Ice Bucket Drought Propaganda

Image of low water levels at Lake Oroville.

Today (August 24, 2014) I have seen a couple of articles posted to Facebook claiming that the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge has been contributing to the California drought. The comments to these articles express outrage that people are blatantly ignoring the damage to California. The images of Lake Oroville and statistics about the dire nature of the drought are dramatic and certainly show the bad situation that California's drought has caused.

As serious as the drought is (and I'm not trying to minimize it), my gut reaction to the insinuation (if not outright statement) that the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is a large contributor to the California drought is that this is a bunch of reactionary propaganda with no real basis in fact. With a little internet data and some back-of-napkin calculations, I verified that it is mostly fear mongering.

I'd like to start with the most extreme estimate to make my point. Let's assume that every single person in California participated in the ice bucket challenge. That is nearly 40 million people. I would be surprised if the total participant count in the entire US reaches that number, so we should be safe that this is a high estimate. Let's assume they all fill a 5-gallon bucket completely with ice/water (although I think the average is probably closer to 2 gallons), and let's assume it takes everyone 2 attempts to get the video right. That is 10 gallons per person. That is a total of 400 million gallons of water. That sounds like a lot at first glance.

The state of California was kind enough to document the capacity and current water levels of their reservoirs, including the Lake Oroville reservoir on their Department of Water Resources page. They measure the water in acre feet, so I used the conversion that 1 acre-foot is 325,853 gallons. That means the challenge used 1228 acre-feet of water. It turns out that Lake Oroville has a capacity of 3,537,577 acre-feet, and a current water storage of 1,123,093 acre-feet. Then the amount of water used by the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is approximately 0.035% of its total capacity and 0.11% of its current capacity.

The total current storage of California's reservoirs, according to the same site, is 7,659,526 acre-feet of a total capacity of 27,254,482 acre-feet, which corresponds to a challenge use of 0.016% and 0.0045%, respectively.

That amount of water does not sound like a huge amount. For comparison, a low-flow toilet flush uses about 1.6 gallons of water, so the ice bucket challenge is about the same as flushing the toilet about 6 times.

Also, many participants are performing the challenge in their yard, so some fraction of the water is going back into the ground.

Conclusion: The impact of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge to the California drought is an outrageous overstatement.

I captured the reservoir data from today, August 24, 2014, for reference.