This Is No Time to Back Up on Flushing

Next time you set foot in the bathroom, push down the toilet handle.

That flushing noise you hear is the sound of 20 years of enlightenment, of common sense, of sound conservation practices being swirled away down the drain.

In the midst of the East’s worst drought on record, a Michigan Republican congressman named Joe Knollenberg wants to repeal the federal law that mandates conservation by requiring low-flush toilets.

The honorable gentleman says he has been receiving complaints--some scrawled on toilet paper--from annoyed consumers whose low-flush toilets “repeatedly clog” and “require multiple flushings.”

What torment. What agony. Tennis backhands ruined. Golf swings altered forever. The medical journals must be racing pell-mell to write up the carpal flush syndrome.

I’m sorry your constituents may have to double-flush, congressman. But even if they had to flush three times once in a while, it would not negate the savings in water that low-flush toilets deliver.

Since 1990, Southern California water agencies have rebated or given away 2.5 million low-flush toilets. In the city of Los Angeles alone, that innovation saves 9 billion gallons of water a year, and $50 on a family’s water bill.

Congressman, your state touches four of the five Great Lakes, the biggest freshwater lake system in the world. Pick one of them, and go soak your head.

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Boy, did they laugh at us 20 years ago. The Gov. Moonbeam, small-is-beautiful state populated by bricks-in-their-toilet-tanks, air-in-their-heads Californians.

But guess where the state’s one-word motto came from: “Eureka,” Greek for “I have found it,” is what the Greek mathematician Archimedes supposedly shouted when he climbed into his bathtub and realized that water is displaced according to what enters it.

The wet genius had found a principle of fluid mechanics; its practical application led to the brick (or plastic bag) in the toilet tank as a way to conserve water. Its more sophisticated incarnation, the low-flush toilet, caught on here before the federal government in 1992 finally saw the wisdom of requiring all new household toilets to be low-flow--the law Knollenberg wants to repeal.

There’s only one remotely reasonable argument against low-flush toilets, and it’s as Californian as water conservation:

No growth.

Bumper stickers like “Flush Twice, Stop Growth,” and “No Water, No Building Permits” are evidence of a sullen awareness that the more water consumers save, the more water developers will have to supply all the sprawling subdivisions they want to build. The good news and the bad news is that L.A. now uses the same levels of water it used 30 years ago, and yet a million more people have moved in.

But the water L.A. has conserved has also gone to reviving Mono Lake, which had been sucked nearly dry by urban thirst. Perhaps if Californians could be assured that that’s where more of their conserved water was going--back into lakes and rivers--they could flush once, and for all.

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These drought years have forced Southern Californians to realize how capricious is the flow of imported water that keeps this artificial desert megalopolis alive.

Told in 1991 to cut water use by 15%, Angelenos did even better. The lapel buttons read, “Save Water--Shower With a Friend.” Restaurants stopped serving water automatically; it took a dozen glasses’ worth of water to wash one. I went into a bathroom and found an admonition above the flush handle: “Poo do, pee don’t.” Hosing down sidewalks and driveways was prohibited, and still is.

Rules that were considered draconian then are standards we now observe without a second thought. But drought is a new terror on the Eastern Seaboard. Maryland residents who water their lawns can be fined $1,000. At county fairs, beverage vendors are being asked to use their melted ice to water plants.

The DWP’s general manager is S. David Freeman, and his cowboy hat is a clue that he knows the meaning of water here in the West. “I don’t know what’s bugging this guy,” he says of Knollenberg. “He must have some manufacturing in his district that makes fancy toilets or something. . . . Why he’d want to change the law and go back to waste as usual is kind of nuts.”

Freeman just heard from a friend back in desiccated Virginia. The man’s son, a conservation-minded teenager, awoke one recent morning at 2 a.m. and found his mom outside, watering flowers on the sly.

The teen said, “Mom, this is just wrong.” His mother said, “Well, there’s nobody looking.” And her son answered, “I am.”

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com