You are now in San Diego County category.

Businesses and restaurants in Little Italy are asking the city of San Diego for money after a water main break last year.  On July 30, 2017, a 16-inch concrete main broke at Kettner Boulevard and Juniper Street in Little Italy.  “This was a pretty horrendous water break,” said Marco Li Mandri with the Little Italy Association of San Diego. Water flooded streets for hours. Normally busy restaurants and businesses were forced to close. “Kettner was shut down the entire day and you obviously can’t do any food service without water.”

San Diego’s weather, year after year, is more apt to be abnormal than “normal.” It’ll be wet one year, dry the next, dry the next, dry the next and then super wet the next. What San Diego really has is an average (10.34 inches of rain annually) that is a blend of the majority dry years and the occasional wet ones. No one would apply the word “normal” – or “average” – to 2017. It was both super wet and super dry at times, although consistently warm.

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.”

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.”

 

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.”