Community
Rainwater harvesting and water conservation
Presentation
I've developed a PowerPoint presentation describing household and community-scale water-conservation measures. You may freely use it or portions of it, with appropriate credit. Be warned that it's big (37 Mb because of the many images) and will take several minutes to download.
Use of village buildings for rainwater harvesting
As the monsoon approached in 2015, I developed a proposal to use fire funds and third-party grants and donations to equip the Magdalena fire station, where I'm a volunteer firefighter, with rainwater storage tanks. The station roof has an area of 4900 ft2 and receives 3000 gal with every inch of rain. Below are shown overhead (north is directly upward), east, and west views and the draft tank-placement plan.
To the north of the station on village land I've proposed establishing a community garden to be irrigated with the excess water captured from the roof.
These proposals elicited only token interest from people with the power to push them forward. Rainwater harvesting is not considered important, given the certainly infinite reserves of groundwater available everywhere in the arid West at the cost of punching holes in the ground. If one hole goes dry, just punch another. If they all go dry, it was someone else's fault—no one could ever have imagined that there are any limits on consumption of resources.
In 2016 I also spoke with people associated with the Magdalena Senior Center, proposing a similar project. The response again was approval, but the stated (and perfectly understandable) reason that nothing would be done was the shortage of money available in the state and county budgets.
Indeed, I have no evidence that a community garden here would attract any use, or that anyone would care whether or not it was watered with rain. There's no evidence that gardening is of much interest to more than a few people in the village; perhaps least of all to people whose diet consists of lots of sugar, fat, meat, and processed foods. So I've given up on this line of community activism.
