== Let's all get wet = By Mark Morford

[madokie]

It's pouring rain and water's gushing everywhere. You call this a drought?

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2009/03/06/notes030609.DTL&nl=fix

As I write these words, rain is hammering my apartment building and rivers of fresh water -- hundreds or perhaps thousands of gallons per minute -- are gushing down the streets and the sidewalks, filling rain gutters, overwhelming the storm drains and rinsing the City relatively clean, and you think, ahh yes, rain, bring it on, so healthy, so good, so desperately needed.

Maybe you also think: Surely all that water is going somewhere helpful, yes? Surely at least some of those drains feed into some grand network of reservoirs and tanks that, in turn, replenish the supply and nourish the community and come back through our taps and get recycled for irrigation, and it's all glorious and helpful, right?

Wrong.

Truth is, the vast majority of that glorious water is merely flushed away by a system of conduits and drainage pipes and sent straight out into the bay, all in an effort to avoid urban flooding because, well, we are simply not equipped to handle too much of it at once. ...

[MadHound]

1. He makes some very good points

However that doesn't mitigate the fact that you really can't put tens of millions of people out in a desert or semi-arid area and expect that it can be a long term sustainable proposition.