U.S. Study Says State Acted Too Late in Drought

State and federal officials, gambling that abundant rainfall lay just ahead, waited too long to react to California’s persistent drought, exacerbating the damage caused by five years of below-average precipitation and depleting future water supplies, a federally funded study reported Thursday.

The study, commissioned by the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, said state policy-makers virtually ignored water shortages during the first four years of the drought as they continued to allow reservoirs to be drawn down and adopted only limited conservation measures.

The report warned that this reluctance to conserve not only made the drought years more severe than they had to be, but also shows California is ill-prepared to cope with longer water shortages such as those that could accompany global warming.

“The experience of the drought suggests that California will not address climatic changes with specific policies until long after the impacts are being felt. In the meantime opportunities to reduce long-run costs may be lost,” the report said.

The decision to draw down reservoirs at first made it seem as if the drought was inconsequential, although from the earliest drought year, 1987, fish and wildlife populations were already experiencing major declines. Only recently, the report said, have Californians realized the profound effect the drought has on the state’s unique environment where “many wildlife populations are so strained that their ability to recover must be questioned.”

The 62-page study by the Berkeley-based Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security, was released in Washington by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles), who had asked the EPA for an analysis of the health, economic and environmental costs of the drought.

Waxman had specifically asked the agency to look at the drought as an indicator of how society and government might respond to extreme climatic changes such as global warming, the gradual heating of the Earth caused by the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The institute’s Peter Gleick and Linda Nash, who authored the report, offered a pessimistic assessment which they emphasized was their own conclusion and not an official position of the federal environmental agency.

In remarks Thursday to the House subcommittee on health and the environment, which he chairs, Waxman said California’s reaction to the drought as outlined in the report underscores the need for more vigorous measures to combat global warming and potential water shortages.

“We can survive for a while by pumping our ground water supplies dry, as California is now doing,” he said. “But when our generation passes away, and we leave a dry and parched world to our children, it will be too late to prevent human catastrophe.”

In Sacramento, State Resources Secretary Douglas Wheeler took issue with some of the report’s conclusions, although he did not quarrel with the contention that California had been slow to react to the drought.

“I would say that in retrospect even people like (Department of Water Resources Director) David Kennedy would acknowledge that we did not foresee the length or the severity of the drought and might have acted differently had we understood that was the case,” Wheeler said. “We might have acted differently particularly with respect to conserving enough water to meet current emergencies.”

Faced finally with an emergency, Wheeler said the state under Gov. Pete Wilson’s leadership has taken a wide range of steps, including the establishment of a water bank, the promotion of water conservation and cutbacks in deliveries from the State Water Project to hold more water in storage for next year. At the same time, he said, environmental groups, water development interests and government agencies are making a serious effort to work out long-range solutions to the state’s water shortages.

“I think the lesson of the drought is first, it’s not always best to assume the best and second, we do have a need now if we didn’t five years ago for long-term policy,” he said. “I would disagree with the suggestion we cannot cope. I don’t think we have any alternative but to cope.”

He said the state has been hampered by some long-established policies, particularly governing the federal government’s Central Valley Project and the transfer of water from one region to another. For example, he said, officials are pushing behind the scenes for congressional action to overturn a policy that requires the Central Valley Project “almost to drain its reservoirs dry each year.”

Even if the drought ends next year, Wheeler said, he believes government officials in particular and society in general now understand that California does not have enough water even in normal years to meet demands.

The authors of the report, who acknowledged the steps that government has taken in recent months, nevertheless said they feared that the action came too late to compensate for the shortsightedness of the early years.

“Without doubt, another dry year would result in a much more severe situation than California has experienced so far,” they wrote. “Reservoir reserves have been drawn to extremely low levels, some fisheries populations have been brought to the verge of extinction, if indeed they have not already been pushed over the edge, and ground-water reserves have been severely depleted in many agricultural regions.”

While the state’s economy has not suffered any “major dislocations” since the onset of the drought, they said, the dry spell has caused other damage which cannot be quickly repaired even if normal rainfall returns next year.

Specifically, they said the drought has weakened or killed so many trees in the state’s woodlands that up to 60% of the forests in some areas of Southern California may be dead.

At the same time, the report noted that California ratepayers have spent an additional $3 billion during the drought for electricity as low-cost hydroelectric power became less available. Natural gas and other fossil fuels that were used to generate electricity to replace the hydropower not only were more costly, but emitted more carbon dioxide and increased air pollution, they said.

BACKGROUND

The Pacific Institute, a nonprofit study group founded in 1987, does research and policy analysis primarily in the areas of global environment and international security. In recent years, it has concentrated its work on environmental issues, especially those relating to climate change and water resources. An 18-month study it completed for the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, for example, examined the effect of climatic change on the Colorado River Basin.