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Lucky.rareboy said:
This reminds me of something I read that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is trying to get cities to do: build massive cisterns with recycling facilities so all their water is contained in the system and they don't have to draw from rivers any more. Given that by the time a gallon of water in the Mississippi reaches New Orleans it's been through several dozen humans, the impact on that river would be impressive, but the place it would be most beneficial would be on the Colorado, especially if agriculture was required to use minimal-loss irrigation -- no more canals no more ditches, just pipes and drip lines. In the Monterrey valley in Mexico a large portion of farmers were convinced to make that switch and they were all shocked by how it changed how much water they needed; most places realized a reduction in water use over 90%! Places in Oregon's Willamette Valley making the switch from overhead sprinklers to ground-spray (a lot like drip, just the pipes are about four to six inches off the ground and use little spray-sprinklers) saw a 75%-80% reduction if they irrigated during daylight, around 85% - 90% if at night.
Down south of me there's a city along I-5 that saw an interesting solution put in place when a developer was about to take them to court because the city had decided to rescind a long-standing development permit for a large hillside once it was determined to be unstable just as it was, let alone with houses on it.
A small town just south of me actually allowed houses to be built on a ridge that is nothing more than an ancient sand dune. Geologists from the university got wind of it and pounced, showing up a half dozen at a time at every single relevant meeting. They got the density of houses reduced by about three-fifths, but what really pissed off the city was that they got the state to declare the slopes on that ridge to be untenable for anything more than native trees, so where the city had been looking for a tax windfall based on over two hundred very expensive houses they ended up getting something like forty-five. Of course the houses that did get built are valued at a couple million apiece because they not only have an ocean view on one side and a river view on the other, with nothing blocking their views, but their only neighbors are each other, and they're string out with at least fifty yards between them (and none of the owners objected to the requirement to keep the biomass on the slopes down by trimming the trees because that keeps their views open).Indeed. I remember an area near a house that my father once owned. There were houses on top of hillside above a beach front road. That hillside was pretty steep, and there were mud slides every winter that would block part of the road. I can remember seeing that a number of times. My father commented he fully expected those houses would sooner or later come down during some heavy rain/mud slide incident. (I wonder if those houses slid down onto the beach if the property taxes would go up, since since they'd no longer be "beach view" but "beach located" at that point!)
Here, the Tennessee River is huge and rains are increasing. Not foreseeable that runoff will be a factor, although the aquifer might drop due to the boom here and the burden increasing. Farms here generally do not have to irrigate.
