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Downtown L.A.’s Five-Year Rain Total is Lowest Ever Recorded

/in /by /The Los Angeles Timesby Joseph Serna

Los Angeles has chalked up yet another dreary milestone in its growing almanac of drought.

On Wednesday, experts at the National Weather Service confirmed that the last five years have been the driest ever documented in downtown L.A. since official record keeping began almost 140 years ago. Having missed out on most of El Niño’s bountiful rains this winter, the Southland experienced yet another dreadfully below-average year of precipitation between July 1 and June 30. As a result, downtown Los Angeles recorded an average of just 7.75 inches of rain every year since July 2011, according to NWS meteorologist Scott Sukup.

 

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Del Mar Lowers Drought Response Level

/in /by /The Coast News Group (Encinitas)by Bianca Kaplanek

Council members opted to follow state and local recommendations and agreed to reduce the drought response to Level 1. Last month, when staff suggested the change based on increased water supplies due to winter storms and Carlsbad’s desalination plant going online, Councilman Don Mosier called the move “premature” and a “big mistake because…two-thirds of the state is still in a drought.” “You’re undoing a good program,” Mosier said at last month’s meeting in an effort to convince his colleagues to leave the response level unchanged. “This community’s adapted to using less water, and I think we should continue to do that.”

 

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Desalination Plants Get a Reboot to Fight Water Shortages

/in /by /Take Partby Erica Gies Mentioned: Carlsbad Desalination Plant

On an overcast day in May, construction is in full swing on the Charles E. Meyer Desalination Facility in this affluent enclave on the Central California coast. Several workers fine-tune rebar in foundations for processing units, while two others deploy a large spinning plate to melt the edges of an ocean intake pipe so it can be attached to another pipe. In response to California’s epic drought, the Santa Barbara City Council voted last year to reactivate a desalination plant built in 1992 to fight an earlier drought. It operated for only six weeks before being shuttered.

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San Diego Water Authority Is Pretending the Drought Is Over; It’s Not

/in /by /Voice of San Diegoby Tracie Barham Mentioned: San Diego County Water Authority

Without mandatory conservation, San Diego is positioning itself to fall back into the same short-sighted planning that built the state’s drought inadequacies in the first place. For decades, the San Diego region inched closer and closer to a drought crisis, pumping more water for more lawns from the ever-dwindling supplies in the Colorado River Basin and the Bay Delta. We were addicted, concerned with getting more water today, not the drought tomorrow. Then we hit rock bottom. In 2015, after we failed to respond to voluntary conservation calls to action, Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency.

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