Storms Fail to Cut Drought : Water: The outlook for an end to the shortage is not good, officials say. However, Los Angeles should be spared major discomfort.

February storms may have been too much of a good thing for some--closing highways and ski slopes under fresh powder--but water sensors in Sacramento say California still faces a worrisome fourth year of drought.

Farmers and municipal water districts have been warned to expect a 50% cut in Central Valley Project supplies--the first such cuts since 1977, and only the second in the entire 50-year history of the federal irrigation project.

San Jose, the state’s third-largest city, has already decided on mandatory rationing this summer, while other cities along the Central Coast from Santa Cruz to Santa Barbara continue planning similar restrictions.

Despite this, Los Angeles and most other Southern California cities will be spared major discomfort this year because they are a top priority of the State Water Project, which imports water from Northern California.

“We’re not in a position yet to say it is certain, but we are pretty close to that--it looks as if Southern California will receive 100% of its order,” said David Kennedy, state water resources director.

Farmers, however, generally are not so lucky. Many are facing the difficult choice of finding alternative water supplies--by pumping more from the ground or buying from neighbors--or scaling back operations and scrambling to find a way to make loan payments.

The outlook for an end to the drought is not good, state water officials said Wednesday. No more storms are due in February, the last of the season’s three wettest months, and forecasters do not expect a repeat of 1989’s March Miracle, in which unseasonable storms delayed serious shortages.

“It would take several pretty heavy storms to bring us out of it,” said Gino Young of the California Department of Water Resources Drought Center in Sacramento. “Normal rainfall for the rest of the year is not going to do it at this point.”

Despite pounding storms that have inundated some Sierra towns with snow and washed down coastal cities, the state has seen only 70% of usual precipitation this year, Young said. Most of that has already soaked into dry soils, leaving little to run off into reservoirs or percolate into ground-water basins.

As of Tuesday, for example, the state’s Four River Index measured only 4.26 million acre-feet flowing in the Sacramento, Feather, Yuba and American rivers systems, the main source of the state’s surface water. Water from those rivers slakes the thirst of Central Valley farms and cities in Northern and Southern California.

At the current pace, those rivers will probably move about 11 million acre-feet of water in the entire year, Young said, or about 60% of normal. Based on historical rainfall patterns, there is only a 10% chance that enough rain will fall in the rest of the year to move the index into the normal range.

Runoff is unlikely to increase in the spring because the state’s snowpack contains 62% of the water it historically should contain this late in the rainy season. This is up from only 45% of normal two weeks ago.

A lack of new water is compounded by low reservoir levels caused by three earlier drought years. As of Wednesday, statewide reservoir capacity stood at 68% of its historic average for that date. In real terms, the state’s biggest storage sites were less than half full.

In scattered cases, the situation is much worse. Lake Isabella northeast of Bakersfield, for example, still contains only about 15% of capacity, according to state water-monitoring computers.

State water officials have been trying to increase precipitation by seeding clouds, but the program has come under attack in rural Sierra County northwest of Lake Tahoe. Residents and elected officials there complain that additional snowfall will cause them hardship and cost them more for everything from space heating to snow plowing to flood control in the spring.

William I. DuBois of the California Farm Bureau Federation said growers are already making hard choices about what to do if they cannot work out a way to replace the water being withheld by the Central Valley Project.

Some growers, he said, will simply match the 50% water cut by planting 50% fewer acres, usually forsaking surplus crops, such as grains, in favor of perishable annuals, such as vegetables.

Livestock operators will line up outside sources of feed for their cattle, sheep and other animals. This feed, from such places as the Colorado River basin that are not experiencing cutbacks, will pressure prices upward.

Fruit and nut growers with trees in the ground likely will simply try to keep their orchards alive through the summer using whatever water is available and not worrying about poor crop yields.

“It is serious, no doubt about that,” DuBois said. “But it’s not equally serious for all growers. . . . These people are really ingenious. Most of them will figure out a way to get by with the least possible damage.”