Fog catcher makes water, CSUMB senior sees device as fix for shortage

By RACHEL KANE

Herald Correspondent



Nestled in a eucalyptus grove on a hill, right near the Otter Sports Center at CSU-Monterey Bay, stands what rural South Americans have used as a water source for years.
The almost 10-foot-tall Chilean fog catcher, what amounts to suspended mesh shade-cloth nets made of rayon, traps the notorious Central Coast fog and routes it to a trough below. The result: water.
Gregory Ruiz, a senior studying earth systems at CSUMB, thinks the simple apparatus could help solve the area's water shortage.
"I think anyone can make one," said Ruiz, who got the idea to build the catchers from assistant professor Dan Fernandez, who suggested that he study fog catchers for his final capstone project, the equivalent of a senior thesis at CSUMB.
Others say fog catchers aren't nearly efficient enough to have any appreciable impact on the local water supply, but Ruiz believes they're worth a try, at least on a limited basis.
It took him 16 hours to assemble three fog catchers.
"I've always liked to work with water resources," said Ruiz, who knew nothing about fog catchers when he started the project. "I like the idea of making some use out of foggy weather."
Ruiz has been working on his project since the end of June. Last Tuesday he placed two of the fog catchers on Glen Deven Ranch at Big Sur. He's hoping the foggy spot will be more conducive to water making than his first site near the CSUMB gym.
Ruiz was initially attracted to the site on campus because of the amount of water around the trees in foggy weather -- he said the trees sometimes were "dripping and making puddles." But once Ruiz placed his fog catchers around the trees, he found that "damn near all" of the water was being sucked up by them.
Ruiz will be back in Big Sur every Tuesday until around October to check on his fog catchers.
"An ideally placed collector" -- a little more than three miles from the ocean -- "has so much condensation going on" that it would be inundated, producing anywhere from one to two liters of water overnight, Ruiz said. The water is "not that salty," he said, and probably would not need much processing to be palatable.
Andy Bell, planning and engineering manager for the Monterey Peninsula Water Management District, agrees that the fog catching process works but discounts its value.
"It'll work," he said. "A lot of things will work."
He said the process is simple but impractical.
"Just think of the California Coastal Commission. Would they allow it?" Bell said.
As for the concern that commissions and coastal visitors alike would object to large fields of what look like oversized, two-pronged butterfly nets near the scenic California coast, Ruiz said, "They're really, really inconspicuous. It looks almost like a laundry line with black, see-through sheets."
Bell, however, was not so sure about the aesthetics of the fog-catching fields.
"It would take just too much space. More than the public would allow."
According to Ruiz, part of the attraction is cost.
"They're really not that expensive to build," he said. "The bigger you build them, the more cost-effective they are."
Ruiz received a grant from the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation to help cover the $825 cost of the three fog catcher kits and the $445 for shipping from Chile where the parts were manufactured.
By the end of his experiment, Ruiz hopes to find an equation that identifies how big a catcher has to be and how many are needed to yield a certain amount of water.
He said that fog collection could be an ideal complement to desalination, the latest tack for solving the Peninsula's water shortage.

Rachel Kane can be reached at 648-1172 or rkane@montereyherald.com.