Think Conservation

Southern California does not face a water emergency this year, but it should begin to act as if it does. The Sierra Nevada snowshed feeding the major Los Angeles water system in the Owens Valley is only 55% of average, and the region’s water supply will have to be bolstered by holdover water stored in reservoirs of the state Water Project and the Colorado River system and by increased pumping from wells.

But every gallon of reservoir water used this summer is a gallon that will not be available in 1988 if next winter is another dry one. Southern California generally can survive one year of drought without hardship, but not two consecutive years as occurred in 1976 and 1977. The problem is that no one will know whether such a pattern is happening again until well into next winter.

It is encouraging that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power will consider a doubling of its budget for water conservation education programs. That is the minimum that needs to be done. Active water conservation programs that go well beyond education already are under way in Northern California, where the snowpack situation is even more sparse. The snow depth at Tioga Pass in Yosemite National Park was only about one-eighth of the year-ago level.

Southern California survived the 1976-77 drought with minimal hardship, but that is no cause to be smug. The area now has several million more residents drawing on essentially the same water supply.

State officials estimate that rigorous urban conservation programs implemented over the next 20 years or so can yield as much as 1.4 million acre-feet of water annually, or enough to meet the needs of nearly 2 million urban families. Much of those savings will only offset new urban growth. And that goal will never be achieved unless Californians take their chronic water shortage just as seriously in wet or “normal” years as they do during dry periods.