Today we saw that the Hilton was decorated everywhere for Christmas holidays. Our usual meeting room was all decked up since Phil mentioned that that room is used for screening movies and for hotel guests to come and relax.
Herb appointed Bill as the "Aid de Camp" to help him with things that he forgets as part of the President's duties. He was acting President since Venky is on vacation. He announced that the club will be DARK on Dec 27, 2019 and that our next meeting will be Jan 3, 2020.
Herb also announced our new member Sarah Taylor and Charles presented her with the new member badge and advice about membership advantages.
Today Patricia had the last day of toys collection drive and this week the punishment was for Art Mendoza. He had to sing a Christmas tune :-).
Today's 1-minute talk was by Sanjiv and he presented some points on the history of Rotary.
> Over 33,000 Rotary clubs in 200+ countries
> Two official mottoes of Rotary
- Service Above Self
- One Profits Most Who Serves Best
> Dedicated to six areas of focus
- Promoting peace
- Fighting disease
- Providing clean water & hygiene
- Saving mothers & children
- Supporting education
- Growing local economies
> Saw couple of interesting news items on the Rotary site —
> In May 2014, Guinness World Record recognized Rotary for the “The World’s Biggest Commercial” photo awareness award since Rotary had enlisted 177 celebrity participants for the global effort to eradicate polio.
> A couple from India (Mr. Ravishankar Dakoju, and his wife, Paola), recently donated US$14.7 million to the Rotary Foundation.
## "Pure Water San Diego Program" by Tiffany Ngo
Our speaker today was Tiffany Ngo, who is a consultant and community outreach specialist for the City of San Diego Public Utilities Department. In her current role, she works on the education and outreach program for Pure Water San Diego, the City’s phased, multi-year program to provide San Diego with a safe, reliable and sustainable water supply.
She has been part of the consultant team for the City of San Diego’s Pure Water Program since 2016, where she provides strategic counsel and implements community outreach tactics to engage diverse stakeholders and maintain public support as Phase 1 of the program nears construction.
Tiffany is a graduate of UC Santa Barbara, where she majored in environmental studies with a minor in spatial science.
She talked about how earthquakes can cut off water supply and hence the need for programs to store pure water.. Imported water used to cost $400 /acre foot and that now costs $1,300!
There are 5 ways to deal with water shortage -
- Conservation
- Desalination
- Ground water development
- Recycled water development
- Pure water development
As an example, she said that the Torrey Pines Golf course uses re-cycled water to maintain part of the lawns. She said that a DEMO facility with a small 1 million gallon capacity has been built and has gone through some 50,000 lab tests to verify water purity. The water comes out as "too" pure and so they have to add back some impurities to make it safe to drink for humans. There are 5 steps to purification and it takes about 2 days. The phase-1 plan is to build the Morena Pump Station, which will be a trench-less construction.
At the end, DMSB Club President-elect Herb Liberman presented the speaker with the Joshua certificate that represents our club DMSB donating school supplies to schools in Malawi in the name of the speaker.
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