Despite record-low water savings in February, winter storms in Northern California filled reservoirs and returned the missing snowpack, easing the drought crisis and triggering softer water conservation targets, state water officials said Monday.
While many parts of the state may be headed into a fifth year of drought, the punch of El Niño that landed upstate will help Southern California communities.
After nine months of fervent conservation, drought-fatigued Californians narrowly missed meeting the water-savings target set by Gov. Jerry Brown a year ago.
Urban dwellers reduced their consumption by 23.9% between June and February, state regulators said Monday, just short of the 25% cut required under Brown’s executive order. Still, the conservation efforts saved about 368 billion gallons of water, or enough to supply nearly 6 million Californians for a year.
While El Niño has put a dent in California’s historic drought, conservation efforts by urban water users in the state have tapered off in recent months — a trend reflected in San Diego County.
Regulators announced Monday that residents and businesses didn’t meet Gov. Jerry Brown’s mandatory statewide conservation target of 25 percent — on both a monthly and cumulative basis. The customers failed significantly in February, the most recent month for verified data. It was by far the worst monthly showing since the program began last June.
The drought, if somewhat ameliorated by a passably wet winter in Northern California, reminds us that aridity defines the West. Our vulnerability is particularly marked here in Southern California, where the local rivers and springs could barely support a few hundred thousand residents, as opposed to the 20 million or so who live here. Bay Area, we’re talking about you, too, since about two-thirds of your drinking water is imported.
The San Diego County Water Authority is offering a Free Program called “Watersmart Landscape Makeover Program”. Listen in as Sharon Lowe, SDCWA, demonstrates some of the easy steps to convert you yard to drought friendly, using native plants and even how to make your own compost.
All of this means drought conditions will continue clobbering Southern California for the time being. That’s bad news for farmers like Chris Sayer of Petty Ranch in Ventura County. He grows citrus and avocado trees. Lately, the leaves on some plants have started going brown.
“A lot of these leaves look really stressed, you can see how the tips of them are all dried out,” Sayer explained as he walked past an avocado grove.
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California made the argument that the district’s email servers are often used for personal business, and are therefore the realm of private communications.
Even though the U-T asked only for official emails on government accounts, the district claimed emails sent by a government employee on an official account saying “what a disaster” would not be relevant to government activities.
Federal officials will say how much water some California farmers can expect to receive this year in one of the nation’s most productive agricultural regions.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s announcement on Friday affects San Joaquin Valley farmers, spanning California’s interior from Stockton to Bakersfield. It is home to about one-third of California’s farmland. Because of drought, many of the farms in the last two years received no water from a vast system of reservoirs and canals.
It’s the last day of March, which means it’s the end of the six-month period during which Southern California receives most of its rain. So, during this El Niño winter, how much rain did the region get?
Not much at all. A number close to 100 would mean it had been a typical year for precipitation—and this year the L.A. area is still about 40 percentage points below that. With just a few hours left in March, it will be impossible to make that up.
As climate change has heightened concerns about the global decline of mangroves, a study released this week found that such ecosystems along the desert coast of Baja California may be more important than previously thought for keeping heat-trapping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
Researchers at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography discovered that despite their short and stunted appearance, mangroves in these desert locations had surprisingly high rates of sequestering carbon underground. In some cases, the ability was several times greater than that of lush mangroves in tropical locations.
