The High Sierra Is Low on Snow : Los Angeles Water Supply Avoiding Risk This Year

With conversation drowned out by the roar of the engine, Chuck Maurer holds onto the controls of the orange snow cat winding its way up a snowy roadway along Rock Creek about 15 miles south of here.

He does not--most decidedly, it should be emphasized--look a bit like Johnny Carson.

But in many ways, Maurer is in a similar situation to Carson’s with straight man Ed McMahon. This is because--rumbling along Rock Creek in the snow cat one day last week--he was preparing to provide part of the answer to a question that McMahon or Carson’s audience often raise: “How bad is it ?”

“It,” of course, is the snowpack on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada--source of three-quarters of the water for the City of Los Angeles and many surrounding areas. And Maurer’s employer, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, has been asking itself just that for weeks now.

On Wednesday, it came up with an answer: “Pretty bad.”

In an annual rite observed each year on about April Fool’s Day, DWP said its final tabulations of the water content of the eastern Sierra Nevada snowpack indicate that this year’s bizarre winter--it had nearly the normal number of storms, but they proved far drier than usual--has resulted in moisture equal to only 55% of the average snow runoff yield.

A Leftover Legacy

The DWP said Wednesday that things would have been even worse than that--in the range of just 35% to 48% of average--if it had not been for runoff water left over in the mountains from last year’s unusually high precipitation yield.

The situation is bleak enough that the Mammoth County Water District, which supplies water to the Mammoth Lakes area, has already decided it will have to institute mandatory water restrictions--perhaps as early as May 1. The district, which is hamstrung by severe limitations on water storage capacity, says it will ask property owners to cut back drastically on lawn watering and other irrigation in an attempt to cut water use by 30%.

“Anybody who lives up here and thinks there aren’t going to be water restrictions,” said Gary Sisson, the district’s director of operations and maintenance, “has been dreaming.”

DWP Is Concerned

DWP hasn’t raised the issue of restrictions, and probably won’t, officials say--at least this year. But in a winter that has provoked more than a few comparisons to the drought year of 1976-77, the precise water content of the Sierra snowpack has emerged in the last few weeks as an issue of concern.

The Los Angeles water supply is a composite of pipelines, aqueducts and reservoirs, with politics and money acting as the cement that holds it all together. In an average year (officials of water agencies prefer “average” because California’s water supply is too erratic for a “normal,” even though many official data summaries refer to “normal” levels), 75% of what is consumed in Southern California comes from the eastern Sierra, 15% from local ground water wells in the Los Angeles basin and 10% from elsewhere--primarily the Colorado River and the complex of rivers and mountain runoff in the northern part of the state.

And since last year was unusually wet in the Sierra and because the Colorado River flow is above average due to heavy snows in northern Arizona and Colorado, there is little risk of a Southern California water crisis this year. Nonetheless, because the mountain slopes stretching from here south through the Owens Valley are so crucial, there is always a sense of suspense about now. It has been worse this year than at any time in the last decade.

This is because of the lack of snow, to be sure. But it also has to do with political considerations. The Metropolitan Water District frets that its access to Colorado River and Northern California water could be reduced by competition from cities in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Central Arizona Project, which started pumping at full capacity just within the last two years. And there is also an agreement reached between Los Angeles and Inyo counties a couple of years ago that limits the amount of water the city can remove from the Owens Valley.

Potential of Dispute

Up until now, the limitation has been academic because winter precipitation was ample. This year, though, DWP officials say, disappointing water yields in the eastern Sierra have the potential to resurrect a water rights dispute that has its roots as early as 1890.

It all made this jaunt in the snow cat--past stands of lodgepole pine along Rock Creek into the Little Lakes Valley--more important than it might otherwise have been.

For four days at the end of every March, DWP snow surveyors like Maurer and his partner, Mike Higginbotham, scatter into the mountains in snow cats and on skis and snowshoes, returning to snow measurement sites near Mammoth Lakes, in the Rock Creek area, near Big Pine and Cottonwood Lakes above Lone Pine. Since as early as 1930, crews have visited each site several times each winter, plunging hollow aluminum or stainless steel poles into the snow all the way to the ground. The depth is measured and the poles are pulled out and weighed to determine water content of the snow.

Workers from state and federal agencies do much the same in mountain ranges throughout the West.

This data is supplemented in the space age by measurements recording the pressure of the snowpack on antifreeze-filled pillows that look a lot like huge water beds. Solar-powered transmitters beam pillow data to relay satellites throughout the winter. Then, by what are now computerized extrapolations done at DWP headquarters in Los Angeles and at the California Department of Water Resources in Sacramento, officials determine the amount of water that can be expected as runoff when the seasons change.

Regional Picture

The Department of Water Resources and U.S. Department of Agriculture will fit the DWP data into a larger, regional picture in a few days, but all of the estimates--including the satellite-assisted data--indicate the picture in the region is much the same as Ron Maurer and Mike Higginbotham found it last week as they rumbled along Rock Creek in the snow cat.

The aging vehicle was jammed with equipment including four sections of aluminum tubing bundled up in a canvas sack--enough to plunge through snow as much as 10 feet deep. It is a measure of how substandard the snow pack is this year that the maximum length of tubing provokes laughter--the heaviest snow Maurer and Higginbotham would encounter was just under three feet deep, less than half of what would be expected in an average year.

“What happened,” Maurer said of the winter, echoing conclusions by other people scattered through the Sierra, “was we had a lot of little storms. They looked nasty, but when it came down to precipitation, we didn’t get an awful lot out of it. It snowed, but there was no water in it, hardly.

“What’s really going to hurt is if we get a bad year next year, too.”

Two-Man Operation

The computers and satellites aside, what the detailed profile of the future water supply relies on is a basic, ground-level two-man job. Higginbotham shoved the hollow tube into the snow and called out the snow depth measurement to Maurer, who recorded the figure--in pencil, thank you--in a little dog-eared book he keeps shoved into the pocket of his parka. (The first time Higginbotham did it last Thursday, the tube hit bare dirt only 33 inches down. “This is like diving into the shallow end of a pool,” he said.)

Then Higginbotham pulled out the tube and placed it in a scale that Maurer wore on a piece of rope around his neck. The weight--expressed in the equivalent of inches of water--also got penciled into the little book.

The Rock Creek snow measurement area includes three separate spots called “snow courses”--stands of about 10 poles in the ground that assure that each winter’s snow measurements are taken at roughly the same spot. In the Rock Creek area there is also one of the satellite-monitored snow pillows, which must be checked. Other monitoring data records the timing and intensity of storms as well as temperature patterns. Painstakingly, the two snow surveyors climbed up on equipment to collect the data.

There has never, in Maurer’s memory of 10 years with DWP, been a winter when snowshoes could be dispensed with in the Rock Creek snow survey. But on this day, he and Higginbotham pulled them on only once. Everywhere else they went, snowfalls of as little as six inches--even large expanses of bare ground--made special equipment unnecessary.

Boulders and Barbecues

Pulling into one snow course, Maurer leaned out of the driver’s side door of the cat and looked back up at the roadway. “I’ve come right off the road in the past,” without bothering to follow the road, he said, and the cat will stay securely atop several feet of hard-packed snow. But this year the terrain was nothing but boulders punctuated by bared picnic tables and barbecues--elements of the surroundings never visible this time of year when circumstances are normal.

Toward the end of a snow course at a lower elevation, two of the poles were sticking out of bare ground. “You can see this from the road,” Higginbotham volunteered, “a lot of goose eggs.” Methodically, Maurer pulled out the dog-eared book and pencil, dutifully recording “0” or “dry” as the measure of snow depth and water content at each point. Snow measurements normally in the 3- to 4-foot range came out at 10 inches--even 5 inches.

Deceptive Snow Cover

Mammoth Lakes itself has not had such a profoundly dry appearance, but in the high country around Lake Mary and a cluster of smaller ponds--the area where DWP surveyors conduct their measurements here--a skier familiar with the surroundings finds the seeming snow cover deceptive. The drought condition is not quite as readily apparent as it is in Rock Creek, but on Lake Mary Road, a wintertime Nordic skiing artery, signpost tops stick up through the snow and the hillsides are uncharacteristically barren.

Lake Mary is Mammoth Lakes’ only reservoir and, except for a single well drilled in 1979, the town has no backup water supply. Development--especially of lushly landscaped condominium projects--since 1977 has put this picturesque outdoor village in the incongruous position of feeling the effects of disappointing snow years before it troubles Los Angeles. People like Gary Sisson admit they sometimes have difficulty explaining how Mammoth Lakes could be in the position of imposing mandatory water restrictions while Los Angeles goes without. Increased water demand in town and the local building boom have combined to mean, Sisson said, that Mammoth Lakes must face the possibility of water restrictions even in a year where the Sierra snowpack is 85% of average.

L.A.’s Bank Account

Things are different in Los Angeles, where LeVal Lund, who supervises the DWP snow survey operations, said the varied sources of water for Southern California generally guarantee no crisis this year. For Lund and officials of every water agency in the West, this year is a little like raiding a savings account in the bank when you’re short of cash.

There have been plenty of deposits in the last few years--especially since 1983--and the bank account balance is good.

“There is concern this year, though,” Lund said, “because of the fact that when you talk about something less than 60% (of the average Sierra runoff), you know you’re going to have to make up that 40% at some time in the future.