Comment by jeffbee

If you look into the actual design capacity of our municipal water systems, many of them were designed for far larger populations. The EBMUD, for example, intentionally secured 325 million gallons per day in upstream capacity because that was 10x the needs of the service area in 1929. Implicitly they assumed that the service area would grow to 4 million people, but it never did, primarily because of zoning. Today EBMUD delivers only about 120 MGD. We could more than double the service area population without water issues.