A Word with... Huell Howser
Q. How did you get concerned about California’s Water issues?
A. Everybody should be concerned about California’s water. The average Californian has traditionally taken their water for granted, and before I started this I wasn’t much different. There’s a natural tendency here to think that water comes out of the tap in the same way that food comes out of the grocery store. Reporting on the subject turned out to be a perfect assignment. Like most people I hadn’t followed the water agenda closely beforehand and I knew little or nothing about what went on to deliver water to all of us. Each episode was a learning experience for me and my viewers.
Q. What impressed you most in your travels?
A. Two things. First, was the sheer complexity of California’s plumbing system. When you really get into it you have to be amazed at the ingenuity and foresight that went into its planning and construction decades ago. Second, I was bowled over by the professionalism and commitment I found among the people who run the various facilities today — everyone from the guys who maintain the levees and measure the snow mass up in the Sierras to the ones who keep the pumps running and treat the water. I came to see that they’ve been fighting a lonely battle for years, pretty much invisible to the rest of us. Only recently are ordinary citizens and even the politicians starting to pay attention to what they do. Water experts have been sounding the alarms for a long time, but so long as clean water was flowing, most Californians tended to think everything would always be OK.
Q. How did you go about making the PBS series “California’s Water”?
A. We started with a roadmap from ACWA and then followed the story wherever it took us. To make the original 21 30-minute segments took over two years as my crew and I traveled all over the state. We will continue to add two or three more episodes per year because how California meets these challenges is an ongoing story. And I’m delighted that people continue to watch the original episodes. They’re shown at schools and at civic clubs and on TV. You can also see them as streaming videos at www.acwa.com/television/segments.asp.
Q. What kind of feedback have you had from the public?
A. The reaction has been 100 percent supportive. People regularly thank me for demystifying the whole issue, for explaining terms like groundwater and aquifer and acre-feet in terms they can understand. For two weeks after we did the segment on the Delta, people in Los Angeles were constantly coming up to me and saying, “I never knew what all the fuss was about the Delta and why it matters until you took us there.”
Q. Do you think Californians are finally getting the conservation message?
A. Yes, people are starting to understand that the days of unlimited water are gone and that we have to adapt to that fact. The amount of water we have is not going to increase nor is the state going to stop growing. So we’ve got to make what we have go further. Sure, there’ll be wet years and dry years, the reservoirs will be up and they’ll be down. Water conservation will become part of everyday life and in a generation or so people will marvel that we ever even debated about it.