California is dreaming...they are dreaming about your water. In all of the well publicized problems of the California drought right now, they don't mention one thing. They don't mention that California has until recently pumped 1.35 billion gallons of water into the Pacific ocean every day through ocean outfall pipes. Yes, we said billion.
They have cut that back a bit in recent years due to water recycling programs*, but it is still about a billion gallons a day. We are sure they would love to have that water now. We are sure when they built those outfall pipes they thought everything was OK, that there was plenty of water, no problem.
A full report on all of that is here http://healtheocean.org/images/_pages/research/HTO_COWDI.pdf Long but don't worry, there is an executive summary. The takeaway message is that once it's gone, it's gone.
*Yes, if you've been to LA or Orange County recently you likely drank or showered in water that came from a sewage treatment plant before being triple-filtered, run through reverse osmosis, and UV light treated. Then they add minerals to the water because the process above essentially makes distilled water - which is pure but tasteless. They add minerals so it tastes like something again and in the case of Orange County, they send it to an underground aquifer 16 miles away to mix with underground supplies.
We are not suggesting that we need to go that far - we don't need to go to potable re-use of treated water, but at the very least, we'd like to not wast Delaware's water.
California is Pumping! No, this is not a map of surf spots.