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Vigilante Water Cop Records Over 100 Water Wasters On Video
Watch out, Water Wasters. There's a new force in town, defending Los Angeles from those who dare squander water—our most precious and increasingly scarce resource.
Tony Corcoran has been taking videos of water wasters he encounters throughout the day, KTLA reports. He then posts the videos to YouTube, identifying the wasters and their addresses. He's compiled over 100 videos to his channel, Western Water Luv.
Corcoran finds water wasters at businesses, schools, government-owned buildings and homes, and he's been doing it for four years. He generally records the videos in his spare time, or whenever he stumbles across an incident while going about his day.
"If I see something that I find to be terribly egregious, such as a stream going down the middle of the road where there should not be a stream, I stop and take a video of it," Corcoran told KTLA.
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Corcoran said he's not doing this to shame the supposed water waters, but rather, he wants them to change. Corcoran isn't the only one with this methodology. There's an app you can use to report people who you see wasting water, and the hashtag #droughtshaming is in full effect.
Let's take a look at a few of Corcoran's videos.
In this video, a woman is watering her lush, green lawn when Corcoran arrives. She is clearly irritated by Corcoran and his journalist partners, who Corcoran identifies as being from Dutch TV, especially when Corcoran tells her she'll eventually have to choose between flowers and baby formula. She first blames the agricultural industry for wasting the most water, and then sprays her hose at them—which is, of course, another way to waste water.
In this video, Corcoran gets pretty mad and declares Los Angeles a year away from Mad Max. Note: his profile photo on YouTube is presumably him wearing a post-Apocalyptic gas mask with the caption "California 2016."
Here's a video of Muir Elementary mostly watering their parking lot. "There goes the tooth brushing," he laments.
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It's not all outside, though. Corcoran also went into the bathroom of The Rodger Room to observe some wasting being done by a urinal.
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This work is only possible with community support. Every investigation, service guide, and story is made possible by people like you who believe that local news is a public good and that everyone deserves access to trustworthy local information.
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