On a Thursday in February four years ago, the self-described “low-level civil servant” who produces OnthePublicRecord.org, an anonymous blog about California water, posted an existential lament about life amid the policy wonks.
“Sometimes I wonder what terrible thing I did wrong in a previous lifetime that I must now spend so much of my time in windowless hotel ballrooms, listening to people read slides to me,” wrote the blogger.
This is it folks. This year’s Monster El Niño has finally hit! The incessant ringing of flash flood and tornado warnings on everyone’s phones are causing panic and chaos all over Southern California. Branches are falling, bugs are drowning, fire alarms are ringing and umbrellas are being torn to shreds. San Diegans are wondering why they never invested in a good pair of rain boots. People going out to buy their first umbrella in years are wondering why this never occurred to them before. UCSD students are shaking their fists at professors who refuse to cancel class even as inches of water cascades down the lecture hall stairs. As you cower under your comforters this week debating whether or not going to class will kill you, here are some tips on how to survive this year’s onslaught of water from above.
Tuesday the state Water Resources Control Board reported the state had again failed to meet its water conservation goals in November. The same day, record rainfall was recorded at Los Angeles International Airport.
Missing the water saving goal is a bad thing, but the water board was conciliatory, as it has shown it is inclined to be. It emphasized that cumulatively from June to November, we were on track to hit the governor’s 25 percent water use reduction.
To the untrained eye the three images looked practically they same. They showed the El Niño pattern from 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16.
The first two brought crazy weather to Northern California and Northern Nevada. It’s usually the first quarter of the year where the moisture really starts to fall.
“So far we’ve got out of this event exactly what we expected,” Sasha Gershunov, climate and meteorology researcher at Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego, said of this winter’s weather phenomenon.
Now that 2016 has gotten off to a wet start, with a series of El Niño storms drenching California in recent days, the question is turning up with increasing frequency at dinner parties and coffee shops:
“How will we know when the drought is over?”
The answer, water experts say, is more complicated than you’d think.
Despite of all the rain, California’s reservoirs are still very low. The storage system is used to capture rainfall and snowmelt runoff for use later in the year.
El Niño is producing snow in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The snowpack is looking promising according to the California Department of Water Resources (DWR). Current snowpack measurements are 16 inches more than they have been recorded since 1965.
A California lawmaker is dramatically raising the stakes when it comes to water, proposing fines that could reach thousands of dollars a day and public shaming of everyone who fails to conserve.
Legislation introduced this week would require the state’s 411 urban water districts to set a local limit on household water consumption for drought emergencies.
Violators would be fined at least $500 for every 748 gallons of excess use.
An Alamo house identified last month as using more than 11,200 gallons per day would be assessed $6,800 a day in fines, or more than $200,000 a month, under the penalties called for in the bill.
Q: With all the rain we’ve received recently, we’ve turned off our irrigation system. What else can we do to conserve during winter?
A: You’re off to a great start by turning off sprinklers; outdoor water use accounts for more than half of water use in a typical home. There are indeed other ways to save as the focus shifts to indoor water use.
The recent storms that caused major flash flooding around San Diego County were only a drop in the bucket when it comes to easing years of severe drought.
The amount of rainwater that San Diego captured in its reservoirs, while much appreciated, did not do anything to put a real dent in the five-year drought.
“So we have a long ways to go before we can see any measurable filling of those reservoirs,” Dana Friehauf, San Diego County Water Authority said.
Much of the torrential rain that fell on Southern California this week flowed right into the ocean, just like it did before the state’s epic drought.
That seemed like a good idea for many years, as storm drains provided a crucial defense against flooding. But with California entering what may be a fifth year of drought, water agencies are slowly moving to capture and store more of this precious resource.
