Mandatory Water Rationing to Begin : Drought: Long Beach sets quotas for 20% cutback in consumption. Rules take effect more than a month earlier than expected.

Wasting water will become an official environmental sin Friday, when mandatory water rationing goes into effect in this city, a month ahead of schedule.

Although the recent rains have washed away the dust and brown of the drought, officials say the storms have not eliminated the need for rationing.

“The rains have certainly helped,” said Stephen Ehren, conservation manager of the Long Beach Water Department. “They have eased the situation. But they haven’t filled up the reservoirs.”

With the rationing, Long Beach joins cities throughout the region that have responded to five years of drought by imposing curbs on water use. Local water officials had planned to start rationing May 1, thinking it would take that long to reprogram their billing system, but moved the date up when they finished the revamping sooner than expected.

Designed to cut local water consumption by 20%, the rationing sets quotas for homes and businesses and bills them at three times the normal rate for any water they consume above that. The allocations vary according to the type of residence. Whereas single-family homes will be allotted 325 gallons a day, each unit of a duplex will have a quota of 275 gallons a day and each apartment will be allotted 200 gallons a day.

By comparison, Water Department officials say the average single-family home used about 374 gallons a day during the past year.

In some cases, customers will have to drastically alter their watering ways to meet the quotas. The city Water Department has taken a close look at consumption patterns since January and found some major water hogs, including 13 single-family homes that use more than 2,500 gallons a day. Of those, the biggest consumer is a house that slurps up about 5,000 gallons a day.

Ehren said the homes are on large lots, have gobs of landscaping and in some cases pools and fountains. “We checked their meters. Most of them were surprised they were using that much,” Ehren said, adding that the department is trying to “educate” the homeowners that they do not have to drench their greenery. “We expect these people to show a decrease.”

If they don’t, he noted, the department has the authority to install flow restricters that could reduce water flow to the homes to a gallon a minute.

Some apartment houses are also using far more than will be allowed under the new quotas. One 500-unit apartment complex in North Long Beach uses about 2 million gallons a month more than its allocation calls for.

“They could be paying about $6,000 a month more for water if they don’t reduce it,” Ehren said, although he added that the landlord may be able to successfully appeal his quota if he can prove that an above-average number of people live in the apartments.

The water allowances for apartments and duplexes are smaller than for single-family homes on the theory that apartments and duplexes have fewer landscaping needs and two occupants per unit, as opposed to four occupants in the average single-family home.

Customers will be able to appeal the quotas if they have more people living in their home, or in the case of a business, if the restrictions will put people out of work.

Commercial and industrial customers are being asked to use only 80% of the water they consumed before the voluntary conservation program went into effect last spring.

The city Water Department is spending $40,000 mailing out notices this week to each of its 87,000 customers, informing them of the water quotas compared with what their usage has been. Since most apartment complexes have master meters, the notices will go to the landlords.

The department imposed some general curbs at the beginning of March, prohibiting people from watering landscaping during the heat of the day, hosing down driveways or letting leaks go unrepaired. Those curbs will remain and violations are subject to $25 fines, but Ehren said that during the past month, the department has issued only warnings--523 of them.

With mandatory rationing looming, the public this month has made about 2,000 calls to the Water Department for information about the restrictions, asked for 500 applications to appeal the quotas and taken home about 20,000 water conservation kits.

Long Beach gets 60% of its water from the Metropolitan Water District, which has told the agencies it supplies to cut consumption by 20% or face penalties. Much of the district’s water comes from the Sierra Nevada, where the snowfall was exceptionally low for most of the winter.

Ehren said that water use in Long Beach during the first three weeks of March fell by 24% compared to the same period last year, but a good part of that reduction is a result of the rains, which have slashed the need to water lawns.

WATER RATIONING

On Friday, the Long Beach Water Department will put the following water rationing restrictions into effect:

Single family homes will be allocated 325 gallons a day.

Each unit of a duplex will be allocated 275 gallons a day.

Each unit of an apartment complex will be allocated 200 gallons a day.

Industrial and commercial customers will have to use 20% less than they did during the base year of May, 1989, to May, 1990.

Any water consumed above the quota will be billed at three times the normal rate.

For more information, call 424-SAVE, the department’s water conservation hot line.