Can you believe it? Jerry Brown declared an end to California’s historic drought Friday. No one ever expected this because there is too much money to be made off supporting the drought fantasy! OK. Great! So when are water rates going to drop back to pre-drought levels! Never you say? As far back as I can remember the Democrats have never been able to survive without a tax or fee once imposed!
California is a land of extremes – where preparing for extremes must be constant and eternal. The last six years demonstrated California’s precipitation extremes. From 2012-2015, California endured one of its driest years of record. 2016 was an additional near-average year, classified into drought because water storage levels were so low. 2017 will likely be the wettest year on record in northern California and one of the wettest years ever in most of California. Most of California has over 160% of average precipitation, with over 150% of average snowpack.
Just over 4½ inches of rain fell over the weekend in Grass Valley. That’s about three times the normal amount of rain for the entire month of April, the National Weather Service said. The weekend rains are the latest example of precipitation that’s pushed through Nevada County this year, helping fill reservoirs and eliminating a drought that’s loomed over Northern California. Meteorologists said Grass Valley has received 90.64 inches of rain since Oct. 1. That’s compared to an average of 50.74 inches for the same time.
While the deep snowpack in California’s mountains is easing drought concerns, there are still people in the state’s rural Central Valley who don’t have water running from their taps. California Governor Jerry Brown has declared an end to his state’s five-year-long drought. Emergency water restrictions have been lifted for most Californians, but not all. In some of the hardest hit areas in the rural Central Valley, there are still thousands of people living without any running water.
A storm that delivered a body blow to Northern California, endangering homes and leaving 40,000 customers without electricity, rolled through the Central Coast Friday toward Los Angeles. The weather system dumped fractions of an inch of rain in San Luis Obispo County but Rocky Butte, a summit near San Simeon, received nearly 5 inches over 24 hours. Rain was expected to continue shifting slowly southward before the system finally tapers off late Saturday.
For four Indian tribes that grow melons, wheat, cotton, onions and alfalfa near the Colorado River, fallowing cropland will bring extra money. It will also get the Colorado River Indian Tribes’ name out as a water player, part of the solution to the Southwest’s water shortages. And, says Tribal Councilwoman Amelia Flores, it’s a way to get other cropland into production and to upgrade their irrigation equipment.
It wasn’t that long ago that many wondered whether California’s drought would ever end. For five years, the state endured significantly less rain than normal, cutting into the water supply and forcing the state to impose strict limits on water use. That officially ended Friday when Gov. Jerry Brown declared the drought over. So how did the drought end? That seemed pretty quick. The turning point began last winter, when Northern California began to see a significant uptick in rain. Then, this winter, the north had one of the wettest seasons on record.
Startlingly green hills, surging rivers and the snow-wrapped Sierra Nevada had already signaled what Gov. Jerry Brown made official Friday: The long California drought is over. Brown issued an executive order that lifts the drought emergency in all but a handful of San Joaquin Valley counties where some communities are still coping with dried-up wells. He also made it clear that the need for conservation is not going away. “This drought emergency is over, but the next drought could be around the corner,” Brown said in a statement. “Conservation must remain a way of life.”
California’s current rainy season can no longer lay claim to being No. 1. After relatively modest rainfall in March, this season now ranks as the second wettest in 122 years of record-keeping, according to data released Thursday by federal scientists. Between October 2016 and March 2017, California averaged 30.75 inches of precipitation, the second-highest average since such records began being kept in 1895, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The destruction of Oroville Dam’s main spillway in February likely occurred because it was built on highly erodible rock, according to several experts interviewed by Water Deeply. If confirmed by a forensic investigation now underway, rebuilding the spillway will require a much more expensive and time-consuming effort. The Oroville spillway was ripped apart in February as California Department of Water Resources (DWR) released water from the dam to make room for heavy storm runoff into the reservoir. It’s an important reminder that no matter how carefully built and maintained a dam might be, it will always remain vulnerable to unknowns.
