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.
Southern California is seeing one of its driest starts to the water year in decades, the National Weather Service said Wednesday. Since the start of the water year on Oct. 1 through Dec. 31, downtown Los Angeles has received just 0.12 of an inch of rain. That is tied with 1962-63 for the fourth-driest start to a water year since record keeping began in 1877, the weather service said. “The start of the storm season has been exceptionally dry,” said Ryan Kittell, forecaster with the National Weather Service in Oxnard. “It’s one of the driest in history.”
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.
California water officials on Wednesday confirmed with manual measurements what electronic sensors have been saying for weeks: the state’s largest drinking water reservoir – the Sierra Nevada snowpack – is well below its average water content for this time of year. But water managers say it’s too early for worries that California is sliding back into drought.
The new year begins with a minimal snowpack in the Sierra Nevada as measuring stations across the state report an average Wednesday of 2.3 inches — just 21 percent of normal. “The survey is a disappointing start of the year, but it’s far too early to draw conclusions about what kind of a wet season we’ll have this year,” said Frank Gehrke, chief of the California Cooperative Snow Surveys Program. “There’s plenty of time left in the traditional wet season to reverse the dry trend we’ve been experiencing.”
Water managers in San Diego County said residents shouldn’t worry too much about Southern California’s bone dry weather and the Sierra Nevada mountains’ conspicuous lack of snow — the frozen reservoir that routinely holds more than half of the state’s freshwater. “What we’re seeing right now is that San Diego has sufficient supplies for 2018, regardless of conditions,” said Tim Bombardier, principle water resources specialist at the San Diego County Water Authority, the region’s water wholesaler.
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.
More San Diegans are coming forward with outrageously high water bills that in some cases are more than $1,000. But they say the city is brushing off their concerns. Now, they have a new strategy to get different answers to their expensive questions. “It’s too hard, sometimes, to fight it,” said Joyce Abrams, a La Jolla resident whose last three water bills doubled to nearly $500 each. “You can’t not pay because then they turn your water off.”
This season is shaping up to be one of the driest years the Los Angeles area has ever seen. Since the start of the water year on Oct. 1, the downtown area has received less than an eighth of an inch of rain. This puts it in a tie for the fourth driest start to a water year. The last time it was this dry was in the early 1960s. So far, the rainfall is nearly four inches below normal for October through December.
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.
