doodledee

A week or so go I was standing around talking with KC about how hot and dry it'd been lately and how my lawn was starting to suffer a little bit and he happened to mention that over the month of July, the crew out at Hazeltine National needed to use 9.6 million gallons of water to keep the course in it's breathtaking championship condition. "Whoo-wee!" I thought, "that’s a lotta damn water!"

Then the other day I got my water bill from the city. I opened it and saw that we owed a little more than usual this time, a fact I immediately attributed to my recent lawn watering and/or habit of beating the heat by taking 6 showers a day. After I cursed and vowed to keep it under 5 from now on, I turned to the larger, more obvious issue: how much water do I use compared to fancy ass golf course? Grab your rifle, it's time for some class warfare!

Here comes the stastics:

Dave
-------
May - July Usage:  11000 gal
      July Usage:  5500 gal*

* - assumes July was 50% of usage, probably high, but whatever

Hazeltine
-----------
July Usage      :  9,600,000 gal
Membership      :  ~400
Gal/Member      :  24,000 gal

A little quick math shows that even if I maintained my July level of usage all year round, it would still take me 1750 months (145 years) to burn through the same amount of water that Hazeltine used in a single month. Or better yet, look at it this way: with only 400 members, the course's water usage equates to each of the members having more than *four extra houses* worth of water usage. That's outrageous! Let's storm the gates! And play a free round! And then we'll call it even!

Those numbers got me interested enough that I wrote to Edina's water chief guy and asked him for our citywide data. Here's what he wrote back with:

Edina
-------
July   : 401,752,400 gal  
March  : 164,016,000 gal

Note 1: March numbers provided for 'non-hotter-than-hell' reference.

Note 2: All the golf courses in Edina have their own wells 
and are therefore not included in these numbers.

(Notes mine)

Whoo-wee again! 400 million gallons was way more than I was expecting! Year 2000 census data claims there are roughly 22,000 households in Edina, which would mean that each one is using like 18,000 gal/month, over 3-times more than I do. Huh? There are [naturally] a lot of in-ground sprinkler systems in town, but come on, that's a lot of water. In reality I'm sure the local businesses account for a ton of usage, but I have no way of accounting for them because I'm too lazy to look for the data. In any event, in the interest of fairness I'll politely back off and say it's actually like each Hazeltine member owns one and a half additional houses, not 4.

Does that make it better? Maybe a little, but they're still an easy target, so I'm gonna remain somewhat flabbergasted - and maybe even a tiny bit outraged - by the numbers.

Seriously though, a free round and I'm totally over it.

Edina Demographics [areaconnect]

Hazeltine National Golf Club [hngc]