The Sunnyvale Sun
News
Sunnyvale residents not asked to curb water use
By Cody Kraatz
The city of Sunnyvale is confident it has enough sources of water to be safe from shortages, and has not required its water users to conserve water since South Bay water providers recently raised the alarm about possible shortages.
"I met with our water managers a couple of months ago to discuss the water situation, and I was told that between our three sources of water, we don't see any immediate threat to our supply," said John Pilger, Sunnyvale spokesman, by e-mail. "Of course, another dry year can change that picture."
Besides using local groundwater wells, the city buys water from San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and the Santa Clara Valley Water District. Those two agencies have joined many others in the state in calling for voluntary 10 percent reductions in response to low rainfall and snowpack this winter.
The SFPUC issued its call in April after comparing water usage in the summer of 2004 to the amount of water available for this summer.
"We certainly feared that mandatory cutbacks would be required if demand were at similar levels to what it was in 2004," said Tony Winnicker, SFPUC spokesman, adding that Sunnyvale gets about 40 percent of its water from SFPUC. Rationing is not expected, but is also not off the table.
The SFPUC found a 16 percent reduction in the South Bay region that includes Sunnyvale compared to 2004. But the agency said usage is creeping up again, possibly in connection with warmer temperatures, leading water suppliers to worry that people may not be taking the water situation seriously.
Winnicker said the agency would like to believe people are cutting back but noted that there could be many reasons for the earlier reductions and people might not be conserving that much. Water suppliers believe the need for water conservation is going to continue as climate change causes drier winters in the Sierra Nevada, where the Bay Area gets a lot of its water.
Fremont Union High School District and Cupertino Union School District, which manage water use at local schools, have not responded to the water district's 10 percent request, but their taps are turned down with school out for the summer. The only notices FUHSD received from its water providers, California Water Service Co. and San Jose Water Co., were fliers with its monthly bills.
"A letter we would respond to," said Geoffrey Kiehl, FUHSD chief business officer. Summer savings will be approximately 10 percent.
Carl Dunn, FUHSD coordinator of facilities maintenance, said swimming pools and playing fields, the biggest users, would be damaged if the taps were turned off. The district had let fields die during a drought in the early 1990s but does not want to do that again because the cost to restore it is high.
Jeremy Nishihara, spokesman for CUSD, said no water agencies directly contacted the local elementary school district about water conservation, but it is operating at about one-third its standard school year usage. The district shares its field irrigation management with various cities, and has an energy manager who minimizes the use of all utilities.
Sunnyvale sold 8.3 billion gallons of water in 2006. That is 63,000 gallons per year per Sunnyvale resident and enough to fill about 12,600 Olympic-size swimming pools per year.
About 630 million gallons of the water the city used in 2006 was nonpotable , from its Water Pollution Control Plant. The water plant, built in 1956 and expanded to process 29.5 million gallons of wastewater per day in 1984, treats industrial waste, recycles wastewater for landscaping and industrial uses to keep it out of San Francisco Bay and improves the quality of treated sewage.
