[Vision2020] re:water

[Mark Solomon]

While it hasn't been examined recently, an Army 
Corps of Engineers study from 1982? (help on the 
date anyone?) examined the costs and general 
feasibility of pumping water from the Snake, from 
Dworshak and from the N. Fk Palouse River to 
Moscow. All were prohibitively expensive. It's a 
2000' lift from the Snake or Dworshak plus the 
pipeline.

I've been advocating for the last year or more 
that PBAC members impose a task on themselves to 
establish individual water budgets based on the 
best currently available knowledge. Even if all 
they did was say the amount we're pumping now is 
the amount we'll set for our budget as 
"sustainable" (hardly a very defensible premise, 
but it's a place to start), it would allow each 
entity to put costs to acquiring new water, be it 
through conservation or new sources. My guess is 
all of a sudden water conservation would be an 
economically viable part of the cities and 
universities base program, not the add-on it's 
generally treated as now.

For an example, let's say a developer wanted to 
build 50 new houses and it was going to take 5 
million gallons/yr to supply them with water 
(that's a real number based on average 
consumption rates for a household of 4). Low 
flush toilets use 13,000 gallons/year less than 
older toilets for a family of four. There are at 
least several thousand old 5-7 gallon/flush 
toilets in Moscow houses. The City could have a 
program where a developer could pay into a toilet 
replacement fund to cover the cost of replacing 
enough toilets that his or her development ended 
up water budget neutral. In this instance, the 
developer would have to "buy" 384 low-flush 
toilets to balance the water books. It would be 
significantly less costly to the developer if the 
developer installed water saving devices and 
appliances throughout the house and xeriscaped 
the yard as well.

Let's make a water budget and stick to it!

Mark Solomon

At 4:00 PM -0700 4/24/06, Tom Ivie wrote:
>What about pump stations and irrigation 
>districts?  This is done in southern Idaho. 
>They seem to be able to pump out of the Snake up 
>great distances to irrigate what otherwise would 
>be desert land. Could it be done here? 
>
>
>
>Love cheap thrills? Enjoy PC-to-Phone 
><http://us.rd.yahoo.com/mail_us/taglines/postman9/*http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=39666/*http://beta.messenger.yahoo.com/>calls 
>to 30+ countries for just 2¢/min with Yahoo! 
>Messenger with Voice.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20060424/98ef4dcd/attachment.htm