MENDOCINO, CALIFORNIA — As a measure of both the nation’s creaking infrastructure and the severity of the drought gripping California there is the $5 shower.
That’s how much Ian Roth, the owner of the Seagull Inn, a bed-and-breakfast in this tourist town three hours north of San Francisco, spends on water every time a guest washes for five minutes under the shower nozzle.
Water is so scarce in Mendocino, an Instagram-ready collection of pastel Victorian homes on the edge of the Pacific, that restaurants have closed their restrooms to guests, pointing them instead to portable toilets on the sidewalk.
And the fire department has asked sheriff’s deputies to keep an eye on the hydrants in response to a report of water theft.
“We’ve grown up in this first-world country thinking that water is a given,” said Julian Lopez, the owner at Café Beaujolais, a restaurant packed with out-of-town diners in what is the height of the tourist season. “There’s that fear in the back of all our minds there is going to be a […]
Why don’t they use desalination of ocean water??? It is not hard to do and we are already using it in some areas. We must just expand it to supply more places. The oceans are big and growing, too. It is stupid not to use desalination for needed water!