Groundwater in Calif.’s Central Valley is at risk of being depleted by pumping too much water during and after droughts, according to a new study in the American Geophysical Union journal Water Resources Research.
The study finds that groundwater storage recovery has been dismal after the state’s last two droughts, with less than a third of groundwater recovered from the drought that spanned 2012 to 2016.
The California drought has been brutal over the past few years, but to see just how devastating it has been, you need to see before-and-after pictures side by side.
Bay Area News Group photojournalist Nhat V. Meyer went out to the San Luis Reservoir in Merced County this week and took pictures in approximately the same places that he did in January 2019. The reservoir is one of the largest in California.
The results are startling.
Looking to bolster its water reserves during a historic drought, the Palmdale Water District, on Monday, continued its request that customers conserve water by 15% and also agreed to purchase water from another State Water Project contractor.
The Board of Directors reaffirmed the voluntary water conservation program by implementing Stage Two of its Water Shortage Contingency Plan.
The District, in June, adopted an updated Water Shortage Contingency Plan, in which the requested 15% reduction falls under Stage Two instead of Stage One, as it was in the previous plan.
Growers are dealing with severe cutbacks in the surface water deliveries they normally receive from reservoirs.
The lack of steady irrigation has already impacted spring cropping decisions made by farmers.
You can’t water your lawn more than twice a week in the city or Sacramento during summer, and never on Thursday or Friday. For thousands of Sacramento County residents, the limit is three days a week. In Roseville, there’s no watering between 10 a.m. and 8 p.m. Customers of the San Juan Water District have five days to fix leaks, and hosing down the driveway or sidewalk is off-limits in Elk Grove. Long before Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a drought emergency for the Sacramento region — and much of the rest of California — area residents were already dealing with an assortment of restrictions on water consumption, depending on their supplier.
California is enveloped in balmy weather that’s more like spring than mid-winter — and that’s not a good thing. We have seen only scant rain and snow this winter, indicating that the state may be experiencing one of its periodic droughts and adding another layer of crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic and economic recession. The all-important Sierra snowpack, California’s primary source of water, is scarcely half of what is deemed a normal depth.
Recent years have brought a taste of extreme weather and the destructive power in nature that’s always just around the corner here in California. At the same time, numerous crises have highlighted our many vulnerabilities: drought, new groundwater restrictions, endless stumbling blocks in the way of system repairs and upgrades, regulatory restrictions to protect declining fish, and elusive voluntary agreements in lieu of “unimpaired flow” standards for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta from the state water board that would be ineffective and would cripple regional economies.
