The City of San Luis Obispo is out with updated water usage numbers for the month of August.
Last week, inaccurate totals sent to the state showed a surprising spike of 26 percent. Ron Munds, the city's Utilities Services Manager, says it was a simple data entry issue that threw off the calculations. The source of the problem was found Monday, and the new numbers now show San Luis Obispo saw a cut in water usage of 9 percent.
Munds says he's happy the August numbers now reflect conservation and wants to send the message for people to continue using the resource wisely.
“We are comfortable with water supply, but we don’t know if we’re in the new worst-case drought scenario,” said Munds. “The way our water projections and water model works is it plugs in the last worst-case drought which was that drought back in the late 80s, early 90s, and now if we’re looking at the new worst-case drought, we'd have to recalibrate that model, but we don’t know yet."
Munds says if we have another year like 2013, we would really have to reassess where we’re at in terms of future water supplies.
Governor Brown wants Californians to cut water usage by 20 percent. The statewide August numbers showed a drop in usage of 11.5 percent for August, which was up from 7.5 percent in July and just 4 percent in June.
