Hydronomics
Why we are building a comparative dashboard for small water systems at the wildland-urban interface
Water is second only to air for sustaining life, and by far the most local. Water arrives at a specific place, through a specific pipe, owned by a specific entity, and is paid for under a specific rate schedule adopted by a specific board of neighbors. There are a finite number of ways it arrives: surface diversion, groundwater, purchased wholesale, recycled, desalinated. There are a finite number of ways it is paid for: volumetric rates, fixed service charges, capacity and connection fees, assessments, grants, debt, and settlements. The permutations are many. The underlying grammar is small.
The problem is not a shortage of data
Small water systems in California already generate a great deal of public information. Financial statements. Rate studies and Prop 218 notices. Electronic Annual Reports to the Division of Drinking Water. Urban Water Management Plans. Board packets, budgets, capital improvement plans, water quality reports, bond disclosures.
Almost none of it is easily comparable and viewable. Each entity reports on its own fiscal calendar, in its own categories, at its own level of aggregation, in a PDF. Two districts thirty miles apart, drawing from similar sources and serving similar communities, cannot readily answer the question of which one delivers an acre-foot more efficiently, or why.
There is a useful precedent here. In the early 1980s, Wall Street had abundant bond data and no way to use it. A single issuer might have twenty outstanding bonds, each with a different coupon, maturity, call provision, and day-count convention. Determining whether one was cheap against another was not a lookup but a computation, done by hand from printed yield tables. Michael Bloomberg's insight was that the valuable asset was not the data feed but the normalized security master sitting underneath it. This was the tedious, unglamorous work of putting every instrument into a form where it could be compared to every other instrument. The analytics were the visible product. The normalization was what had real value for improved decision-making.
The Hydronomics project is an attempt at a master database for small water providers at the WUI edge.
Why the WUI edge, and why now
Systems at the wildland-urban interface carry a structural tension that ordinary utilities do not.
They bill for gallons across a rate base with sometimes highly variable abilities to pay. They are built for gallons per minute. Fire flow is a capacity requirement, and it sets the tank volume, the main diameters, and the pump horsepower for an event that may never occur. The result is a cost structure that is overwhelmingly fixed, financed by revenue that is overwhelmingly variable, in a regulatory environment that constrains the shift toward fixed charges. Conservation, drought, aging infrastructure, and shrinking lot sizes all push the two further apart.
Then there is the failure mode. When the Camp Fire moved through Paradise, the treatment plant and pumps kept running, but distribution pressure collapsed and the network drew combustion products into itself. Benzene in the system reached levels several hundred times the federal chronic standard. The Do Not Drink advisory was not lifted for standing homes for eighteen months. Service connections fell from roughly 10,500 to about 1,500 while fixed costs and staffing stayed intact. The district survived on state appropriations, federal grants, and eventually a settlement paid at less than half its face value.
That is the case everyone knows. What is less discussed is that the financial and operational precursors to such failures may be visible for years beforehand in the forms of deferred renewal, thinning coverage ratios, aging asbestos-cement and plastic laterals, single-source dependencies, staffing levels below what the asset base requires.
What we are building and why
The dashboard is a means, not an end. The questions it exists to serve:
What does it actually cost to deliver a unit of water, and why does the number differ so much between neighbors? Sources, elevation lift, treatment burden, size and type of customer base, density, debt vintage, and governance form all contribute. Separating them is the work.
How do prices vary, and what does the variance reveal? Rate design encodes a theory of what water is for. Comparing those theories side by side makes them arguable.
Who is doing something unusual that works? Shared operators, mutual aid interties, joint procurement, standby and ready-to-serve rate structures, ember-hardened appurtenances, backup power at booster stations. Good ideas that can ripple outside of the districts that invented them.
What are the leading indicators of failure? Financial, physical, and organizational, tracked over the years before the event rather than reconstructed after it.
What is missing? Part of the output is an honest assessment of data quality and comparability, including a clear account of what cannot yet be compared and what would have to change for it to be.
Every small system at the edge is working on something that may be informed by the prior work and experience of other systems. The purpose of this project is to shorten the distance between them.