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Where Has All The Water Gone, Part Two |
Glenn Walsh | 8/25/08
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Read Part One
Many large numbers are debated about the Dry Gulch Reservoir Project. 35,000 acre-feet or 12,500? Project cost of $150,000,000 or $300,000,000? Future Archuleta County population of 30,000? 60,000? 150,000?
In many respects, however, the biggest numbers in the debate today are 0.25, 0.34 and 0.00. Twenty-five percent is the reduction in potable water used by the average home in Archuleta County since 2001. The average home now consumes 255 gallons per day. Curiously, the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) is presently in the midst of a lawsuit remanded from the Colorado Supreme Court in which the water district argues that reduction below 300 gallons per home per day is unachievable before the year 2100. According to its own numbers, PAWSD is already well below that figure.
PAWSD customers have reduced their daily water usage by 25% this decade, and this figure includes raw water delivered to the golf course and transmission losses of 34% of all treated water. |
The water district has brought these reductions about with two intelligent policies. First, while Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln are not generally credited with contributions to water conservation policy, Dead Presidents are the most effective tools for water conservation. Increased monthly charges are also the cheapest tool that a water district can use to influence water use —only $230 dollars per acre foot. PAWSD uses $20,000 per acre foot as the benchmark to evaluate conservation measures. The block and tier system the district began to adopt in 2003 charges increasingly higher rates for higher use and has clearly reduced per tap water use.
Second, PAWSD has established commercial and residential toilet and washing machine rebate programs to replace older appliances with newer models with 300% greater efficiency. The results of the rebate program to date have been modest — 202 toilets and 35 washers — but the higher efficiency fixtures have become the standard in new construction over the past ten years.
The number 0.34, or 34 percent, represents one positive and one negative development for the local water district. Positively, average water consumption by PAWSD customers plunged 34 percent between 1996 and 2006, a period of almost unprecedented growth in the County.
Yet total use of treated water has been almost unchanged over this period of growth.
 Halfhearted efforts are made to ascribe this drop to “drought effects” — habits acquired during the Stage 1 drought restrictions imposed six years ago for a few months — though per tap use has dropped from 410 gallons per day per tap in 1996 (six years before the drought) to 270 gallons in 2006 (four years after) – a 34 percent overall drop. More problematic for the “drought effect” theorists: usage actually increased 14 percent for the two years following the 2002 drought and only began to drop again after conservation measures were adopted by PAWSD.
Conservation appears to working in Archuleta County, whether or not it plays well with the district’s water rights application for a 35,000 acre-foot reservoir before the courts.
Negatively, that same number — 34 percent — also describes big losses for PAWSD: the district is losing 34 percent of the total water it treats, somewhere between its treatment plants and our taps. This loss of 666 acre feet of water each year is also equal to 34 percent of the district’s current reservoir capacity.
Incredibly, the volume of water that PAWSD loses between plant and tap is equal to 56 percent of the total water the district delivers to all its residential and commercial customers.
Water lost between treatment plants and taps amounts to more than 50% of total residential and commercial usage, and water projections for Dry Gulch assume no improvement over next 35 years
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Zero, however, is the biggest number in the present debate about the size of the reservoir to be built at Dry Gulch. Because zero is the percent of actual and potential water conservation and loss recapture that district water engineer Steve Harris has incorporated into the forecasts for future demand which support the 35,000 AF Dry Gulch Project.
Forecasts of future demand
While PAWSD does not know where 34% of our treated water goes, we do know one place it appears. The same place where water conservation savings do not appear: Steve Harris’s water demand projections for the Dry Gulch Reservoir.
Daily usage by PAWSD customers was down to 255 gallons per day per house by 2006. It won't get there until the 22nd century according to Harris water demand projections. Customers currently use less than 2000 acre feet (including nearly 700 AF of lost water). Harris includes 800 acre feet of water which is not delivered to the golf course, making his demand figures about 80% over par. |
Other than justification for a 35,000 AF reservoir, there are few plausible reasons for continuing to use Harris’s projections of population growth and water use when they are already, only five years later, unsupportable. Does one suppose that water demand would not have been officially updated in all PAWSD documents and plans (and the water rights brief before the courts) if Harris’s 2003 population projections for 2010 were now 70 percent low rather than 70 percent high, and daily use per tap — rather than declining 25 percent — had increased from 330 gallons per day to 405 gallons per day?
Double dipping? PAWSD delivers about 100 acre feet of raw water to the golf course, but claims 900 acre feet of demand. At the same time, PAWSD doesn't count 600 AF Village Lake, which meets this demand, as a reservoir. |
Harris also plays an 800 acre-foot game of three-card monty with the golf course. The district supplies on average 100 acre-feet of raw, untreated water directly to the golf course from Village Lake. The district then throws 900 acre-feet onto total demand.
PAWSD uses the 600 acre-feet of storage in Village Lake to satisfy the 100 acre feet of golf course demand. But the district does not count Village Lake as a source of supply.
Talk about playing around with your scorecard.
800 acre-feet over par for demand, and 600 acre-feet under par for supply. Adding almost 50 percent to demand and subtracting 30 percent from reservoir capacity. Effectively making Village Lake disappear.
David Copperfield could scarcely do better.
The Harris demand outlook also assumes that 34 percent of all water in the PAWSD system will still be wasted 35 years from today. The standard in the industry is 10 percent, and 15 percent is considered "acceptable". The demand figures PAWSD is using for 2043 contain an awful lot of leakage: almost 4,000 acre-feet.
Using the PAWSD yardstick of $20,000 per acre foot to develop new reservoir systems, that is $80,000,000.
One assumes that this PAWSD board, with the new AMR meter reading system, will aggressively attempt to reduce this 34 percent loss figure over the next ten years, and bring the system closer to the industry standard within twenty years. So why shouldn’t a reasonable amount of progress — a reduction by twenty percent over twenty years — be the target? That would bring the PAWSD system within the acceptable standard. Of course, PAWSD exceeds almost all relevant standards by wide margins. Why not here?
And why not include these savings in our future water demand table?
Read Part Three...
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