In a clear sign that the drought persists, California today adopted new emergency regulations aimed at stopping residents from wasting the state’s precious water.
The rules ban practices such as hosing down sidewalks and driveways with drinking water, washing cars without a shutoff nozzle on the hose and irrigating lawns and gardens too soon after rain.
Recent rains have eased California’s drought, but in the dry November before December’s deluge, many of the state’s residents still weren’t heeding calls to conserve water.
For the fifth month in a row since Gov. Gavin Newsom asked California residents to voluntarily cut water use, they missed the target — by a lot, largely due to lagging conservation by Southern Californians. Amid that news, and emphasizing that California’s drought still isn’t over, state water officials approved new rules Tuesday to prohibit wasteful water practices like washing cars without a hose shutoff nozzle.
The dusty hills of Griffith Park are sprouting shades of green. In Pasadena, water is streaming through arroyos that only weeks ago sat caked and dry. And from the perfect vantage point downtown, the distant San Gabriel Mountains are gleaming with crowns of snow.
After one of the driest years in recent memory, Los Angeles — and California — is off to a notably wet start. The state received more precipitation in the final three months of 2021 than in the previous 12 months, the National Weather Service said.
Arizona, California, and Nevada have agreed to further reduce their usage of Colorado River water over the next two years as the states figure out ways to prevent critically low water levels in Lake Mead.
The river accounts for 40% of Arizona’s water supply.
The states were already preparing for mandatory water cuts in 2022 resulting from the Tier 1 shortage federal declaration.
California is facing an indisputable fact: We need, in a big way, to get busy finding water alternatives to the long-indispensable Sierra Nevada snowpack.
Yes, we’ve been blessed by recent exceptional snowfall, perhaps a snowy feast after an extended water famine. But year to year, California’s frozen reservoir—the mountain snow whose melt feeds farming and quenches the thirst of Californians—is dwindling and increasingly unreliable as the climate changes.
Californians will face mandatory restrictions governing how they can water their lawns and wash their cars for the second time in less than a decade as the state withers under another drought.
The rules adopted Tuesday by the State Water Resources Control Board are fairly mild — no watering lawns for 48 hours after a rainstorm or letting sprinklers run onto the sidewalk— and could take effect as soon as the end of the month. Scofflaws could face $500 daily fines, though regulators say they expect such fines will be rare, as they were in the last drought.
California has seen big changes in reservoir levels so far this rainy season and the trend is up for the foreseeable future.
At the beginning of the water year for 2020-2021, some major reservoirs, such as Lake Oroville, were at record lows. California’s well-known reliance on water capture and transport was under severe strain until a record October storm provided quick relief.
The California Department of Water Resources conducted the first Phillips Station snow survey of the season on Thursday, Dec 30 after the basin received over 200 inches of snow, and will potentially see more in the coming week.
Winter rains have bolstered water storage in the region’s two key public reservoirs, reversing months of decline and starting off 2022 with hopes for a less-uncertain year ahead.
A lot depends on how the remainder of the rainy season shakes out. After rain this week, the forecast calls for dry weather later this month, followed by months in which the North Coast stands an equal chance of above-normal and below-normal precipitation under La Niña atmospheric conditions.
