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California Fights Drought With 96 Million "Shade Balls"
HughPickens.com writes: Katie Rogers writes in the NY Times that the city of Los Angeles is releasing 96 million plastic "shade balls" into the 175-acre Los Angeles Reservoir to help block sunlight and UV rays that promote algae growth, which would help keep the city's drinking water safe. Officials also say the balls will help slow the rate of evaporation, which drains the water supply of about 300 million gallons a year. The balls cost $0.36 each and are part of a $34.5 million initiative to protect the water supply. Shade balls are the brainchild of Brian White, a biologist with the utility who based the idea on "bird balls" that he observed in waterways near airport runways to prevent airfield bird strikes. The Los Angeles Reservoir, which holds 3.3 billion gallons, or enough water to supply the city for up to three weeks, joins three other reservoirs already covered in the shade balls. "In the midst of California's historic drought, it takes bold ingenuity to maximize my goals for water conservation," says Mayor Eric Garcetti who was at the Los Angeles Reservoir to mark the addition of 20,000 of the small balls to the lake. "This effort by LADWP is emblematic of the kind of the creative thinking we need to meet those challenges."
To the extent the point was to keep heat away from the water, I wonder why they didn't go for something with a high albedo instead of black.
So if the surface is completely covered with these black ping pong ball like things, doesn't that also reduce oxygen exchange?
Is there a risk that they just turn the lake into an anoxic wasteland (sulfides are quite toxic) if they do this ?
"In the midst of California's historic drought, it takes bold ingenuity to maximize my goals for water conservation," says Mayor Eric Garcetti
Or you could, you know, tell all those rich idiots who insist on acre-sized green lawns in the middle of the desert "tough luck".
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Yeah, let's just fling any old kind of plastic on top of our water supply without checking that it won't rot in the sun and leach whatever chemical its made of into the water, or melt into a sheet that starves the water of oxygen, or chokes the local wildlife. Oh, and you'll have to get them painted black first.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
They are creating an environment for an algae bloom that are starting to cause problems everywhere.
The algea blooms, which are not truly algae but are cyanobacteria, use less light(lower wave length) want low oxygen environments with lower water turbulence. And they are creating that.
Once cyanobacteria bloom starts, it's very difficult and costly to control. It' has very few natural predictors, I don't know of any freshwater ones, and worse yet, cyanobacteria can create toxins that have killed dogs running through it.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
You have to love how they use gallons as a unit of measurement because it gives a really big number - 300,000,000. But in water terms, that's actually very little. That computes out to just under 921 acre-feet, which is the standard unit of measuring large quantities of water. Not so impressive-sounding now, so let's see what the actual costs are. Divide the $34,500,000 cost by the number of acre-feet and then again by the expected lifetime of the balls - say, 20 years. You wind up with $1,900 per acre-foot. This is a lot of money, but California residents and normal businesses normally pay around $1,000 per acre-foot. If you amortize the cost of these balls over the total water going through the system it's still a bit pricey but not insane when you consider the effects of droughts. For example, in Carlsbad, California they are building a desalinization plant with guaranteed annual sales at a cost of just over $2,000 per acre-foot.
Of course, real sanity would address the real causes of the "drought" - the fact that the two groups that use 85% of California's water pay nowhere near this much. Government pays $0 per acre-foot and wastes a breathtaking amount of water. Big agriculture pays around $10 per acre-foot (the small organic farms I buy my produce from still pay the two-orders-of-magnitude-higher residential rates). I'm all for agriculture - California is an amazing place to grow food and provides a huge percentage of the fruits and vegetables consumed in the US - but the artificially low prices have been abused by some farms and orchards. There is still a lot of flood irrigation being used (and some farmers were actually growing rice in the desert). A massive amount of alfalfa is being grown in the desert and then shipped to China, because at the subsidized water prices this is actually cheaper than China growing their own hay. Sit back and bask in that insanity. The government has dumped as much as a third of California's water supply for various environmental purposes - you could argue the costs and merits of this except for the fact that none of these projects are having their desired effect, so all of that water is just pure waste (around 33% of state water usage). And then they threaten to fine us if we water our lawns more than twice a week (> 5% of state water usage).
So anyway, for once, the black balls are the government doing something expensive but not completely stupid. But the fact that this is even necessary due to government stupidity and a breathtakingly colossal mismanagement of a valuable natural resource sort of makes it all moot in the end. There is no shortage due to drought - there's a shortage due to bad policies.
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