Drought Clues Dry Up Fast

The random manner in which nature deals good and bad water seasons to California is as logical and predictable as rolling the dice, and probably less so than trying to fathom the stock market. The state has just survived one of only a dozen critical dry years in this century without any noticeable inconvenience. This was made possible by carryover water stored in the state’s reservoirs from previous wet years.

One critical dry year does not make a drought in California, given the wonders of water projects. Two such years most likely will. Three could cause severe problems because reservoir storage would be depleted during the second year.

Whether California is to endure a significant drought during the coming year, however, is anyone’s guess. And as welcome as the season’s first storm is, it does not offer any real clues. A special 1987 drought report from the state Department of Water Resources says that the only way to assess the prospect for a second critical dry year--the driest of five official classifications--is to roll the dice and, to the slimmest extent, go by the record. History is against a drought, but there are no guarantees.

Only twice in the century have critical dry years come back-to-back in the important Sacramento River Basin, most recently in 1976-77. However, the critical dry years of 1933-34 were preceded by a dry year, a critical dry year, another dry year, and another critical dry year. The decade since the drought of 1976-77, on the other hand, has been dominated by wet years.

The problem with drought is that even experts cannot be certain how severe a drought might be until it is well under way. Prudent water agencies begin to conserve well before the extent of the drought can be known. This is the reason that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and other organizations have conducted aggressive advertising and public education programs for some months now to alert citizens to the need to save water.

If water falls unevenly in California, the burden of conservation seems to as well. Families, which use about 10% of the state’s supplies, are being asked to do most of the saving, although agriculture consumes about 85% of California’s developed water. This is being done when some farm water agencies cannot use all the water allocated to them and are being frustrated in efforts to sell the water to urban districts. While urban water conservation programs are fruitful and necessary, the state should demonstrate more forcefully that irrigation water is being used as efficiently as possible, too.