DWP Receives Bad News From Snow Reading

The two water surveyors pushed the hollow aluminum tube vertically into the snow, pulled it out and read the bad news for Los Angeles.

“That’s not much,” said Terry Beitler of the city’s Department of Water and Power as he looked at the tube filled with snow.

Beitler and his partner, Chuck Maurer, were measuring the snowpack on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada, which provides Los Angeles with much of its water.

Their findings confirmed that the pack was smaller than it has been since the drought of 1976 and 1977. And there was more bad news.

Inside their hollow pole they also found the wrong kind of snow. It was powdery snow with much less water than the wet, heavy snow--called Sierra Cement--that usually hits the mountain range.

Beitler and Maurer were participating in the first of the three major snow surveys that will be made in the Sierra Nevada before the spring thaw. Other crews began similar measurements Tuesday throughout the mountain range.

All confirmed what every skier knows: Not much snow yet this winter. A dry January in the Sierra has raised fears California may suffer a third year of drought.

Tuesday’s DWP survey, 10,000 feet up Mammoth Mountain, showed that the snowpack on the eastern side of the Sierra was only 70% of normal.

Water for Aqueduct

From these mountains flows the water for the aqueduct from nearby Owens Valley to Los Angeles. This is Los Angeles’ cheapest, most plentiful and purest water supply.

The rest of the city water comes from wells in the San Fernando Valley, some of which are polluted, and from the Colorado River and Northern California sources of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

While Los Angeles’ rainfall has been about 85% of normal so far this winter, making the drought seem remote, around Mammoth Lakes 285 miles northeast of the city precipitation has been 37% of normal, a DWP official said.

“We have seen a lot of rain in Los Angeles, but it has no correlation with how much water we have because we get our water here,” said Randy Neudeck, a DWP engineer.

Without a sharp increase in snowfall, officials said, DWP reservoirs will be below capacity at winter’s end. At present, they said, DWP reservoirs are at 70% of capacity; Northern California reservoirs at 65% and Colorado River reservoirs at 100%.

Complicating the situation is the powdery nature of the eastern Sierra snowpack caused by atmospheric conditions, according to Duane Buchholz, assistant aqueduct engineer.

That was evident when Beitler and Maurer pulled out the tube after pushing it more than 40 inches into the snow.

Snow Course’

They did their work on a snow course, a flat area where snow has been measured the past 52 years to provide an accurate record of snow patterns.

Underneath the snow was a snow pillow, a large rubber sack filled with antifreeze.

As the snow presses down on the pillow and the antifreeze, instruments are activated, telling the depth and weight of the snow. These pillows are placed throughout the Sierra, some capable of sending their information to satellites and then to laboratories.

But every pillow must be checked by surveyors. Some must snow-shoe or ski to remote survey points.

After weighing the snow-filled tube, Beitler said it contained enough water to reach a level of seven inches in the tube if it were melted.

In past years with the snow heavier and wetter, a similar amount of snow would have contained about three times as much water.

Buchholz said this means that the runoff from the eastern Sierra into the creeks and the natural underground reservoirs of the Owens Valley will be below normal again this year unless February and March are especially stormy months.

‘Nothing Normal for Sierra’

Nobody up here is ruling that out. After swapping stories with other DWP workers on the Sierra’s eastern slope, Beitler said, “The longer I live up here, I realize there is nothing normal for the Sierra.”

However, the Department of Water and Power, like other water agencies around the state, are preparing for a third year of drought.

They intend to continue to sell the city’s conservation program, which generally is voluntary.

And they intend to launch a three-year program of cloud-seeding along the eastern Sierra.

DWP officials said tests and cloud-seeding operations in 24 countries over the past 30 years have shown that precipitation can be increased from 5% to 20%.

It costs $100,000 for a year of cloud seeding in this area, they said.