[Lapg] AP story: Rainwater harvesting makes comeback amid severe drought

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

AP story: Rainwater harvesting makes comeback amid severe drought


   By MALIA WOLLAN
   ASSOCIATED PRESS

   Published: Monday, September 1, 2008 at 4:30 a.m.
   Last Modified: Monday, September 1, 2008 at 6:02 a.m.
   SAN FRANCISCO -- Tara Hui climbed under her deck, nudged past a 
cluster of 55-gallon barrels and a roosting chicken, and pointed to a 
shiny metal gutter spout.


   JEFF CHIU / Associated Press
   Tara Hui demonstrates how she drains water from bins stored below 
her deck where she harvests rainwater at her home in San Francisco.
   "See that?" she said. "That's where the rainwater comes in from the roof."

   Hui is one of a growing band of people across the country turning 
to collected rainwater for nondrinking uses such as watering plants, 
flushing toilets and washing laundry.

   Concern over drought and wasted resources, and stricter water 
conservation laws have revitalized the practice of capturing 
rainwater during storms and stockpiling it for use in drier times. A 
fixture of building design in the Roman Empire and in outposts along 
the American frontier, rainwater harvesting is making a comeback in 
states including Texas, North Carolina and California.

   "We call it 'the movement that's taking the nation by storm,' " 
said Robyn Hadley, spokeswoman for the Austin, Texas-based American 
Rainwater Catchment Systems Association, whose membership has jumped 
by more than 40 percent this year.

   Hui, 37, got her first 55-gallon plastic barrel for free five 
years ago. The barrel had been packed with maraschino cherries, so 
when rain first filled it, the water smelled like candied fruit.

   Now, she has a daisy chain of 25 linked barrels under her back 
deck with a combined capacity of nearly 1,250 gallons. She built the 
system herself, after searching the Internet for information and 
buying the necessary plumbing parts at a hardware store. The whole 
setup cost her $200.

   The average American uses 101 gallons of water a day at home and 
in the yard. Add in agricultural and industrial water use and that 
climbs to an average of 1,430 gallons per day per person.

   Scientists warn that climate change will result in more severe 
droughts and erratic storms worldwide, and this spring was the driest 
in California's 114 years of record-keeping. Extreme drought and 
abnormally dry conditions persist across large swaths of the country, 
with states in the West and Southeast hit hardest.

   Even in a drought, it only takes a few hours of heavy rain to fill 
all 25 of Hui's barrels. She uses that water during the summer to 
irrigate her back yard.

   This fall, San Francisco will try to recruit more people to hoard 
the rain. The city will be putting $100,000 toward hosting how-to 
workshops and offering rebates and discounts on rainwater catchment tanks.

   In addition to conserving water, these efforts help alleviate the 
problem of storm runoff. Asphalt-covered roads, sidewalks and parking 
lots repel storm water, forcing it down storm drains and into creeks 
rather than allowing it to soak into soil. Big flushes of storm water 
in water treatment systems can send raw sewage flowing into the 
ocean. Overloaded streams can cause flooding and damage salmon habitat.

   Elsewhere, roofs are being used to collect rain from Austin to 
Seattle. Santa Monica's new library sits atop a 200,000-gallon 
rainwater cistern, and in August the city launched a rainwater rebate 
program for homeowners. In Marin County, a recent seminar on 
rainwater harvesting attracted a standing-room-only crowd of several hundred.

   Doug Pushard, a software entrepreneur and rain collection 
enthusiast based in Santa Fe, N.M., runs HarvestH2O.com, a Web-based 
organization providing information on rainwater harvesting. It got 
more than 23,000 page views in July, almost triple the number he got 
in the same month last year, along with numerous calls and e-mails.

   New companies and ingenuity in plumbing and policy are pushing 
rainwater harvesting from the off-the-grid fringe to the core of 
21st-century green building design.

   "You still have to be a tinkerer to make things work, but that's 
changing," Pushard said.

   Every year, Sunset Magazine sponsors several "idea houses" 
featuring sustainable building design. As many as 40,000 people 
stream through each house to study the latest in green architecture. 
The 2007 idea houses in San Francisco and Lake Tahoe collected 
rainwater, as will this year's idea house in Monterey.

   "We're going to see a lot more design features for recycled water 
and rainwater catchment," said Dave Walls, executive director of the 
California Building Standards Commission, which in July adopted new 
building codes for the state requiring new buildings to strictly 
conserve water.

   In June, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave a 
Washington-based nonprofit $4.2 million to determine whether 
rainwater harvesting could provide potable water to the billions of 
poor people worldwide who lack access to clean water. Drought-prone 
and groundwater-scarce places like Australia, the Bahamas, Iran and 
parts of India are already busy pooling precipitation.

   "People don't think about where their water comes from or how much 
they use," Hui said as she used her collected rainwater for 
irrigation. "We all need to."