Ed Andrechak
Hi, I'm Ed Andrechak. I came to St. George to retire and do nothing but hike, and realized that there wasn't much of a water supply, and we seemed to use water at a high rate, considering the fact that we lived in the desert. There's a thing called gallons per capita day GPCD. Washington County and St. George had some of the highest GPCD in the West.
Karen Goodfellow
We're actually being quoted as that in national news.
Ed Andrechak
So I got busy, studied up. Since I'm an engineer, I've never met a problem I didn't like, and I am Karen's partner in conservation.
Karen Goodfellow
Karen Goodfellow. I grew up in Miami Beach, Florida. I was a swimmer. We did a lot of boating growing up, but living here in the desert, you have a very different perspective on water. We all share one water here. It's every drop that falls within this geographic area, that includes underground water too, and the source is this trickle, the Virgin River. You moved from back east, and you compare it to:
Ed Andrechak
Susquehanna River, 200 times the size of the tiny Virgin River.
Karen Goodfellow
Truly, a creek. The water is very important for tourism, recreation, for agriculture, and also produces riparian areas, and that riparian corridor in the middle of a desert is where a lot of migrating birds stop, and this watershed supports probably 20 species of plants and animals that don't exist anyplace else in the world.
What I like to think about is the indigenous people here, they figured out how to grow the crops where the water was. In some cases, they moved the water. The pioneers would put the water into ditches, and they would lift a wooden gate to redirect it. And in bad water years, they just wouldn't use as much water. They'd put their gate down, and then they let their neighbor have that water. And I was actually talking about this to my dental hygienist, because we talk about water to everybody, right? Ed, and she said, "I remember doing that with my grandfather," and so it is part of our culture, but we don't have any new water. It's going to get drier, it's going to get hotter...
Ed Andrechak
Population's growing, but we need to change behavior, and I called it building a water conservation culture. We have to treat water preciously, and we have to use it wisely. My favorite adage is: building culture is like nailing jelly to a tree. Some of the things we wanted to do was to translate this to actual practices. There's this thing called AMI, Advanced Metering Infrastructure. You can check your water balance every 15 minutes, and it gives the local water district for the city immediate understanding of where leaks are occurring.
Karen Goodfellow
In the county of Washington, 54 percent of our water is used on landscape irrigation. Seventy-five percent of that is grass, just grass. You shouldn't have grass in the desert.
Ed Andrechak
They can't imagine a life beyond grass, which is hungry for water.
Karen Goodfellow
So hungry for water. It uses chemicals, it uses fertilizer, but there's some beautiful properties that have done xeriscaping -- the artistic use of desert plants and rocks and gravel and all of that, and big shade trees. So I helped to organize something called Parade of Gardens Southern Utah last year, and this event is a fun and neutral way for people to go see -- Well, if I don't have grass, my yard could look like this, and I wouldn't be spending all that money and time cutting my grass.
Ed Andrechak
Some of the jelly's sticking to the tree now.
Karen Goodfellow
Right, Ed?
Ed Andrechak
Right!
Karen Goodfellow
I love it here. I love the red rocks, the kind of trees we have, and we need to embrace that, so that we mirror the desert that we live in.
