Recent blog posts made hay over two water-related bills passed in California, suggesting that consumers may now be fined for doing laundry and taking a shower on the same day.
California has a water problem—one so severe that Gov. Jerry Brown thought it prudent to sign two bills, Senate Bill 606 and Assembly Bill 1668, into law focused primarily on decreasing per-person water usage.
One part of the legislation requires that “urban retail water suppliers” stick to set annual water budgets or potentially face a penalty of up to $1,000 per day (more if the overuse coincides with emergency droughts).
The goal, according to the text of SB-606, is to achieve “20-percent reduction from the baseline daily per capita water use by December 31, 2020.” To set the water budget standards, these urban retail water suppliers (i.e. a water supplier that services 3,000 people or 3,000 acre-feet annually) can adopt one of four methods to determine their water usage targets. AB-1668 sets the “standard for indoor residential water use” at 55 gallons a day per person, with the number decreasing to 50 gallons by 2030.
The Organic Prepper, a blog site focused on “self-reliance strategies for preparedness and personal liberty,” claimed in a recent post that it is now “against the law in California to shower and do laundry on the same day.” Websites including Infowars, Prison Planet, and ZeroHedge re-posted the blog entry, helping it gain attention on Facebook’s fact-checking apparatus. Breitbart went with a more nuanced approach in its suggestion that the new water law “could prevent showering, doing laundry on same day.”
One aspect of AB-1668, and the main focus of Organic Prepper’s post, is its mission to limit the use of personal indoor water-usage to 50 gallons per day by 2030. The blog post estimates that the gallon mark would not be enough water for one person to both shower and do laundry in the same day:
An 8-minute shower uses about 17 gallons of water
A load of laundry uses about 40 gallons of water
According to Consumer Reports, a 20-year-old washing machine may, in fact, take up to 40 gallons, with modern washing machines using half that, if not significantly less. (Some use as little as 7 gallons.) Showers use roughly 2 gallons per minute.
The blog also claims that fines for not complying would directly apply to the individual consumer. “Here are the fines Californians will be looking at – and it’s not a typo – these fines are PER DAY,” Organic Prepper says. However, the $1,000-per-day figure previously mentioned applies to the urban retail water suppliers, as section 1864.5 in AB-1668 makes clear:
…
(2) For all violations other than those described in paragraph (1), one thousand dollars ($1,000) for each day in which the violation occurs.
It is unclear the effect that said fines could have on consumers.
The insinuation from Organic Prepper that individual consumers would receive the $1,000-per-day fine is incorrect, but claiming that a consumer may pass the 50 or 55 gallon mark by showering and doing laundry may be accurate, depending on the model of the washing machine and the time one spends in the shower.
If you have questions about this fact check, or would like to submit a request for another fact check, email Holmes Lybrand at [email protected] or the Weekly Standard at [email protected]. For details on TWS Fact Check, see our explainer here.
