Water Glut--Take a Bow, Southlanders

If you spent the week watching Boris Yeltsin shouting through a bullhorn from the top of a tank, you may have missed an intriguing development on the home front. Here in Southern California, as summer finally arrives, we find ourselves facing a water glut. A high-summer, mid-drought, water glut.

Now “glut,” of course, is one of those words. You may think I am engaging in hyperbole, or trying to provoke. But trust me. The evidence is startling.

Throughout Southern California, every reservoir operated by the State Water Project is full, or virtually so. Castaic has hit 92.5% of capacity. Perris now stands at 94%, Pyramid at 97% and Silverwood at 97%.

Ditto the reservoirs operated by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. This has occurred because supply has exceeded demand by a wide margin this summer, month after month. And every day, still more water comes down the canals and aqueducts. So much is arriving, and it’s coming so fast, that our water officials fear the reservoirs may not be able to contain it all.

As Times reporter Fred Muir pointed out last week, The Met is sufficiently alarmed that it has offered to sell 50,000 acre-feet of water at about half its usual price so the reservoirs will have room for new deliveries. And that sale just covers September. In the coming months, more cheap water will be thrown onto the market.

As remarkable as this glut may be, there’s something more remarkable still. That’s the response of our water leaders. They want the glut to stay low profile. They want to explain it away with rationales that make it seem less important than it is.

Carl Boronkay, the Met’s general manager, last week characterized the glut as “awkward” and laid its cause to the weather. A cool summer, he said. Others promised the glut would be temporary--begone, glut!--and tossed off warnings that the drought has not passed.

Of course the drought has not passed. But this glut is important; it means something. And the meaning is apparent to anyone who looks at the basic numbers. Namely, this: the average Joe and Jane of Southern California have fooled the experts and saved water beyond the wildest predictions. Their efforts to conserve have transformed a shortage into a glut.

From January through July, the 15 million customers of Met water reduced their purchases by 38%. This level of conservation is roughly twice that produced during the 1976-77 drought. And the results have been as dramatic in San Diego, where saving was voluntary, as they were in other cities where conservation was mandatory.

Keep in mind that no city asked for savings of 38%. In Los Angeles, the city ordered a 15% cut; water consumption dropped 32% instead. So steep has been the decline in water revenues at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power that its officials now fear the department’s credit rating may be jeopardized.

How much of this is due to the cool weather, our notoriously shy summer of ‘91? You can argue over this point, of course. During normal times, cool weather can produce a significant drop in consumption all on its own. But what is the impact during a drought where people already have turned off their sprinklers?

The DWP calculates that impact to be minimal, about 4% of the total 32% savings in the city. In other words, the weather didn’t save us. We saved ourselves.

So why isn’t this glut being celebrated? Why isn’t the Met sponsoring caravans to Perris lake so we can see the fruits of our frugality and wallow in our success?

A couple reasons, I think. First, our water leaders don’t trust us. Sure, they’re thinking, the great Southern California mob cut back by 38% for the first half of ’91. And who wudda thought it. But ’92 will be a different story. You can’t trust the mob.

And then there’s a more subtle thing. The more that conservation succeeds, the less we need heroics from the Carl Boronkays of the world. Remember, for example, last winter when the drought panic was running at its peak and Boronkay managed to purchase 215,000 extra acre-feet of water from the rice farmers of the Sacramento valley?

A grand maneuver, and at the time it seemed like just the thing we needed to keep the taps running. Boronkay was the man who made sure we got it.

Today, that same water is being sold at a discount by the Met so the reservoirs won’t spill their banks. You can begin to understand why Boronkay would refer to the glut as “awkward.”

But his awkwardness is our victory. That’s a big difference, and one we should not forget.