Recent Storms Raise Hopes for Growers’ Water Supplies

A week of stormy weather in the Sacramento Valley and northern Sierra Nevada produced rare optimism Monday from state officials who predicted that threatened cutbacks in water deliveries to agricultural regions will not be necessary if rainfall now merely continues to be normal.

And federal officials said the heavy downpours boosted their reservoir strength in the Sacramento River basin enough so that many agricultural customers who have been advised to expect cutbacks probably will be fully supplied.

“Things are greatly improved,” said William J. Helms, drought response coordinator for the state Water Resources Department. “We feel we probably would be able to make full delivery from the state water project if we continue to get normal precipitation the rest of the year. It looks very good right now.”

He cautioned, however, that if “the tap shuts off” in the remaining days of March and through April, “there will still be very severe shortages.”

After nearly three years of drought and an extraordinarily dry December, January and February, state officials had warned that water deliveries to agricultural areas might have to be reduced as much as 40%. They said they would make a final assessment in May, at the end of the rainy season.

Federal officials, hit even harder by the effects of the drought, had already ordered cutbacks in deliveries to Central Valley farmers and some Northern California cities.

The water shortages in Central and Northern California so far have not significantly affected urban users in the south.

John B. Budd, a spokesman for the federal Bureau of Reclamation, said the latest storms had poured enough water into the Sacramento River basin that the agency would probably be able to honor its agreements with its water rights contractors. Water rights contractors, who were drawing from the Sacramento River in the early 1900s, long before the federal government established its reservoirs, have first priority over federal water. As long as the water flow into the Shasta reservoir exceeds 3.2 million acre-feet each year, they are entitled to be fully supplied.

Earlier this year, Budd said hydrologists were predicting that the inflow to the Shasta reservoir would not reach 3.2 million acre-feet. An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to cover one acre of land to a depth of a foot.

“Everybody intuitively feels now that we will exceed 3.2 million acre-feet,” he said. But the system’s remaining customers, he said, will not get their water deliveries restored “because the storms were not big enough.” The water rights contractors absorb about 40% of the federal water deliveries. The remainder goes to the populous San Jose area and to agricultural customers in the Central Valley.

Budd said his agency still has not fully assessed the effects of the latest storm and it will be several days before it determines how much of the snowpack in the Sierra was reduced by the warm rain. “We may think things (now) are much better than they really are,” he said.

Helms said that while the March rainfall is 180% above normal, it has not been nearly enough to restore all the water that was depleted from the reservoirs during the drought years.