Saltwater corrodes firefighting equipment and may harm ecosystems, especially those like the chaparral shrublands around Los Angeles that aren’t normally exposed to seawater. Gardeners know that small amounts of salt – added, say, as fertilizer – does not harm plants, but excessive salts can stress and kill plants.
Salt the earth
Can’t have wildfires if nothing grows!
I mean, as long as we:
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Produce it in advance and store it then.
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Are willing to pay what it would cost.
We can come up with all the freshwater we want in LA, desalinate ocean water. San Diego built a large desalination plant down the coast, finished it a decade back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_"Bud"_Lewis_Carlsbad_Desalination_Plant
Can’t do that at the last minute, though.
Did you read all of that?
The cost of water from the plant will be $100 to $200 more per acre-foot than recycled water (approximately 0.045 cents per gallon), $1,000 to $1,100 more than reservoir water (approx. 0.32 cents per gallon), but $100 to $200 less than importing water from outside the county.[42] As of April 2015, San Diego County imported 90% of its water.[13] A conglomerate of California-based environmentalist groups, the Desal Response Group, claimed that the plant will cost San Diego County $108 million a year.[16]
So yes, “we” can come up with all the fresh water “we” want, provided “we” can afford to pay for it. There are a hell of a lot more poor Angelinos (some of whom have just gotten even poorer) than there are poor people in SD and L.A. county does not import 90% of its water.
What the fuck is an acre-foot?
It’s 1 chain by 1 furlong by 1 foot
I thought you were taking the piss, but no, an acre really is one chain (66ft) by one furlong (660ft). TIL.
This is a shortsighted, unintelligent comment.
Please explain.
The only reason that most of the southwest is short on water is that the water rights in California were decided in the late 1800s allowing farmers in the central valley to use most of the water that we have available to us in the southern part of the state. They have decided to plant water hungry crops, such as alfalfa, in a desert so that they use their allotment every year and don’t lose access to “their” water. Some of the cities have decided to sell “excess” water to Nestlé to be bottled at a rate of cents per 1000 gallons of water.
The US is literally starving, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and Mexico of water because of all these bullshit imaginary contracts that haven’t been revisited since the 1800s
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