In case you haven't heard, California has a major drought. Meanwhile, there are people dunking buckets of water over their heads in the name of supporting the ALS charity. Somewhere along the line, someone brought up the point that people who do the ice bucket challenge in California are wasting water. I wanted to know the math on this. In other words, how much water would the ice bucket challenge represent to the total amount of water that is left in California?
So I looked up Folsom Lake on Wikipedia. This is just one lake mind you. There are plenty of others (all of which are drying up.) But let's say that Folsom Lake is at 25% of capacity. Meanwhile, it's capacity is 1,010,000 acre feet which equals about 300 billion gallons. Is my math correct? I used Google to calculate this so maybe I've got it wrong. I think it's more like 329 billion something. But am I at least in the ball park?
Ok so assuming the lake holds 300 billion gallons,... then 1/4 of that would be 75 billion gallons.
Now California has a population of about 38.5 million people. And let's go ahead and round that up just for the sake of making math a little easier. I'll say 40 million people. So let's say 40 million people each decided to throw a gallon of water on their head. So what percentage is 40 million gallons of water to Folsom Lakes 1/4 capacity?
So I take 75 billion gallons of water that are left in Folsom Lake and divide that by 40 million California citizens. Correct? That equals 0.0005. So now I multiply that by 100 to get the percentage which would be 0.05%.
Am I right? Or am I a total math dummy? Keep in mind, I've only mentioned one lake, haven't even discussed other water possibilities and even assumed every Californian would do this ice bucket thing. Any thoughts on this from people here who are way better at math than me?