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The blame for California’s below-average snowpack was placed Wednesday at the feet of a largely impotent El Niño, which failed to deliver the powerful storms forecasters expected.

Snow surveyors for the California Department of Water Resources found that the water content of the Sierra snow is only 87 percent of the historical average for this time of year. That’s a bug drop from January when the “frozen water supply,” as it is called by hydrologists, was well above normal.

State drought surveyors will trudge through deep snow Wednesday to manually measure what could be close to a normal Sierra Nevada snowpack for this time of year.

A year ago, Gov. Jerry Brown stood on the same spot — then a dusty patch of ground with no snow — to announce that the dire drought required residents to cut back water use by 25 percent.

With the wettest winter in five years having taken the hard edges off the historic drought and a key Sierra snowpack reading Wednesday expected to show big gains, Californians can look forward to substantial relief from mandatory statewide water restrictions.

The rain storms and blizzards that were supposed to come with El Niño were conspicuously non-biblical in California this winter, leaving the state in an ecological limbo that has regulators thinking about easing water-use restrictions in some places but not in others.

While the weather cheered ski resorts hit hard by the historic drought and brought some reservoirs to their highest points in years, in the end it dropped less snow than average in the Sierra, where more than a third of the state’s water comes from.

After losing a landmark judgment in 2015, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California must pay $8.9 million in attorneys’ fees to the San Diego County Water Authority, a San Francisco Superior Court judge ruled Thursday. As the prevailing party, the Water Authority is entitled to its attorneys’ fees, according to the court order; a previous decision awarded the Water Authority more than $320,000 in court costs.

MWD now owes the Water Authority more than $243 million, including damages, costs, interest and attorneys’ fees. The bill, including the award of attorneys’ fees, accrues simple interest of 7 percent annually.