each member community a fixed amount per cubic metre, an expense passed on to consumers. So, even if not metred at the consumer level, the precious commodity does not come free.  The problem I see is that if your bill is the same regardless of the amount you use, there’s no financial incentive for consumers to restrain their use of water, a restraint most people will need to motivate them. Not many can be motivated by considerations of ethics and stewardship over the long haul, even though that should be the natural thing for Christians and adherents of most other religions.

All these discussions and issues are developing under the shadow of “Water scarcity crisis looms in BC,” according to Stephen Hume (VS, April 6, 2015). He points to the California drought as a warning about what is likely going to be the direction of things in BC.  We need to take the bull by the horns now, he argues. “Over the past 50 years, BC’s snow cover dwindled by 18% on average.”  The glaciers feeding the Columbia River have shrunk by almost 15%. He quotes some experts who predict “an impending water crisis” in Western Canada. “This means rethinking both how we live in BC and how we pay for it,” he urges.

In closing for the day, I add my “urge” to his and ask you to do the same. The bottom line is: We can’t go on this way. We need to change; tomorrow is just around the corner. Perhaps not my corner—I am 77--, but around yours and that of our children.  You have been brought up in care-free luxury, more than any generation in all of history. That’s not going to continue. Watch my word! But more than watching: Do something about it, both personally and together as a community—NOW!

Post 65--Back to the Water

Hume’s Prophetic Warning

That precious stuff—water—has been discussed in posts 55, 57 and 58.  I want to continue with the topic today, for we here in BC are still in the serious water shortage of 2015 and we don’t see the end in sight.  Stephen Hume wrote us a strongly prophetic warning about the upcoming scarcity. He holds up California as the BC of tomorrow (“Water scarcity crisis looms in BC,” VS, April 6, 2015).  He warns that “Instead of tit-for-tat finger pointing, we now need an adult discussion of how to adapt to coming change with long-term planning that isn’t dictated by developers, investors and politicians wanting quick returns within short horizons.” 

Turning to stats, Hume tells us that over the past 50 years BC’s snow cover has “dwindled by 18% on average;” in  the Columbia region, 20%; Kootenay, 23%; mid-Fraser 47%!  50 years may seem like a long time to the juniors of this world, but to guys like me (77), that’s a short time, believe me, so short that we cannot afford to duplicate those stats during the coming 50.  Scientists are warning of “An impending water crisis in Canada’s western prairie provinces.” A crisis next door will become our crisis in BC, as farther-way California is already in terms of our food prices. 

Hume wants us to “to start having this conversation right now. Not in the rarefied atmosphere of academic conferences but as citizens prepared to bring the same passion to the discussion that we mustered over TransLink’s proposals. Believe me, water security is a much bigger issue than adjustments to the sales tax.” Amen, brother!

Mixed Public Reaction

In spite of his dire predictions and calls for serious actions on the part of citizen, government and UN, earlier in July, when our drought had already begun to make its mark, hundreds of Metro residents have been caught ignoring restrictions. Can you imagine such stupidity?  These are the people that have the power to vote, to determine our next governments!  No wonder we can’t vote satisfactory government into place. With such egocentrism and stupidity in place, how can you expect intelligent voting? 

I need to be fair. While there are those stupid ones, “across most of Metro Vancouver over the last decade” the use of water is down! (Gordon Hoekstra and Randy Shore, VS, July 17, 2015).  Despite increasing population, the total drop in Metro was 9% between 2004-2013. In per capita terms, this spells a reduction of 20% across the region. In the Township of Langley, water consumption dropped from 307 litres a day in 2004 to 282 in 2013—that’s 25 litres per capita per day. Try drinking that! You’ll see how much that is. So, credit where credit is due. Thanks to the more intelligent among us. Apparently we are still the majority!  Do I hear a shout of approval? Thank you. But, at the same time, 282 litres is still a lot that must be reduced.  How many bathtubs is that per capita?

Some Government Measures

What has caused this impressive reduction? Several measures taken by the authorities have helped. Hoekstra & Shore list education, sprinkling restrictions, better leak detection, improved water-efficient technology and charging for water, among others.  Then there are new requirements in construction. In Vancouver proper “the demolition of 1200 properties a year to make way for new homes…that require the lowest flow toilets and shower heads,” while “new single-family homes and duplexes” require the installation of meters. 

From Tub to Tank

In one of the earlier posts I confessed to a private water saving measure I have never before confessed publicly to others, only to find we are not the only ones to…. Well, remember that ditty? Today, in view of the extreme shortage we are facing, we are following advice we read elsewhere—from tub to tank. Our bathtub and toilet are right next to each other. So, we leave the water in the tub and whenever a flush is unavoidable, I get down on my knees and scoop water from the tub into the tank fast, so that the tank fills up from the tub and not from the “natural” mechanism inside of the tank. My guess is that at the end 75% of the water in the tank is from the tub. That’s a considerable saving.  Gross, you might think?  Extreme, you might snort? Well, yes, probably, but we are in an extreme situation and soon might be in one that’s gross if there’s no water to flush at all.

That’s it for today, but in the near future I do hope to return once or twice more to this most vital of topics—more vital than a half percent increase in sales tax and one that may well dwarf all TransLink issues. If there’s no water, there’s no need for the former.  Just to make you curious, the next post will be among the most politically incorrect I have ever plagiarized. 

Post 58--The Personal--The Flushed Treasure

       

In the last post I diverted myself from the intended topic to an article of human interest, at least, of this human’s interest!  Today I’ll try to control myself and stick to the intended subject. When you’re done reading, you can judge for yourself whether or not I succeeded. 

I explained in the last post that we are experiencing serious drought in BC that started with a thin snow pack on the mountains and continues with reduced rainfall ever since spring. Our reservoirs are running unusually low. Not sure I should say “dangerously” low, but at least enough that the media talk about it every day and authorities are imposing rules for restricting the use of our water.   

            

An article by T. I Crawford and Kevin Griffin in the VS (July 8, 2015, p. A3) gives some interesting residential water stats and advice.  As to stats you may find interesting: The average Canadian household uses 340 litres of water daily, of which 30 per cent or 102 litres goes to the toilet. The average older toilet uses 12 litres a flush; the newer models, half of that. Even if this post does not get much beyond the toilet issue, if you act on it, the post will have served its purpose. 

The big toilet issue is, of course, that flush. Is it really necessary to flush after every use? Our family lived in Nigeria for 30 years; our kids grew up there till they went to college. During their early years our flush system was entirely manual, with the water coming out of a raised drum that was filled by some students who need jobs or, rather, money. So, we developed a culture of only an occasional flush, when it really could no longer be avoided. Later, we moved to the city with a complete water system, but often without the water!  Again, severe rationing was the name of the game: only when intolerable. 

When we parents found the toilet flushed, we would sometimes holler it out in shock, “Who flushed the toilet?! Why?!”  I know, it sounds ridiculous, but go live some time in a less well-equipped country and you will understand. The problem arose when we would come “home” to either Canada as in BC or the USA as in MI for a break, where there was water everywhere. Then, when someone had not flushed, I might get annoyed and yell, “Who didn’t flush the toilet?!”  And then we’d go back to Nigeria and fall back into the reverse routine! This was enough to create serious psychosis in our poor MKs! It’s a miracle our MKs (Missionary Kids) came out of that ordeal relatively unscathed.

Upon our permanent return to BC, we could not get used to the extremely wasteful use of water we ran into at every detail in our lives. By now the kids were gone and we decided to stay with the non-flush routine even in BC, though not as strenuously.  I remember discussing water usage with our BC friends and we might confide our flushing habits. They would be shocked and act horrified. We’d quickly move onto another topic!  We learned to avoid that subject altogether.  Embarrassing for us; disgusting for them.

But, ah, Griffin to our rescue in the VS. Apparently we are not the only ones, for there is this well-known little ditty that goes:

“If it’s yellow, let it mellow.

  If it’s brown, flush it down.”

Griffin advices we follow this ditty.  Thank you, Griffin. I no longer feel alone!

Another trick Fran, my wife, and I practice is to place a bottle with sand in the tank. That reduces the water by a bottle each flush. Just imagine how much water will be saved by this painless method for every toilet just in the city of Vancouver!  Go ahead. Get yourself a good-sized bottle, fill it with sand, and place it in your tank. Then go your way and forget about it, but each flush spells a save. We tried two bottles, but the tank was not big enough. 

Well, it’s time to get our mind out of the gutter. Just one more item about toilets and we move on: Make sure there’s no leakage. Griffin suggests you put some food colouring in the tank to see whether it shows up in the bowl. If it does, you should repair. Another Griffin bathroom tip: Turn off the tap while you’re brushing your teeth or shaving. Same with washing hands. 

I am amazed that this needs to be said at all. In some public male bathrooms there are notices above the urinals instructing men step by step how to wash their hands. I guess it does need to be said! How immature have we become?  Perhaps I should devote a post to how to properly wash your hands!  Come on. Give me a break. 

To finish off our litany on water preservation, I will summarize a few more of Griffin’s tips and let it go, at least for today.  I do expect there will be more about this liquity treasure in the future, but I don't want you to get bored with the subject.

Shower—Replace shower head with a “low-flow version,” take shorter showers, and shut it down while you’re lathering your body with soap and shampoo. Then turn it on to rinse. 

Kitchen tap and water—Wash food items in a bowl and then rinse, instead of keeping the tap running.  Use left-over dishwater on your plants and make sure the tap does not leak. A leak can cost 280 litres a week or 14,560 litres a year or 291 50-gallon drums wasted. Allow that leak throughout your 80 years and you’ve wasted 23,296 drums of precious water.

 

And then there’s that outdoor stuff you can do, but we’ll let it go at this. From here on, use your imagination. There’s all kinds of small and not so small steps you can take to preserve this precious life stuff.  The bottom line is: Keep your imaginative eye on that reservoir high up on the mountain from which all of us draw. It is not a bottomless pit! And think of your neighbour.

In closing and on a lighter note, figure out the mistake in the “Kitchen tap and water” paragraph above! Where do the figures mislead you? Well, at least I stuck to my announced topic today! Give me at least that much credit!

Post 57--"Precious Resource" Revisited

The California drought gets plenty of media attention, not only in CA itself but also in other jurisdictions, certainly in BC. Our BC interest in the subject is due to the sharp increase in the price of  CA-grown fruit and vegetables that we consume in our province. We are confronted by the CA situation every day as we look for bargains in the local vegetable market just around the corner from us. It’s not a pretty scene for us seniors who are on fixed incomes nor, I’m sure, for working parents with growing children.

But as we speak, we have our own drought in BC to cope with as well. We depend for our water on two sources, snow on the mountains and plenty of rain forest precipitation. This year, we are short on both. Snow was so sparse that ski resorts had to occasionally shut down, a most unusual situation for us here.  And while we could somehow afford to truck in snow from more than a 150 kilometres away for the winter Olympics back in 2010…. Yes, truck in snow!  Ever heard of that?  Usually if there’s snow trucking to be done, it’s to get rid of it. Not in 2010. We had to truck it in! Imagine! And all that expense just so a few—probably less than 200?—die-hard winter sports activists can have their moment of fame after spending most of their lives on a few snow-oriented acrobatic exercises. Was that worth all that expense? That’s for another post someday.

Sorry, got so carried away about that snow trucking—pun intended—that I  didn’t even complete that sentence. Left you in the snow, so to speak. While we managed to pay for trucking snow for the Olympics, we couldn’t this past winter. What does that tell you? Could we draw the conclusion that the Olympics and its economy are more important than the daily lives of ordinary citizens under routine circumstances?  At any rate, the point is we got a lot less snow last winter with the result that there is less snow to melt and fill up our reservoirs.  For winter sport enthusiasts as well as for the tourist industry, it was kind of a disaster, while the rest of us enjoyed a very mild winter, milder even than we are accustomed to in the south-west of the province.  Alas, now we are paying for it, literally.  We are short of the precious stuff. 

Added to that fiasco—not sure “added” is the right word here—is the greatly reduced rain fall in spring and summer. We’ve just had gorgeous weather and lots of sunshine, but, again, no rain, no water. The only thing we have more of is drought. What we also have more of this summer is fires, forest fires over the top, throughout much of Western Canada. We always have forest fires in the summer, but this year all budgets have been far overspent and an unusual number of communities evacuated.

One of the worst features of the current fire scene is that, according to reports, many of them are caused by humans. Some by careless smokers who stupidly—and I use that word advisedly, for my daughter has forbidden her children to use the word—throw their butts (note the double “t’s”!) out of their car windows. Should these people be hanged, as a display along the Princeton Highway some decades ago used to “advocate”?

Others are lit intentionally! Not just one or two, but a large number of them! Can you imagine anything more fiendish than that? I am reminded of our RV trip to the far Canadian north, when we had a long and amicable chat with a couple of Aboriginals. They told us that their summer employment mostly consisted of fighting forest fires. What about summers with only a few fires? we asked. No problem. They would just light them!  Not having walked in their moccasins, I would not apply the term “fiendish” to them. I have no idea whether any of our 2015 fires are from Aboriginal arson or not. Of course, political correctness being alive and well in the country’s media, they would not likely report such if it were. 

All of the above was to lead me into the subject of water preservation. Stream of consciousness led me to and around the subject but not into it. With my apologies. Call it a human interest post, if you like. But I really should get into the preservation thing before all our water gets used up! So, that will be next. Or should I say “That should be next?  See you there, but don’t wait for my instructions re. water preservation. I’m sure you can think of some ways yourself. Do it! Now! We’re in a precarious situation.  Think of ten small ways in which you, yes, you, can reduce your use of water and then do it.  

Post 55—Wasting Water: A Precious Resource

Spent part of yesterday at Derby Reach, a park on the Fraser River near Langley BC. There were many shrieking happy children voices as they ran around innocently playing their games without any thought of the potential effect or ramifications of their games. Well, of course not. Who would expect such concerns from happy playing children?

There was a water faucet nearby that was difficult to open, but once opened it spurted out water with great gusto, obviously under great pressure down below. There is probably only one activity that children playing in a river-side park like better than water faucets—throwing stones in the river’s water. We were not disappointed on either count. Many were the stones that ended up in the river and many were the gallons of water the children managed to squeeze out of that stubborn faucet and promptly dumped on the grass a few feet away—all evening. Perhaps we should have counted the gallons.  Water a precious resource as some claim? You’d never know from these children—or from their “supervising” parents who did nothing to stop the “innocent” play. 

It’s hard, if not harsh, to criticize children playing their innocent games.  I love watching them go through their antics.  So much fun; so much joy; so much innocence.  No, I won’t criticize them, but I will criticize their parents for allowing them to waste so much water. Today this group of families; tomorrow that group—but ongoing from day to day throughout the park season.  Gallons and gallons of it without let up.  

Water a precious resource? You’d never guess that to be the case either when you drive through North America’s suburbs with their spacious lawns in the summer time. Gallons upon gallons poured out daily to keep them green, only to be mowed every few days and that beautiful grass to be mulched on a weekly basis. An entire industry has grown up to serve that culture of beauty and—waste.  Yes, waste; pure waste of a precious and diminishing resource. Almost totally mindless.

It’s not only the people in Western countries who waste water mindlessly. I have lived in communities in an African country where women have for decades and even centuries had to daily haul water from distant places to cook and clean.  Usually on their heads; sometimes on shoulder or back. It was an unending and tormenting task without ever a break.  I have rejoiced with them when their government would install a water system for the community.  

You’d think that after life-long scarcity and hard work, they would be very careful in their use of the new easy supply of water, but that is often not the case. In contrast to the past where they rationed it carefully, they will often leave the faucets open and running when no one is around to catch the water. I’ve been amazed to see this. Just like the playing children and the law sprinklers above, they seem to think the supply is endless. They just let it run on and on and on….  Almost totally mindless. 

If you keep up with the news, you will know that in the US desert state of California, drought has set in with a vengeance, severely impacting the cost of food not only for the local people but throughout the US and even Canada. As we speak, I watch the price of food in Vancouver BC climb and climb and wonder when it will settle down. The question for all of us, not just Californians, is what can be done about it?  Where will it end?  Do we even have the gumption to address it?  Can a government that wants to address it seriously by restricting access in some way even survive?  

It’s a topic I plan to address off and on. I hope to occasionally describe various plans that are being offered to rescue the situation and the people’s reaction to them. What motivations might be needed for people to become more careful in their use of this precious resource?  Could financial incentives bring a change in behaviour? Perhaps water comes too cheap for us to bother?

As to myself, I have an in-built water restraint: my Christian faith.  I don’t need a financial incentive to reduce my water consumption. I am very conscious of the very first command in the Bible that instructs us to manage well the garden God has bequeathed us. This demands that as the supply diminishes, we devise more economical ways to use it. It demands an end to mindless or selfish wastage. And if nothing else, having experienced those African situations, every time I observe wastage, whether water or anything else, I get nervous.  That experience should be enough for anyone. 

So, this post is an example of  the previous post: the Biblical tradition of mixing religion with the “secular” things of this world. They cannot be separated, for your faith, whatever it is, will always influence your response to these situations. Check yourself. What would be at the bottom of any attempt of yours to convince you to change you wasteful habits?  You will find there is always some value system or belief that underlies your response. If you’re a Christian, the previous paragraph should be part of your motivation and that should be stronger than any financial considerations, though they also have a legitimate part in all of this.