On Wednesday, May 20, 2015 at 7:44:31 PM UTC-7, Hypatia Nachshon wrote:
On Monday, May 18, 2015 at 11:42:19 PM UTC-7, David E. Ross wrote:
On 5/18/2015 6:00 PM, songbird wrote [in part]:
as for your rant, i suspect they stagger watering days to keep the
load on the overall system more balanced.

No. Everyone in the community now irrigates on Mondays and Thursdays.

Thousand Oaks (a neighboring city) proposed specific days for irrigating
gardens, with odd addresses on certain days and even addresses on other
days. The Public Works staff, however, pointed out that if everyone ran
their sprinklers on their permitted days before 9:00am (beyond that time
irrigating was already prohibited), there would not be enough pressure
in the mains during those times to support fire-fighting. In some parts
of Los Angeles, having alternating days for irrigating gardens resulted
in aged mains rupturing, wasting thousands or even millions of gallons
of water.

Note what David said about "aging mains". Some of the municipal "plumbing" is 100 years old or more. Disaster waiting to happen.

HB

Update: Disasters ARE happening. Every few days we get news that another ancient main has broken with resultant damage to houses, people displaced, traffic disrupted. Wonder who pays the bill for public safety personnel and replacement of infrastructure. MWD (Metropolitan Water District) has had a lot of nasty reports about management.

HB

By the way, see my "Gardening During a Drought" at
http://www.rossde.com/garden/drought.html.