How Effective Web Platforms Can Aid Water Conservation Efforts
Dublin, California Vlad Valeyev / Shutterstock.com
In California, more than one-third of Dublin San Ramon Services District customers use water consumption alerts to conserve.
The Dublin San Ramon Services District in the San Francisco Bay Area imposed mandatory water use limits on residents in May 2014—about a year before restrictions became mandatory across California—reducing consumption more than 25 percent.
Facing a now-four-year drought, last year the California State Water Project only provided contractors 5 percent of requested water allocations. And the help came in September, after the summer months when demand is highest.
That meant DSRSD’s supplier, which relied on CSWP for 80 percent of its water, could only provide 75 percent of its normal allotment, so the district tapped into its local aquifer.
“It’s like living on a savings account with no income coming in,” district spokeswoman Renee Olsen told Route Fifty in an interview. “That was the situation we were in last summer.”
To encourage customers to cut back, DSRSD updated its website, which hadn’t been overhauled in a decade, to be mobile-friendly in June 2014.
DSRSD worked with Santa Monica, California-based Vision Internet, which has experience building websites for local governments and agencies, to build a content management system, which the district lacked.
Website visitors can access their account, report drought violations, read up on ongoing district water conservation projects, and keep up with board meetings.
The Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, which serves an area in and around the city of Calabasas near Los Angeles, also worked with Vision Internet to revamp its website to emphasize information about water conservation. That district has seen more than 20,000 unique visitors to its website since its 2013 launch, as well as a decrease in water use.
DSRSD’s site was connected to AquaHawk, an interactive water consumption and alerting portal, where customers and district staff can monitor use data in near real time.
Most water agencies read meters every 30 to 60 days, Olsen said, but DSRSD installed transmitters in 2013 that stream data via antennas that’s relayed to a server. The data is made available to AquaHawk, which residents can have alert them when they’re nearing a set dollar amount.
An advertising and direct mail campaign for the new website got the ball rolling, and now around 7,370 out of 20,500 water accounts use AquaHawk—more than one-third of the district’s customers.
Two months after launch, 97 percent of residents were under the district’s 4,480-gallon-a-week limit.
“It allows our customers to take control of their water use, and our job was to communicate why they needed to cut back and establish the limits necessary in the community,” Olsen said. “Our customers responded because we gave them the tools to do that through our website and AquaHawk.”
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