The giddiness California water resources officials felt last winter as storms dropped record amounts of rain and snow has faded under a relentless barrage of blue sky and sun, but this week’s promise of stormy weather is giving them hope. Snow surveyors measured only 3 inches of water in the Sierra snowpack Wednesday, a dismal 24 percent of average for this time of year.
It’s been almost a year since Los Angeles residents felt any real rain, and precious little snow is in the Sierras, but water managers say it’s too early for fears that California is sliding back into drought as abruptly as the state fell out of it. Water officials carry out the first of their regular ritual winter snow measurements before news cameras on Wednesday. Plunging rods into snowpacks to measure the snow depth, water managers use the event to acquaint Californians with the state of the water supply.
Until California’s latest drought really took hold in around 2012, few residents of the Golden State had ever heard of the State Water Resources Control Board. But it very quickly became a major force in their lives. As the five-year drought worsened, the board would go on to order water use limits on every water agency in the state, which led to rationing requirements in households across California. It also imposed severe water-right curtailments, requiring rural residents who draw water from streams to immediately stop doing so.
The Lake Oroville spillway crisis and evacuation last February might have only lasted a few days for Yuba-Sutter residents, but the ordeal left many with unanswered questions and a newfound fear of the unknowns of living downstream from an aging water storage facility and system. Questions about who is to blame for the spillway’s failure, how it happened and what can be done to prevent it from happening again continue to resonate with local residents close to a year after the event occurred.
This year’s Nobel Prize in Economics went to Richard Thaler, who pioneered “nudging” to help people volunteer to make more personally and socially beneficial decisions. As an example, having employees automatically enrolled for retirement contributions and then allowing them to lower their contributions results in considerably more retirement savings than having them “opt-in” to retirement contributions with no default contributions. Similarly, informing water users that their water use substantially exceeds their neighbors’ significantly reduces their water use.
Not since 1959 has Stockton staggered into the new year with less than an inch of total rainfall. But that’s exactly what’s just happened. It almost seems like we’ve gone from drought, to flood, right back to drought. That may be premature. Our reservoirs are well above average, still flush with last year’s bounty. And there’s still plenty of winter left to add to that supply. “We’re keeping our fingers crossed here, too,” said Hannah Chandler, a forecaster with the National Weather Service in Sacramento.
Every year is different for water management in California. The 2012-2016 water years were among the driest and warmest on record. 2017 was the wettest year of record for much of California, with thousands of water managers struggling to store as much water as possible in reservoirs and aquifers. So far for this 2018 water year (which began October 1), Northern California precipitation is about 67% of average for this time of year. Further south, the San Joaquin Basin precipitation is about 38% of average and Tulare basin is about 25% of average. Snowpack statewide is about 27% of average for this time of year.
One of the hard truths revealed by California’s five-year drought is that many small, rural communities lack the resources to adapt to water shortages. In this case, that means both money and expertise. It can be very expensive, for instance, to build a new water treatment plant or connect with one in the next closest town. Even if a community finds the money to build a small treatment plant, it may not have anyone locally with the expertise to operate it.
The Trump administration said Friday it will look at revving up water deliveries to farmers from California’s Central Valley Project, the largest federal water project in the United States, in what environmental groups called a threat to protections for struggling native salmon and other endangered species. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation formally served notice it would begin looking at changing the operation of the massive California water project to maximize water deliveries. Spokeswoman Erin Curtis called it the first step in what would likely be an 18-month analysis.
Three years ago, California voters passed Proposition 1, a bond that provided $7.12 billion for water projects and reallocated another $425 million. The funds had to be split among seven categories: safe drinking water, water storage, flood management, water recycling, drought preparedness, ecosystem and watershed protection and groundwater sustainability. Ellen Hanak and Jelena Jezdimirovic at the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) dove into the numbers to see how the proposition money has been spent throughout the state.
