"People are coming in, denuding the hillsides, damming the creeks and mixing in fertilizers that are not allowed in the U.S. into our watersheds," Denise Rushing, a Lake County supervisor, told the Associated Press. "When rains come, it flows downstream into the lake and our water supply."
Suspicions arose 18 years ago, when water supplies in Humboldt, Mendocino and Lake Counties began running dry shortly after the state passed Proposition 15, which legalized medical marijuana usage in California and sparked demand for homegrown marijuana farms.
"We knew people were diverting water for marijuana operations, but we wanted to know exactly how much," said Scott Bauer, the department biologist who studied the pot farms' effects on four watersheds, told the Associated Press. "We didn't know they could consume all the water in a stream."
Bauer said that the four watersheds he studied contained roughly 30,000 marijuana plants each. In turn, he estimates each plant consumes six gallons of water a day over the 150 day growing season, or roughly 900 gallons of water per plant, per growing season.
http://www.weather.com/news/science/environment/study-california-marijuana-farms-draining-polluting-drought-plagued-streams-20140602
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