Every occasionally, an unbelievable story hits the newspaper, nightly news, and the radio talk shows. Sometimes they are national and international, like the bonuses at the big banks on Wall Street.

Other times they are more localized, such as is the case with one of our recent unbelievable stories here.

With many areas of Southern California being under various drought alerts, including portions of San Diego County under a mandatory water conservation Level 2 drought alert, the City of San Diego is targeting the top one thousand single-family residential water customers. Now I'm all for that, but I wonder why the City hasn't done something much sooner, especially considering....

....that the property ranking #1 on the list -- and ranking #1 is bad in this case -- used a whopping 5.5 million gallons of water from November 2007 to October 2008.

Holy no-wonder-the-lakes-are-dry, Batman! Five and a half million gallons of water for just one residential property. My marketing guru taught me to break things down into their lowest common denominator to make them more understandable. Let's do that since I cannot fathom how just one residential property can use 5.5 million gallons of water in 12 months. So here we go:

1. 458,333 gallons a month
2. 8,814 gallons a week
3. 1,259 gallons a day
4. 52 gallons an hour
5. 0.87 gallons a minute

One of the problems with the water districts here is San Diego is that they actually encourage waste by providing a lower cost for a higher usage. How stupid is that?

I remember about a decade ago when we had to drain our swimming pool to have it re-plastered. We checked on the cost to refill it. The pool held right at 45,000 gallons, and we paid a mere $112 for those 45,000 gallons. Our normal usage was about 5,000 gallons a month, for which we paid about $67. See the stupidity there, especially in an area of the country that is subject to regular droughts?

The City is sending letters to the top 1,000 users "urging them to schedule a free efficiency audit of their property." Seems that conservation experts will help indentify indoor and outdoor water waste. I bet those conservation experts charge plenty, and I bet I could identify waste while charging a lot less.

Of course, in the interest of privacy, the names and addresses of the top 1,000 water users wasters were not released. I don't think it had anything to do with privacy. I bet it had everything to do with safety. I think there would have been riots in front of those properties.