Water

Posted by James.

As Renate mentioned in this post , last weekend we took a boat trip on the Spree and that got me to thinking about the topic of water. As probably everybody knows, California is now in a severe drought with 20% reductions in use mandated by the governor. The weather has been pretty dry for the past three years and about a year ago after we had a winter with only 7" of rain, I started taking only one shower a day, either at home or at the gym, and sometimes going a day without showering. A few years ago, we installed a water recirculating pump on our hot water line. If you press a button before you turn on the hot water, the pump recirculates the cold water in the hot line into the cold line until the water heats up. Since in winter we have an on-demand electric heater, this considerably reduced the amount of waste we generated while waiting for the water to heat up. Also, we've been limiting our toilet flushing to only when needed, and we have water saving drip irrigation and California native landscaping. We've talked about other measures - grey water, putting in a water saving dishwasher - but not come to any conclusions so far.

But here in Berlin, things are completely different. There is so much water! I feel a bit like our secretary who grew up in the former East Germany told me she felt when the wall came down and she got to visit a western department store for the first time: such abundance! I went to graduate school in the Arizona desert, and so I got used to taking "navy showers", where you turn the water off while you soap up. I do that all the time in California, but not here. And here we have an on-demand gas heater too but we just let the water run until its hot enough.

We haven't had all the much rain while we've been in Berlin, but the signs of lots of water are everywhere. You can see from this snapshot of the Berlin Google map that the city is threaded through by canals and the major river, the Spree, and surrounded by big lakes:

The Spree is kind of like the Seine in Paris or the Danube in Vienna and Budapest, though there isn't quite the same amount of concrete and stone encasing it like in those cities.  The canals also are more lined by parks and beer gardens than major thoroughfares.

Here's a photo of the most picturesque bridge on the Spree:

 A bit of reflection from the ship window but you get the idea.

The bridge is called the Oberbaum Bridge and it connects the city sections of Kreuzberg, which was in the former West Berlin, and Friedrichshain, which was in East Berlin. It's a double deck bridge, with the upper deck carrying the metro line U1 and the lower deck carrying car traffic. It looks a little like the old London Bridge, and the current version was build in 1896. The Wehrmacht blew up the middle section in 1945 at the end of the war, but it was rebuilt after the war and served as a crossing between East and West Berlin for West Berlin residents only during the Cold War.

The second half of the boat trip went through the Landwehr Canal, one of several large ship canals that thread through Berlin. A couple weeks after I arrived, I took a walk along the Landwehr Canal near the Tiergarten S Bahn station. In this photo, you can see a good picture of the lock we went through that let us down from the level of the Upper Spree to the level of the Lower Spree on the boat trip:

A boat that just went through in the other direction, towards the Upper Spree. Having boats be a major transportation mode in a city like Berlin, which is a couple hundred kilometers from the ocean, seemed quite surprising to me.

I was attracted to the walk by looking out the S Bahn window and seeing a collection of boats moored along the bank of the Landwehr Canal, called the "Salz Ufer" or "Salt Bank":

You can see them through the trees, which, at this time in early April, didn't have leaves yet. This reminded be of the old Sausalito harbor across from San Francisco, which up until the early '90's had all kinds of crazy boats moored in it, including one that looked like an island. One of these boats looked like it had a bar in it.

Charlottenburg even has a small lake about a 15 minute walk from our apartment, called the Lietzensee. Here's a picture of a cascade on the south end of the lake, installed according to a nearby interpretive sign to help with water aeration:

You can see it just above the flowers.

Of course, water tends to attract wildlife and here's a photo of a heron also at the Lietzensee:

In the Bay Area, aquatic birds tend to come to the bay, but there's no significant other bodies of water for them.

Renate tells me we've actually had 15" of rain this year in Mountain View, according to the Water District web site, which isn't a whole lot but isn't far off from the average. The press says that the problem lies in the lack of snow in the Sierras this winter. But I'm wondering if there was simply no precipitation at all or if it mostly came as rain? If the problem was the latter, then maybe California's water system managers need to retune their management of the dams and canals to dealing mostly with rain during warm winters rather than expecting a large snow melt in the spring. I don't know if they have that kind of flexibility in the system, but it is the kind of question I'd be asking the state water managers if I was the governor.

I'm sure I'll adjust to California's water rationing when I get back home in the fall, since I've lived half my life in arid or semi-arid climates. But in the meantime, I'm certainly enjoying the abundance of water in Berlin.