Gray-water user just like grandma

WHO cares if there is a drought or not? Using gray water just makes better sense in our southwestern environment [“Drought-busters Hit a Hurdle,” March 29].

I’d love to use more gray water left from washing dishes or the laundry if the city of Pasadena or the county made it easy to get the permit and there were contractors who could do the work at a reasonable price. But since that isn’t going to happen (and Californians have been talking about this for decades), I’ll just do as my 84-year-old mother still does and my grandmother before her -- keep a plastic square bucket in the sink to wash dishes and then pour that water into my pots and planters. The water I wash the floors with gets watered down and poured on the roses and plants that attract aphids. I don’t buy fancy detergents with lots of weird chemicals, just basic soap. The detergent gets rid of the aphids and other bugs. I put buckets out when it’s raining to collect rain water for later.

My grandmother used the gray water in the garden into her 90s. That’s what everybody did when she was growing up in Santa Barbara in the 1890s.

A. REY

Pasadena

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I was the executive director of the now-defunct Office of Water Reclamation in the city of Los Angeles’ board of Public Works, and I authored the city’s gray-water pilot project in the 1990s. The report was the basis for changes to the regulations, making gray- water systems legal. However, the extreme caution on the part of the health agencies has made the system so bureaucratically tangled that most homeowners cannot afford a “legal” gray-water system. The risks of using household gray water are so minimal that they pale compared to the risks of running out of water -- or having to pay fees for irrigating one’s lawns and landscaping.

I am disappointed with the way the political will for water conservation faded when the perception of drought went away after a couple of years of “normal” rainfall. Academics and professors always look for the next gap in knowledge -- it is not surprising that they say we don’t know everything there is to know about gray water. We know enough to know that it is safer than many other risks we take every day.

BAHMAN SHEIKH

San Francisco

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