NYTimes | Alysia Thomas, a stay-at-home mother in this working-class city, tells
her children to skip a bath on days when they do not play outside; that
holds down the water bill. Lillian Barrera, a housekeeper who travels 25
miles to clean homes in Beverly Hills, serves dinner to her family on
paper plates for much the same reason. In the fourth year of a severe
drought, conservation is a fine thing, but in this Southern California
community, saving water means saving money.
The challenge of California’s drought is starkly different in Cowan
Heights, a lush oasis of wealth and comfort 30 miles east of here. That
is where Peter L. Himber, a pediatric neurologist, has decided to stop
watering the gently sloping hillside that he spent $100,000 to turn into
a green California paradise, seeding it with a carpet of rich native
grass and installing a sprinkler system fit for a golf course. But that
is also where homeowners like John Sears, a retired food-company
executive, bristle with defiance at the prospect of mandatory cuts in
water use.
“This is a high fire-risk area,” Mr. Sears said. “If we cut back 35
percent and all these homes just let everything go, what’s green will
turn brown. Tell me how the fire risk will increase.”
The
fierce drought that is gripping the West — and the imminent prospect of
rationing and steep water price increases in California — is sharpening
the deep economic divide in this state, illustrating parallel worlds in
which wealthy communities guzzle water as poorer neighbors conserve by
necessity. The daily water consumption rate was 572.4 gallons per person
in Cowan Heights from July through September 2014, the hot and dry
summer months California used to calculate community-by-community water rationing orders; it was 63.6 gallons per person in Compton during that same period.
Now,
California is trying to turn that dynamic on its head, forcing the
state’s biggest water users, which include some of the wealthiest
communities, to bear the brunt of the statewide 25 percent cut in urban
water consumption ordered by Gov. Jerry Brown. Cowan Heights is facing a
36 percent cut in its water use, compared with 8 percent for Compton.
