Good day all. California is in the throws of a bad drought. The state is running out of fresh water. The entire mess is due to the stupidity and incompetence of decades of political leaders. (Like Jerry Brown) Now they have another stupid idea to try and save water.
Because California has a lot of reservoirs, and those are open air, the water tends to evaporate before it can be used. This is just part of the natural process. One way to stop or at least curtail the evaporation cycle is to cover the reservoirs and block the sun from heating the water. Not a bad idea in and of itself. No, the bad idea is how California is planning to do just this. Here are the gory details from Fox News:
LA’s scheme to cover a reservoir under 96 million “shade balls” may not be all it is touted to be, experts told FoxNews.com, with some critics going so far as to refer to the plan as a “potential disaster.”
A disaster? Oh this must just be some hyperbole from Fox. So what is the cunning plan?
The city made national headlines last week when Mayor Eric Garcetti and Department of Water officials dumped $34.5 million worth of the tiny, black plastic balls into the city’s 175-acre Van Norman Complex reservoir in the Sylmar section. Garcetti said the balls would create a surface layer that would block 300 million gallons from evaporating amid the state’s crippling drought and save taxpayers $250 million.
Umm, black? They painted the balls black? That doesn’t sound all that reflective to me. In fact, doesn’t black absorb rather then reflect?
Experts differed over the best color for the tiny plastic balls, with one telling FoxNews.com they should have been white and another saying a chrome color would be optimal. But all agreed that the worst color for the job is the one LA chose.
“Black spheres resting in the hot sun will form a thermal blanket speeding evaporation as well as providing a huge amount of new surface area for the hot water to breed bacteria,” said Matt MacLeod, founder of the California biotech firm Modest Moon Farms. “Disaster. It’s going to be a bacterial nightmare.”
So it won’t be Mexico where people are told not to drink the water, but LA from now on? Wonderful! Didn’t anyone talk to, or listen to some scientists? What did they have to say about this boneheaded idea?
Any color covering will help stop wind-driven evaporation, said Robert Shibatani. principal hydrologist for the Sacramento-based environmental consultant The Shibitani Group. But when it comes to the hot summer sun sucking water out of the reservoir, color is everything, he said. “Ideally you would want a chrome surface,” he said. “The worst would be matte black, which has a reflectivity close to zero.”
And those geniuses chose black. According to Fox, it isn’t just the increased evaporation that is going to be a problem. It’s the aforementioned bacteria too.
Biologist Nathan Krekula, a professor of health science at Bryant & Stratton College in Milwaukee, said black balls will absorb heat, transfer it to the water and cause evaporation. And he agreed with MacLeod that the heat will prove hospitable to bacteria. “Bacteria required a few things to grow a dark, warm and moist environment,” he said. “The balls will give them the perfect environment to live in. “What works in backyard fish pond does not always transfer to large scale system such as this, Krekula added.
A fish pond? The idiots who came up with this based it on a small backyard fish pond? What in the Hell possessed Los Angeles to do anything as stupid as this? Granted, it IS LA and it IS California, but I don’t think anyone could snort enough Coke to come up with something this dumb. There has to be another reason.
Dennis Santiago, a risk analyst for Torrance-based Total Bank Solutions, suspects the real goal for the black-ball cover is to avoid steep Environmental Protection Agency fines. The federal agency’s “Long-Term 2 Enhanced Surface Water Treatment Rule,” announced in 2006, would require public and private water utilities to spend billions to cover open-air reservoirs that hold treated water to prevent contamination. Officials in several districts around the nation have balked at the EPA mandate, notably in New York, where lawmakers are fighting to block a $1.6 billion concrete cover the EPA has ordered built over a Yonkers reservoir.
The Environmental Pollution Agency. I should have known. Once again they have screwed things up beyond any possibility of recovery.
“This is not about evaporation,” Santiago said. “The water savings spin is purely political. What the black balls are really about is that [Los Angeles] needs to stay in-compliance with an EPA requirement to place a physical cover over potable water reservoirs.”
It’s far past time for states and locals to outright refuse anything the EPA demands, and furthermore, if some pinhead judges issues an order backing the EPA, that this judge should be arrested by the states affected and slammed into a nice jail cell. The EPA is no longer about protecting the environment, they are all about destroying all aspects of human existence the world over. I believe the correct term is “Crimes against Humanity.”
I don’t expect LA or California to be the ones to tell the EPA to buzz off. They are just as corrupt and stupid as the moonbats running the city and the state. I do expect that there will be a stand taken against them and the federal courts that back them in the next few years. Without a doubt, that will blow up into, at best, a constitutional crises, and at worst, civil war. This can be stopped of course. All it takes is Congress to strip the EPA of their regulatory power and their budget. The agency will simply wither and die, just the way they want most of the human race to die out.
It isn’t going to happen of course. Congress no longer represents the people or the states.
Thatisall
~The Angry Webmaster~
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