Local people struggling with intermittent water supplies in the midst of a severe drought have also expressed irritation at the liberal use of sprinklers to keep the new course green.
As soon as I got home, I removed anything that might be flammable from outside my house and started the sprinklers.
It's as though every factory in our society had an advanced fire safety system – smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors, sprinklers, high pressure hoses, fancy fire extinguishers – while everybody's home had nothing.
Unfortunately the stage manager, in what she later admitted to be a brainstorm, pulled the lever for the fire sprinklers instead of the curtain.
Rene Russo, a Hollywood actress, is leading a campaign to promote hardy native shrubs in place of lawns, and the district will subsidise high-tech sprinklers.
Yet finding it is easy.Water, water everywhereIn places, the beige American West gives way to fields of vivid green, which are often kept that colour by sprinklers running in the middle of the afternoon.
Water fills his new dam; he ploughs rich fields which were bush and ant-hills a few months ago; he has built barns, curing sheds and roads, dug irrigation trenches, and set up huge American-made sprinklers.
The water "saved" by sprinklers, lined canals and other forms of seepage control has simply been used to expand the area under irrigation.
Most farmers still make the call based on instinct, or err on the side of caution and switch the sprinklers on at fixed intervals.Unfortunately, both these approaches risk wasting water, and in many parts of the world it is a scarce resource.
In the United States many states mandated sprinklers in large new venues and banned indoor pyrotechnics after a nightclub fire in Rhode Island in 2003.
Paramount's trees, lined up like soldiers on parade as far as the eye can see, are irrigated by tiny "micro-sprinklers" at their base so that water hits only the roots and no drop goes to waste.Farming will not disappear, but whether it will be as big as it is now is a question, says Mr Phillimore, adding that "If the agriculture goes away, there is nothing".
