Drought Taxes State Water Project Beyond Its Ability : Crisis: System was designed to prevent current scenario. Supplies to south could be cut 85%.

With a snow survey Thursday confirming near-record dry conditions, California has come face to face with its most severe drought crisis in modern times--a scenario that the massive state Water Project conceived in the 1950s was supposed to prevent.

The project cost more than $2.5 billion to build, threw up dams across wild rivers in Northern California and today gulps more electric power than any city. But it looks as if the project will fail to stave off the painful effects of the longest and deepest drought in six decades.

Barring uncommonly hard falls of late winter snow and rain, state officials say they will have to reduce the flow of Northern California water into Southland cities by as much as 85%. Farms would get no state water this summer. At the tap, people will have to endure rationing in most Southern California cities.

Gov. Pete Wilson, who has the power to declare a drought emergency and order even more stringent steps, has called a press conference for today to address the drought.

Measuring crews delivered bad news from the Sierra Nevada above Owens Valley, 250 miles north of Los Angeles. They found only 13% of the usual end-of-January snowpack, a lighter covering than in 1977 during the last severe drought, and the second-lowest reading ever this far into winter.

As a result, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power--which gets more than half its supply from the Eastern Sierra watershed--predicted that melt runoff come spring will be just 45% of normal. If heavy snows do not fall soon, runoff could slip to 28% of normal. In 1977, the worst year recorded in the area, runoff was 42% of normal, a DWP spokesman said.

Spring runoff is crucial in the Eastern Sierra because that is when most of the year’s water flows into the Owens River. It is then collected by Los Angeles in aqueducts and shipped south to be stored in reservoirs within the city.

For California as a whole, the inability of the state Water Project’s enormous suction pumps and long aqueducts to keep the drought’s unpleasant effects away from people is a failing of the grand notion behind the project.

Approved by voters in 1960, after one of the bitterest campaigns in California political history, the project was an unprecedented effort to alter nature. The Feather River was halted on its race to the sea, turned south and pumped 300 miles to water the deserts of Southern California.

Given the water that nature had denied the region, Los Angeles mushroomed into a metroplex of 8.8 million people, the crazy idea of placing suburbs in the desert became viable, and cantaloupes and tangerines began to grow on land where no water flows naturally in summer. Prosperity itself was based on the promise that water would be there.

But the shortages that loom this year have exposed a weakness in the belief that engineers are powerful enough to keep California in fresh water.

Carl Boronkay, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District, which delivers state water to localities in Southern California, said the threat of widespread and severe rationing this year has dealt a psychological blow to the region’s sense of confidence.

“Rationing to us is a very troublesome thing,” Boronkay said. “Our whole policy was water security, and when you go to rationing you’re admitting to yourself that your goals haven’t been achieved.”

In normal conditions, meaning intermittent rain and snow in Northern California mountains throughout fall and winter, there is enough water to go around. What isn’t used each year is stored behind dams, the most important in the system being Oroville--the tallest in the U.S.--across the Feather River canyon.

When the drought began in 1987, enough water was retained behind the dams each year to survive even the worst dry stretch considered likely to occur. But the reserve in the state Water Project was tapped last year to comply with contracts ensuring a certain flow to farmers in the Sacramento Valley, said Larry Gage, manager of the project for the Department of Water Resources.

“We started this year much lower than we hoped to,” Gage said.

But history said the drought would not be this severe this year, the fifth winter of the dry spell. It had only happened once, back in the 1930s. Nature cheated. Early signs are that this will be the worst year yet in the current drought, and it may be as bad as 1977, the driest year recorded in California.

The decision to supply the Sacramento Valley farms last year reflects the pressure on officials to balance competing demands for water. No one wants to deny water to a farmer in April for pre-irrigation and force him out of business, then be embarrassed by heavy rains in May--such as occurred last spring.

Most farms in the San Joaquin Valley have access to ground water or some other alternative to state water. But some farmers rely entirely on the state and ordinary rainfall.

“There was a great deal of pressure on the Department of Water Resources to provide agriculture water--and they did. There was certainly pressure to provide (cities) with water--and they did,” said Jay Malinowski, assistant operations manager for the Metropolitan Water District. “What do you do after the first few years of drought? Do you tell people to buckle down and conserve water, and then have it rain like hell?”

The state Water Project was approved by voters in 1960 after one of the fiercest election campaigns in California history. Southern California supported the massive project, and all but one county in the north opposed it.

The first water was delivered in 1962. Not until 1971 was the aqueduct completed to pump Feather River water over the Tehachapi Mountains into Southern California. Today the water supplies most of the cities in Southern California as well as farms in Kern County. A small amount also goes to the San Francisco Bay Area.

At first, the project promised to deliver 4.2 million acre-feet a year, plenty even for today’s statewide population of nearly 30 million. But not all pieces of the project were finished, and even in the wettest years the project can only deliver 2.1 million acre-feet, a fact that chagrins the state’s top water officials.

However, water officials say it is the odds-defying extent of the current dry spell and not any mismanagement that leaves the state in its current pinch.

“The fact that we’re where we are today is more a function of weather than the way in which the project has been operated,” said Malinowski.

Although the city of Los Angeles is the only agency to collect water in the Owens Valley, the shortage of runoff there this year will have an indirect effect on life throughout Southern California.

To compensate for the drought, Los Angeles plans to exercise a legal option to tap into more water pumped from Northern California in the state Water Project.

That will leave less water for Orange County, San Diego and the other places that rely on state water but are farther south and may have a lower legal claim to the water. The Metropolitan Water District, the main purveyor of state water in Southern California, said this week it will have to cut its deliveries for residential use by 20% and for farm use by 50% unless the drought breaks soon.

Those would be the most severe restrictions ever imposed by the district on its member agencies, which deliver water to homes in all Southern California counties except Santa Barbara and Imperial.

The meager snowpack in the Sierra Nevada above the Owens Valley will also be felt this summer in San Francisco, which draws its municipal water from Hetch Hetchy Reservoir inYosemite National Park.

The Central Sierra is the steepest and highest piece of the range, but the few snowstorms to blow in from the Pacific this winter bypassed the peaks. The downhill ski area at Badger Pass in Yosemite closed this week for lack of snow, Lake Tahoe to the north fell to its lowest record level ever, and Hetch Hetchy is down to 12% of capacity. San Francisco officials are making plans to increase water rationing there beyond the 25% cut imposed last year.

To the south of Yosemite, the snow situation is even bleaker, and dams have fallen to their lowest level ever. Lake Isabella on the Kern River is down to 8% of capacity, Pine Flat reservoir on the Kings River down to 4%.