Friday, September 14, 2012

When and where

Whew! A month of emergency water restriction violations has come to an end.  My hat is off to the police officers who worked diligently to bring some enforcement teeth to this little crisis, when voluntary restrictions failed to do the job.  Some individual officers in particular shouldered a particularly heavy load, due to their shift and beat assignments. The violations had some strong patterns in both time and space, so if you worked any of the hours between 0400 and 1000 on the night or morning shift in northwest or southeast Lincoln, you were more likely to catch these calls.  Here's a visual on the spatial and temporal distribution:



While the map shows the density of the violation complaints, it is also depicting the relative density of automatic sprinkler systems, and the bar graph of violation times also reflects the preferred watering schedule of their owners, along with the time newspaper is delivered.  I think we can conclude that newer subdivisions at the edge are more likely to have automatic sprinklers, that most people follow the standard advice of watering in the early morning, and that newspaper carriers have cell phones.

Nebraska has a history of multi-year drought cycles, so we could be back in a water emergency again next summer or more often in the next several years. The Mayor has assembled a work group that I will be participating in to see if we can build a better mousetrap.  I'm pretty confident we can, and I intend to try to figure out how we can enforce restrictions more efficiently and without involving the criminal justice system.

17 comments:

Anonymous said...

The high water violation areas should be blue instead of red.

Steve said...

The red is indicative of the owner's faces after they got the tickets. I'm not sure if it was due to anger or embarrassment.

Anonymous said...

This one is too easy. You both missed the boat. It shoulf be GREEN since that's the color of their grass.....

256

SP said...

It's been a while since I lived in Lincoln, but isn't this a problem of supply and demand? It seems that the best way to limit water usage would be to dramatically raise water rates, especially during high use periods. This mechanism has the benefit of reducing police work loads and also more efficiently allocating scarce resources.

SP said...

It's been a while since I lived in Lincoln, but isn't this a problem of supply and demand? It seems that the best way to limit water usage would be to dramatically raise water rates, especially during high use periods. This mechanism has the benefit of reducing the police work load and also more efficiently allocating scarce resources.

Anonymous said...

SP,

Yes, but the "eat the rich" crowd would object to anyone buying something that they can't afford.

Anonymous said...

Director,
You are good at researching numbers. I have a homework problem for you: What is the total number of gallons of water the Lincoln Water System distributes in a month compared to the gallons of waste water treated by the Municipal Sewage treatment system?

Maybe you could suggest this as a research project to one of the UNL interns.

Gun Nut

Tom Casady said...

Gun nut,

Wouldn't begin to know where to find that, but I'll look. Here's what I do know, though: winter time water use in Lincoln hovers right around 30 million gallons per day. No one is watering their lawn in January, and there's not a whole lot of car washing and driveway cleaning occurring.

Our peak day this summer was Tuesday, July 24th, at 80 million gallons. So the difference--50 million gallons--essentially is the outdoor watering amount.

Tom Casady said...

Gun Nut,

That took four minutes. We're treating 25 million gallons daily: 20 million at the Theresa Street plant, and 5 million at the NE plant. We have average 54 million gallons of usage per day through the first 13 days of September.

Steve said...

Anon 11:39

I have nothing against the rich. I just don't think they deserve to live anymore than the rest of society. When we're talking about necessities like water, it ought to not be priced so only the rich can afford it. They can have all the green grass, cars, boats, airplanes, or whatever that they want. I just don't want them using my drinking water to maintain them when there is a shortage.

Anonymous said...

Director,
You did in five minutes what would have taken me all day. . . or longer.

So am I correct in assuming the January water usage figure of 30 million gallons and the 25 million gallon figure of treated water per day, that during the winter months we have a NET use of about 5 million gallons daily? I.O.W about 20 gallons per person every day.

Makes me wonder if maybe turning all of those Green Lawns into gardens might be a better use of resources. Talk about culture shock.

Gun Nut

Tom Casady said...

Gun nut,

Got lucky, it was on the front age of the first link I clicked at waste water. Interesting way of looking at it. If you take a shower, brush, shave, drink a quart of coffee, a couple glasses of water, make a pot of pasta, contribute to one daily load of family laundry, and flush your 1gpf toilet several times, it's just simple addition!

Anonymous said...

I'm 99% sure which house this was. It's the only house in the 5200 block of so 78th that isn't owner-occupied. In that respect, it's like that Dogwood Dope farm LPD busted a few years ago, a rental house owned by an out-of-town landlord.

You know what the obvious question is, along the lines of "are the residents suspected of any previous or current...". Well, you get the idea.

Anonymous said...

When I took my morning walk Saturday, I spotted a house that had at least 4 sprays of water hitting the front yard and watering the street, and on the wrong day! Kinda like flippin' the bird, I guess, but it's people like that who make the bans necessary, I'd say.

Anonymous said...

" It's the only house in the 5200 block of so 78th that isn't owner-occupied"

Whoa, I was wrong about that address - the incident occurred two houses away at an owner-occupied house, but it wasn't geocoded yet, so I was playing the percentages. Still, that's a pretty hairy incident type for that area. That immediate neighborhood hasn't had squat happen in the last month. No LFA, no vandalism, nothing. Then all of the sudden a home invasion burglary. Why? Why that house? It gives you that false note feeling.

Tom Casady said...

12:36,

Don't sell yourself short. It is non-owner occupied.

Anonymous said...

"Don't sell yourself short. It is non-owner occupied."

I'm actually relieved to read that. The prop tax DB shows it as owner-occupied, or at least had the mailing address the same as the property address. Are those geocodes that make it to crimemapping.com ever wrongly-placed? It shows 2 houses North of the property I'd figured.

I'll write again, that's quite a crime for that area, since in the entire 70-84 pioneers-old cheney grid square there hadn't even been a single LFA from an unlocked car or the most minor vandalism reported in the week prior. Now multiple guys decide to do a HIB, packing a gun to boot, and at that house. Hmmm...