In a sign of worsening drought, the state on Tuesday warned about 4,300 users to stop diverting water from the San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta watershed, stretching from Fresno to the Oregon border.
The notifications, which indicate that demand from farmers and cities is exceeding supply, are the widest-ranging move by state regulators since 2015 to restrict the use of water rights in a major watershed.
As the Southwest prepares for what’s forecast to be another mercilessly hot and dry summer, tensions over water scarcity are rising like the mercury.
Farmers are facing bleak growing seasons and the possibility of farm failures in several areas due to cutbacks in water allocations for irrigation, creating friction between the ag community and cities on the dwindling water supply in the region. Rural communities in Nevada and elsewhere, already wary of incursions by urban areas into their water supplies, are on high alert as the water crisis deepens.
California never has enough water to meet all demands and even when supplies are relatively robust there’s a triangular competition over their allocation. Farmers, municipal users and environmental advocates vie for shares of water that has been captured by California’s extensive network of dams and reservoirs. Their battles are waged in the state Capitol, in Washington, in regulatory agencies and in the courts and over time, the trend has been a subtle shift of supplies from long-dominant agriculture to protecting flows for fish and other wildlife while maintaining the relatively small amount consumed in urban areas.
Farmers toil at the mercy of nature’s whims, which can prove particularly vexing in California.
Even before climate change, bouncing between drought and deluge was routine in the Central Valley, the state’s richest farming region. Humans have amplified these natural cycles by pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, studies show, creating a future filled with what scientists recently dubbed “whiplash events.”
There is dry, and then there is desiccated.
As any movie fan knows from the classic film Chinatown, California is an infamously thirsty place. But this year, even by its own standards, the state is shockingly, scarily parched. So far in 2021, the state has received half of its expected precipitation; that makes it the third driest year on record according to California’s Department of Water Resources.
This past week, as temperatures from Sacramento up to the Oregon border topped 100º Fahrenheit, the intense heat evaporated the remaining water at an astonishing pace, creating scenes more reminiscent of Hollywood-manufactured dystopias like Mad Max than the lush paradise Americans are used to envisioning on their West Coast.
The scale of the drought hitting the American West is beginning to crystallize as Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona experienced their driest year in terms of precipitation on record, according to the National Center for Environmental Information.
In Utah and California, it was the second-driest winter on record. For Wyoming, it was the third-driest ever. For Colorado, only three winters were ever drier in the 127-year history of record-keeping at the center.
“This is extreme,” said Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute.
In the first week of May a young salmon boat captain struggled to keep his boat stable and fishing while getting bashed by an unruly spring wind storm near the San Mateo-Santa Cruz county line. Far offshore, where the continental shelf drops off and a huge volume of marine nutrients circulate from the ocean bottom to the surface, salmon gathered. So did borderline gale force winds on top of a 10-foot swell. It looked like the scene at the end of the movie, “The Perfect Storm.”
With most of the state gripped by extreme dryness, some conditions are better, some worse, than the last record-breaking drought. Over-pumping of wells hasn’t stopped. But urban residents haven’t lapsed back into water-wasting lifestyles. “We are in worse shape than we were before the last drought, and we are going to be in even worse shape after this one,” said Jay Lund, co-director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at University of California at Davis.
In some areas of California it’s so dry that farmers aren’t even bothering to plant crops this season. Growers north of San Francisco have begun pulling out of local farmers markets and produce-box programs. County Line Harvest, which farms more than 30 acres in Petaluma, California, doesn’t have enough water to grow all the peppers, lettuces and other produce that normally go into its subscription boxes, according to a video posted to its Instagram page.
The water crisis along the California-Oregon border went from dire to catastrophic this week as federal regulators shut off irrigation water to farmers from a critical reservoir and said they would not send extra water to dying salmon downstream or to a half-dozen wildlife refuges that harbor millions of migrating birds each year.
In what is shaping up to be the worst water crisis in generations, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said it will not release water this season into the main canal that feeds the bulk of the massive Klamath Reclamation Project, marking a first for the 114-year-old irrigation system.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
