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Hilary Got Wasted

…and it isn’t the first time.

Yes, and it’s happened more times than you could count. Hurricane Hilary — the first hurricane-level storm to strike the west coast in 84 years — turned into (for Bill at least) about 24 hours of mild Florida rain. And every single drop of that desperately-needed, expensive and scarce FRESH WATER just flowed right through Los Angeles, as it always does, and then straight out into the Pacific… as it always does. How hard can this be, Governor Newsom? 

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26 replies on “Hilary Got Wasted”

In giant bureaucracies, most are either cluseless or powerless. But, it’s utterly absurd and past irresponsible to believe that none have evil motives. God’s Word is full of examples where motives define follow-on resolution. Much of our legal system is based on motive. The dismissal of motive discernment is very politically correct, and simply wrong.

I was born and raised in Burbank, CA. and have always wondered why so much of the rainwater simply runs down the “LA river” and out into the ocean. What a massive failure that has been going on for decades.
Newsome is a complete waste of space who doesn’t give a damn about anything but staying in power and making himself rich, just like every other piece of crap supposedly running this country.
They all make me sick.
TRUMP 2024.

Born and grew up in Redlands, CA (out toward Palm Springs), Step Dad was a “Water Conservation Engineer”. He worked toward getting the local water table up as much as humanly possible. And he made a decent living working on water conservation project all over Southern California. Needless to say, I know something about the insanity of California’s water management project, or rather lack there of…

If you go up stream from the LA River, San Gabriel River, etc, you will see storm water retention basin(s) – many basins that capture that water and all the debris, then overflow toward those concrete rivers. The retention basin(s) are designed to do exactly as BW describes, the water can then filter back into the water table. That the problem with the concrete valley of LA. There is very little open surfaces left to allow that water to infiltrate back toward the water table. The concrete rivers are in place due to historical flooding going back to the 40s when vast areas were inundated with flood water from these storm events. Go to the end of the LA River where it dumps into the ocean and you will see the amount of debris NOT captured that makes it to the ocean. You will also see the sewage treatment plant in El Segundo next to the airport that cannot handle the water that gets into the sewage system and as a result causes them to discharge untreated sewage directly into the ocean. I am a Southern California native relocated several times, last lived in LA County and had great difficulty in discharging during storm events from the POTW we operated in the City limits of LA (South Central). The City Sanitation District was so worried about overflow in their system, sometimes we had to hold water for weeks when ordered by the District.

My dad was flooded out in 1938 in Colton and his dad was involved in the recovery effort of the Southern Pacific Railroad that lost significant amounts of track and bridges. My dad describes him sitting on his moms cedar chest in the living room as it floated with water 6 feet deep.

The Left, and in particular the media and many Californians, don’t do well with scale. While I did this calculation at the beginning of the year , it’s kind of appropriate now. I asked my left leaning friends how much water fell on our County of Santa Cruz on one long weekend in January. They said “a lot”. Asked what “a lot” was in pounds, the answers usually came in the hundreds of thousands of pounds to a couple of million.
I wondered how much “a lot” was. Now I think I know. But of course, BW is overflowing with folks much smarter than I am on matters of …well, mostly everything, so if I’ve made even a tiny error, please have fun mocking at my expense…..here goes!
The Scale of Water and Earth
1 Acre Foot of Water is 2,718,000 pounds per N.O.A.A.
1 Acre Inch of Water would be 225,500 pounds
1 Square Mile is 640 acres Per Google
Santa Cruz County is 607 square miles per Google
1 inch of rain falling across the entire surface of our County is 87,990,720,000 pounds, nearly 88 Billion Pounds??? Or if you love tons, 43,995,360 tons?
On that long weekend, we had 10 inches of rain recorded falling throughout Santa Cruz county.
That equated to 879 Billion Pounds of Water falling from the sky, or 439 Million Tons. That seemed like a lot of water being held up there in the sky, blowing in from somewhere, only to crash to Earth on top of our little County. I was having a hard time grasping at the scale of this as well, so I needed something familiar to have as a yardstick, so to speak.
I know my Ford 150 long bed standard cab 2WD weighs 4100 pounds. So how many Ford F150 pickups fell on our collective heads that long weekend?
214 Million. My left leaning associates said I was an alarmist. Coming from those folks who were saying in 1972 that the man made coming ice age would kill us all by 2020, well…..

It’s not just CA that suffers the foolishness of self-absorbed governance. ALL blue states and communities are devoid of sane, rational leadership.

What the Aussie news reporter said about Biden applies equally here in CA and anywhere precious resources are being wasted: “It’s not him so much as it is those who vote for him.”

Bill, the engineering side of any solution for Hilary getting wasted is far from as simple as you seem to think!
But to go into So. Cal’s. water history is far too complex to cover here. However, let me make reference to one key historical point, that of Wm. Mulholland’s greatest failure:
“The St. Francis Dam in San Francisquito Canyon collapse of 1928” which killed many hundreds.
Much of the open land at the mouth of those canyons draining that rainwater are unsuitable for such structures as dams and water reservoirs due to the unstable nature of the geology, caused by the earthquake faults that permeate the region. Besides that, whose land are you going to appropriate to build these ill-advised structures?
Furthermore, were such dams and reservoirs already in place, they would be already full to the brim left over from last winter’s record West Coast precipitation. Thus, the LA “river” would have been flowing wastefully to the sea anyway.
However, it wasn’t a total waste, as the build-up of feces, needles, trash and other waste products of the thousands of homeless encampments in and around that cement lined blight, have now been flushed clean once again!!!

I think you miss the point. Yes, catching rainwater is not as simple as building a dam, but building cisterns is a whole lot simpler than building and powering desalination plants. It’s more complex than simply a hole in the ground, but when you get down to it, that’s really all it is.

In CA it costs a fortune to water a lawn that shouldn’t even be there. The city, county and state governments tell you not to water and if you must then just a bare minimum for the lawn to survive. If you don’t water your lawn and you live in a HOA, the HOA will fine or sue you. If you don’t live in a HOA your neighbors will sue you presumptive that you’re decreasing their property values.

And as Bill says, there goes millions or even billions of gallons of fresh water gushing into the ocean. Even if they didn’t dig huge reservoirs, the Los Angeles river is a miles and miles long cement ditch. It’s not a difficult feat of engineering to build gate systems (like a lock and dam on any other river) and at least capture the water in that cement ditch when it’s running full. Then allow the overflow that you can’t capture to escape to the ocean.

The water is right there, all you have to do is stop as much as you can contain from escaping. It’s conveniently channeled into a 51 mile long, 20-35 foot deep, 400-600 foot wide catch basin just the way it sits now. It’s a very long, narrow reservoir that runs right through the heart of Los Angeles County. During an event like the one Bill shows in this video there is nearly three quarters of a MILLION gallons of fresh water per SECOND being dumped to the ocean.

Obviously in a desert that’s a massive amount of water that could be put to very good use and without having any significant environmental impacts. If it were used for nothing but watering plants and lawns and took that amount of strain off the rest of the water system it would be a huge help.

I’m with Scott on being leery of claiming to grasp other people’s motivations but hell, it’s like the people in Southern California just WANT to suffer.

If only they could find a “river smelt” where they could implement the Endangered Species Act to justify the diversion/capture plan you outlined.

Weird how they go to such efforts for what amounts to a medium sized minnow that is now extinct in the wild after it’s too late to prevent that extinction. While doing everything they can to ‘restore’ that minnow at great expense to human beings.

After the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said that the major projects on the California River (Central Valley Project and California State Water Project) had no adverse effect on the recovery of the Delta Smelt.

Basically 200.000 acres of fertile farmland lying fallow and the loss of tens of thousands of jobs, not to mention the loss in food production and the economic aspects of that loss, for what amounts to four or five buckets of minnows.

Yet you’re correct, if something like the Delta Smelt were to be discovered to be threatened if the Los Angeles River were to allowed to drain after each rainfall — Those nincompoops would probably do exactly as I said above. But they wouldn’t let anyone use the water because of some minnows or whatever.

Like I said, it’s like the people or more likely their leaders want to suffer needlessly.

My county gets >70 inches of rain annually, a Appalachian rainforest that serves as the headwaters for the Chattahoochee that flows through Atlanta into the Gulf of Mexico and what ultimately becomes the Savannah River flowing into the Atlantic. (We have a continental divide in the middle of the county).
When they said you’d be getting 4 inches of rain we couldn’t relate to that as a catastrophe. Your cement culvert – I can’t call that storm drain a river – looks like our feeder creeks after a good downpour.
I’ve been to San Diego for a convention. It was so dry it made me wonder how it was suitable for human habitation. The fact they have no serious plans to capture this gift from the rain gods is almost as dumb as the people they elect.

Someone (Bill?) should run for Gov of CA with a single item on their platform. Since we don’t have the political will to build reservoirs due to the perceived damage to the environment, we are going to build de-salination plants and small (think Aircraft carrier or USN Submarine sized) nuclear power plants to power them.
Then all that fresh water running to the sea won’t be as big a problem as we will harvest it right back.
There is no new technology needed for this, just employing existing ones.
It would be at least a TRL of a 7 (Technology Readiness Level) meaning ready for pre-production now.
You could even use USN vessels as the floating platform for the power and desalination gear.

When reasonable people are constantly barraged with irrational thinking, it is logical to consider the motivations for that thinking. If the motivation is clearly evil, those “thinkers” declare the rational ones to be conspiracy theorists. It’s gaslighting. The power brokers (politicians and bureaucrats) attempt to quell dissent by disparaging anything that shines a light on them and their works.
This holds true in resource management, but more importantly in the re-election of disastrous politicians (Chicago, LA, San Fran, New York, et al). Ronald Reagan said it: Government IS the problem. We need the government the Founders designed. We do not have that anymore.

The series of Hilary Hurricane spoofs on the Babylon Bee are drop dead funny. Being Hilary, all deaths will be ruled “suicide” and the damage done is mostly “destroyed e-mails and e-mail servers”.

I watched this awesome video six or seven years ago. It is about how one guy transformed his inexpensive, crappy piece of scrub land of a house lot in Tucson, into an urban oasis. Inspiring other to follow his lead, it transformed his neighborhood as well. All through water harvesting. Some of what he did was technically illegal, done on weekends, and in the wee hours so as not to be thwarted in his efforts by the city gubmint. Absolutely fascinating, and well worth an hour of your time to watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcAMXm9zITg

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