April Storm Can’t Slake a Dry State

The drought of 1987-88 began this past week on a much different note than the drought of 1976-77, even ignoring the irony that the state’s water chief made the official declaration during a deluge.

Director David N. Kennedy of the state Department of Water Resources was delighted to have the rain. But California would need another half-dozen storms just like the rare April downfall to make up for a lack of precipitation since early last year.

This drought is different for a number of reasons. One is that California’s current drought-busters are armed with the knowledge gained a decade ago when the state suffered two of the driest years in history, back to back. California learned then it could endure significant and prolonged water shortages--shortages compared with what it was used to having--without serious economic dislocation or personal inconvenience.

The 1976-77 experience gave state and federal water-system managers an opportunity to operate under severe drought conditions for the first time. By exchanging supplies, they made it possible to move water over most of the state. In effect, Marin County, north of San Francisco, was spared a disaster with the help of runoff from the Rockies of Colorado and Wyoming--some of it from snow that had fallen months or years before--which normally would have been consumed in Los Angeles or San Diego.

The political debate over water in California has evolved considerably since the ‘70s drought. Emphasis has shifted from the costly development of new supplies of water by big dam projects to more efficient and creative use of existing resources, giving water systems more flexibility to meet changing conditions.

Kennedy’s department and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation now have a formal agreement under which the two jointly manage operations of the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The delta is where Northern California water is diverted for use on San Joaquin Valley farms and in millions of homes and businesses, both in Northern and Southern California, but mostly in the south. The state-federal agreement helps guarantee good water quality in the delta and reduces the potential environmental damage of pumping water from the delta for export, particularly during dry years.

The last drought instilled a consciousness in the state about water conservation as a matter of everyday good management, in cities and on farms. But the old north-south rivalry over water continues. The north has the bulk of the water and an environmental bias against diverting it southward; the south has the greatest demand for new supplies. But the nature of the traditional dispute is beginning to change. Cities in north and south are discovering they have problems in common that might best be solved by working together.

For all of California’s modern waterworks, most of the state remains a semiarid region highly susceptible to drought. More water may be available today, but California has several million more residents to slake. Demand will continue to grow and it is all but impossible to build any more traditional dam-and-reservoir projects because of cost and environmental problems.

The Department of Water Resources has its engineers busy with an array of less dramatic projects that will provide for better use of existing supplies. These include off-stream storage reservoirs and water banking of wet-season surpluses in underground aquifers for withdrawal during dry periods. But Southern California will still face shortages in future dry periods.

More must be achieved through conservation, because usage since 1976-77 has crept back to pre-drought levels. One way to encourage conservation is to have more realistic water pricing. The cost of water in California ranges from $2-$3 per acre foot (enough to supply two average families for a year), on some of the older federal agricultural projects, to $190, which the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California charges its member distributors for untreated water. Water agencies have been too timid about raising rates as a means of getting users to stop wasting water.

As in 1976-77, Southern California will be spared true hardship this year because of rights to Colorado River water, which happens to be in bountiful supply now. The Colorado’s giant reservoirs still hold excess runoff of past years’ Rockies snowmelt. But California will not always have this reserve, since the Metropolitan Water District’s guaranteed right to Colorado River water was cut more than half in 1985 when Arizona began to take its allocation under a U.S. Supreme Court decree.

This new drought will be particularly hard on those regions of California that depend exclusively on runoff from the central Sierra Nevada snowpack. Mandatory conservation or outright rationing is planned in San Francisco and Oakland. There is particular irony in the fact that the Bay Area cities may be so hard hit, since they have been centers of political opposition to State Water Project exports from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

Both San Francisco and Oakland went into the Sierra Nevada early in the century for their own supplies piped from the mountains--San Francisco from the Tuolumne River and Oakland from the Mokelumne. Both cities, along with Marin County, decided in 1960 not to sign up for backup supplies by becoming members of the State Water Project, fed by the Feather River system further to the north.

With the huge storage capacity of Lake Oroville, the State Water Project will generally be able to meet all the demands of its municipal and industrial customers this year. While the bulk of the project water goes south, the state system also serves portions of four counties in the San Francisco Bay Area outside of Oakland and San Francisco.

If any California city faces an acute emergency this year, other water agencies would, and should, share their supplies, just as State Water Project contractors did with Marin County in 1976-77. “We all need to look at this as if we are drinking out of the same well,” state director Kennedy said.

There is the danger that this new drought could inflame the north-south conflict, if Northern California cities perceive they are suffering while Southern Californians are filling their swimming pools with northern water. In fact, if all of California manages to weather this drought without severe hardship, the margin of comfort will have been provided by the south’s Colorado River water.

The new drought also presents an opportunity, as in 1976-77, for the warring regions to operate their sophisticated water systems cooperatively so that no one area suffers unnecessarily. They will find that, increasingly, Californians do indeed drink out of the same well.