San Jose State Art and Art History and Environmental Studies departments collaborated to create the “Hidden Life of Water,” to celebrate the United Nations’ World Water Day 2023.
The event explores current event topics regarding rainfall and climate change with a panel of speakers, poetry and informative performances at the Hammer Theatre on Wednesday.
The first program had panelists expertising in either environmental studies or sustainability, discussing water-related events ranging from drought to atmospheric rivers.
The three speakers were environmental studies associate professor Katherine Cushing; environmental associate professor Constanza Rampini; and Senior Sustainability Program Lead of the Office of Sustainability Debbie Andres.
Cushing said the average annual rainfall in California is 22 inches, but during the last drought cycle, the average rainfall doubled.
“Our last two drought cycles happened pretty close together,” Cushing said. “One was between 2012 and 2015, and over these last few years.”
Cushing said the drought between 2012 and 2015 and the recent drought California has been in for the past years occurred close together.
She said California residents are primarily concerned with droughts because some of the state’s hottest years have been in the past decade.
“When you think about a phenomena like climate change, there is more energy in the atmosphere – water that used to be near the surface that evaporates,” Cushing said. “More energy in the atmosphere leads to a greater frequency of extreme events like droughts and floods.”
Cushing said, in a matter of five months, a majority of California went from being in the worst stages of a drought to experiencing the opposite.
She said floods are the opposite of droughts – unexpected overflows of water where land is usually dry.
“Before this water season, the 2017 President’s Day flood was the costliest flood in Santa Clara County history,” Cushing said.
The 2017 President’s Day floods were “two back-to-back atmospheric river storms in mid-to-late February . . . the storms arrived a week after heavy rainfall in Northern California prompted the evacuation of nearly 200,000 people when flooding damaged both spillways of the Oroville Dam,” according to an Oct. 5, 2021 article from Climate Signals, a non-profit that curates climate change attribution.
The new rainfall records included San Jose at 1.87 inches, San Francisco International Airport at 2.16 inches and Sacramento at 1.74 inches, according to the same article.
She said the cost of the 2017 President’s Day flood was estimated to be $100 million in damages, which is only a fraction of the billions of dollars in damages from rainstorms today.
An atmospheric river is a flowing column of condensed water vapor in the atmosphere responsible for producing significant levels of rain and snow, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Cushing said these pathways of water vapor are more directed and concentrated.
“Sometimes it feels like it’s raining buckets – the rain is so strong,” she said. “It’s because we are having more [of] these atmospheric rivers as opposed to regular precipitation events.”
The strength of winds and rain have caused power outages across the Bay Area, impacting SJSU last week.
“We have all been through a lot in the past few weeks,” Rampini said. “I was out of power for the last full day – without internet all of today.”
She said, despite the negative impact the storms had on Santa Clara County, it’s important to recognize that California is no longer in a drought.
“All of our reservoirs right now are above their historical average,” Rampini said. “They aren’t necessarily full, but they are breaking records and that’s great.”
The Oroville Dam, which was damaged by the 2017 floods, has recently been fixed to minimize overflowing streams.
“I think it’s about the width of about 15 highway lanes,” Rampini said. “Just 12 days ago, the dam released water for the first time in years to make room for the floods we are having now.”
Rampini said, in addition to the resources dams provide like electricity and flood protection, in case the reservoir level was lowered ahead of an upcoming flood, there will be more room to hold the rain that would otherwise destroy communities downstream.
“It’s not abnormal – California always swings between droughts and atmospheric rivers,” Rampini said. “What we are seeing is that these events are being more extreme.”
She said many people in San Jose downtown and at SJSU do not realize there are two rivers near campus, Coyote Creek and Guadalupe River.
“These communities are living along the river banks, near our river banks and sometimes in the river beds themselves,” Rampini said. “Our homeless community members are really the ones who cannot protect themselves from floods, droughts and heatwaves.”
She said it’s the people living the closest to the river who experience these extreme weather conditions the most.
“We’ve done everything to hide our rivers from our view – we have cemented their channel, connected them with each other and poured cement all over,” Rampini said. “We’ve seen so much urbanization in this area that used to be called, ‘The Valley of Heart’s Delight.’ ”
She said because San Jose has so many impervious surfaces, all the rainfall enters the river channels at once instead of trickling down to the ground water.
“We’ve seen a lot of rain and we are probably thinking, ‘Conservation isn’t that important,’ but we will always have a drought and we will always have rain,” Debbie Andres said. “Both of those events will get more and more extreme.”
Andres said the main water conservation strategy at SJSU is to use recycled water.
“When you flush your toilets or use the sink or wash your clothes, all of that water goes to the South Bay Recycling Water Facility,” she said. “Historically, that water would go to the bay, but it gets treated at the facility.”
Andres said recycled water can be also used for irrigation, flushing toilets and golf courses.
“Instead of pulling from our reservoirs, our water use is mostly from underground sources,” she said.
Andres said the first way SJSU started to conserve water was the creation of a cooling tower in 2001 that uses recycled water. She said it saves nearly 16 million gallons of water per year.
The latest system that was converted to a recycled water system was the implementation of dual plumbing.
“Dual plumbing means there is two plumbing systems in each building,” Andres said. “One is the water that goes to your sinks and your showers, and the other one goes to our toilets.”
She said starting with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, toilets were flushed with recycled water and double plumbing was installed in each of the buildings that followed.
“We save over 100 million gallons of water a year, and we use more recycled water than fresh water,” Andres said.
