It’s Not Nice to Fool Mother Nature--Just Ask the Water Barons : Drought: Residents are being forced to cut back so that their escalating inconvenience will convert them into proponents of big water projects.

The saga of the “California Drought” has been one of the most repeated news stories in the state. But media preoccupation with water is not accidental. Drought hysteria in Southern California is being carefully cultivated as a valuable political commodity, shaped and directed for some specific purposes.

The truth of the matter, routinely obscured but never denied, is that residential water users are being forced to cut their customary water use drastically so that their escalating inconvenience will convert them into proponents of future water projects, regardless of financial costs or environmental effects. Compliance with water conservation is ultimately irrelevant. It is acquiescence that “they” seek.

“They” are California’s Water Barons, an alliance of real-estate developers, corporate agribusiness and bureaucratic water purveyors. Their influence is fueled by legendary campaign largess and sustained by an elaborate water welfare system that perpetuates their wealth. Through taxes, Californians have been compelled to build and maintain these elaborate water distribution systems that allow otherwise worthless arid land to bloom with housing subdivisions and water-intensive crops.

During the drought’s first four years, “they” insisted that water shortages were a problem only in renegade communities like Marin County and Santa Barbara, which had resisted growth by refusing to get their “water fix” from the State Water Project. But throughout Southern California, even as late as last summer, the water bureaucrats scoffed at compulsory water conservation, because the water situation was just fine.

For the Water Barons, the water year of 1989-1990 was business-as-usual. The Metropolitan Water District guaranteed water on demand for every tract house built in the deserts of Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Riverside counties. Artificial monsoons flooded the rice paddies of the Central Valley, while alfalfa farms, cotton fields and pastures were deluged with artificial rain--all with government-subsidized water.

The charade of water invincibility came to a crushing end in early 1991--when there really was a drought. Four years of business-as-usual had substantially depleted water reserves. Snow levels traditionally measured in tens of feet were, by Jan. 1, being measured in inches. Suddenly, the Water Barons panicked. Mother Nature had called their bluff; real water shortages loomed.

In the midst of this terror, the Water Barons experienced a moment of enlightenment. One reason the electorate had recently refused to be stampeded into approving environmentally insensitive, prohibitively expensive new water projects was because of the Water Barons’ own hypnotic reassurances of an infinite water supply. To deflect criticism of these past guarantees, the Water Barons needed a drought.

Pesky environmentalists were soon drowned out in a surge of dire predictions of catastrophic consequences. Water-industry spokespersons competed to construct scenarios of increasingly desperate proportions. “Water cops” were hired to patrol the streets; even the frustrated comics who double as TV weathermen abandoned their shticks to solemnly ruminate on the doom of drought. Unchallenged, water bureaucrats appeared as “information celebrities” on radio and television to pontificate the justification for some new insult directed against the people in the form of either less water or higher water rates. All this was blamed on the “D-word.”

By the end of February, 1991, rain and snow levels were at historic lows. It was only a matter of time before those ingrates (read: taxpayers) were groveling with hypochondriacal dehydration and begging the Water Barons to raise taxes and build more water projects. Once the rabble was desperate, they would blindly support whatever it took to quench their thirst--desalinized water at 10 times the current cost, damming the Grand Canyon and Yosemite Valley, or constructing giant garden hoses to stretch from Alaska.

Southern California was in full-blown water withdrawal. What the Water Barons liked best was that all the blame could be placed on the caprices and vagaries of Mother Nature.

But, in March, it began to rain and snow like it never had before. The storms backed up in the Pacific Ocean. With each new storm came ever more strident denials from the Water Barons that their beloved drought was ending. Subpar rain levels in the city of Los Angeles were used as “conclusive evidence” of seriously inadequate precipitation, until it was disclosed that the rainfall had been underreported by 40%, because of a leak in the Weather Service collection bucket.

With record precipitation and historic snow levels for March, the current water year was rapidly approaching “normal.” As of March 26, Los Angeles had already received twice as much rain as the year before, and more was on the way. By April 4, 1991, the snowpack in the eastern Sierra surpassed 85% of normal.

The Water Barons were caught in an inextricable dilemma of their own contrivance. Was a “normal” water year inadequate to end the drought and force retraction of water-shortage fears? Or were the cumulative effects of the last four years so severe that only multiple, consecutive years of excessive precipitation could reverse the effects? If the latter is the case, why did the Water Barons who now preach drought so cavalierly dismiss the need for mandatory water conservation last year? If conservation was truly unnecessary last year, inclement March made mandatory conservation even less of a need this year.

The answers are twofold. The March rains and snow have, in fact, broken the most dangerous aspects of the drought siege, returning the general water situation to normal. Second, the normal water situation in California is accurately represented by the acronym, “SNAFU” The drought may no longer be a meteorological reality, but it is now being perpetuated to serve the needs of the Water Barons.

California water law is administered by a State Water Board dominated by the Water Barons. The balancing and reallocation powers given to the board have been abandoned in favor of a slavish dedication to inertia. Unless and until the board sees its responsibilities as dynamic and utilizes its inherent powers to achieve an equitable distribution of water resources through periodic rebalancing, even a marginal water year can again precipitate another drought panic.

In the interim, the water consumption of all of residential California--less than 12% of the state’s total--has now been assured by those March storms. If there are any remaining claims of water shortfall during this water year, they will have been manufactured exclusively by the inequities of allocation. The Water Barons can no longer perpetuate the myth of drought to disguise their own abuses and lack of foresight. The drought fears can no longer be marshaled to exploit voters into abandoning environmental protections and voting for unnecessary water projects. The Water Barons have been exposed for all to see, because Mother Nature rained on their parade.