A SPONGE BRICK IN THE TOILET TANK - WHY PASADENA RAINFALL FLOWS TO THE SEA IN A DROUGHT

Above: Sponge Bob Goes Green (click to enlarge image)

by Wayne Lusvardi
An old fashioned method of water conservation was to put a brick in the tank of your toilet. But what if you put a sponge brick in the tank of a toilet?  You wouldn't save any real water but you might create the impression that you were conserving water.  The term *sponge brick* is thus an oxymoron - a contradiction in terms.

At the macro-level water conservation in Pasadena is oxymoronic like a sponge brick. It entails high profile popular efforts at restoration to the middle Arroyo Seco streambed within the Raymond Basin for aesthetic and recreational purposes, the acquisition of the Annendale Estates for open space to enhance nearby home values, and incongruous perchlorate contamination cleanups while rainfall continues to flow to the ocean in the midst of an historic drought.

Ironically, the champion of the Arroyo Seco Stream Bed Restoration Project is Pasadenan Tim Brick, no less the Chairman of the Board of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and Managing Director of the Arroyo Seco Foundation.

Little known is that in 1982 as part of the then emerging environmental movement, Mr. Brick spearheaded the effort in Southern California to shoot down a statewide ballot initiative that would have constructed the Peripheral Canal in the Sacramento Delta which would have brought more water to Southern California. This must haunt Mr. Brick as now Southern California is facing historical shortages of imported backup drought water from Northern California; not due to just a purported
drought but mainly due to an environmental lawsuit to block water flows to Southern California ostensibly to protect the tiny Delta Smelt fish.

Mr. Brick's incongruous efforts to shoot down the Peripheral Canal and champion mainly local aesthetic and recreational stream bed restoration projects thus evokes the incongruous imagery of the water conservation brick, perhaps better described as a *sponge brick.* Sponge brick projects soak up a lot of money, popularity and votes, but deliver very little water conservation. This is perhaps why Pasadena, and Southern California, are facing a drought and water rationing.   

In 2007-08, the Arroyo Seco Stream Restoration Project was completed. This $2.5 million project was funded by the State ($1.9 million) and the City of Pasadena ($600K) and involved tearing out concrete debris, bringing a segment of the Arroyo stream bed to the ground surface, revegetating the canyon, and stocking fish in the surface ponds. Bringing the stream bed to the surface again will result in greater evaporation of groundwater (note: Arroyo Seco means *dry gulch or stream*).  

Reportedly, the water table along the stream bed dropped 20-feet after the original concrete flood control channel was built - a project built by the Works Progress Administration as part of the then Federal *Stimulus Package* to combat the 1930's era Depression. The Arroyo Seco stream recharges the Raymond Basin, an underground reservoir upon which Pasadena depends for about 60% of its potable water.

While Pasadena continues to focus resources on such high profile environmental open space restoration (Arroyo Seco) and preservation (Annandale Canyon) projects which mainly provide luxury aesthetic and recreational environmental goods to elite Pasadenans, real water conservation at the basin level remains a drop in the bucket for the bulk of the population.

Upstream from the Middle Arroyo Seco Restoration Project is Devil's Gate Dam which was built in 1920 for water storage and groundwater recharge. The City of Pasadena owns the land and watershed behind the dam but a flood control easement is retained by Los Angeles County. We understand the L.A. County Water Replenishment District, and the City of Pasadena, would be jointly responsible for management of the four or five settlement basins north of the dam.

Settlement basins retain rainfall long enough for it to percolate into the water table. Also, for settlement basins to work efficiently they require constant tilling of the ground to break up the impermeable layer of silt that builds up on the surface which retards water percolation. You have to cultivate the ground for groundwater harvesting just as you do for farmland crops. This may mean disturbing the habitat. Thus, groundwater harvesting may be *ugly* to environmentalists, landscape artists, and politicians. Witness the many settlement basins next to the San Gabriel River (605) Freeway near Irwindale.  Ugly and smelly projects, such as sewer plants,typically are not popular to environmentalists even though they clean the environment. The same may hold true to water recharge settlement basins.   

Knowledgeable sources have told this writer that the Monk Hill Basin part of the Raymond Basin is losing valuable recharge water because the dirt embankment of the settlement basins have no gates and have to be dangerously contoured *on the fly* by a bulldozer in the middle of each rainstorm! 

Curiously, improvements to the Upper Arroyo Seco settlement basins are not on the list of projects submitted to the U.S. Conference of Mayors by the City of Pasadena as candidates for Federal Stimulus Program funding. Nor have we been able to find improvement of the basins on the Pasadena Department of Water and Power master plan or Integrated Resource Plan.

It is granted that improvement to the Upper Arroyo Settlement Basins would have yielded no usable water until the cleanup of perchlorate is completed, or stabilized, in the Monk Hill Basin area. But a recent study now alleges that perchlorate in Pasadena's water wells comes from the build-up of perchlorate from imported water from the Colorado River from the Metropolitan Water District. Read NASA study here:http://jplwater.nasa.gov/NMOweb/files/docs/mediaroom/Files/Results%20Fact%20Sheet%20for%20Web.pdf
If this is so, why does Pasadena continue to buy imported MWD water for consumption which effectively has the same level of perchlorate as the so-called contaminated wells?

In other words, it has partly been the delay caused by perchlorate studies and projects that possibly has delayed the improvement of the Upper Arroyo Settlement Basins and abrogated any real water conservation at the basin level. 

Perchlorate does not cause cancer, is not a poison, nor is it a neurotoxin. It allegedly blocks absorption of iodine in the diet needed by infants and the unborn for normal mental development. Decades ago, perchlorate was easily remedied by putting iodine in table salt (iodized salt). Now we spend mega millions to *scientifically* clean up water wells of perchlorate in Pasadena while the population incongruously continues to drink roughly equivalent levels of imported perchlorate-laced water from the Colorado River with no discernible harmful health or educational effects.    

While Rome burned, Nero fiddled. While Pasadena burned from mostly a man-made drought it fiddled with wildly popular environmental restoration projects for mainly aesthetic and recreational benefits (Arroyo Seco Stream Bed Restoration); open space preservation projects for capture by adjoining homeowners of a viewscape bonus value for their nearby luxury homes (Annendale Estate Open Space Preserve); and incongruous perchlorate cleanup projects of its water wells (Monk Hill Basin). Meanwhile, the bulk of Pasadena is pending increased water rates due to the drought during an emerging economic depression.

Pasadena needs to prioritize real water conservation projects, not sponge brick projects, if it is going to be taken seriously by its citizens for any proposed emergency drought water rate increase. And Pasadena's environmentally conscious *Green Sponge Bob* citizenry needs to stop advocating to its elected leaders *sponge brick* projects as priorities over true water conservation projects if a solution to the drought is to be found. Where Green Sponge Bob meets oxymoronic *sponge brick* environmental projects you get a drought.       

Comments

[John]

Thank you for giving us this information. Interesting that when one looks at the agenda for the upcoming City Council meeting there seems to be a lot of attention on raising our trash collection fees and hiring lobbyists and street median landscaping projects (in the midst of a drought?), etc., but not a hint that the City is addressing or plans to address the issues you raise.
In our household we try to do what we can to conserve water, but I have to say I'm starting to think we've been had.

[water restoration]

sometimes old method works really fine and it is the best way to do things.