Doing His Best to End the Drought

I am tired of the drought; who isn’t? I am tired of the guilt associated with a long shower and a green lawn. Tired of lectures from television weathermeisters that it isn’t over yet. Tired of acre-feet and pie charts, of pedantic environmentalists and alarmist farmers and their water war, of all the tortured attempts to plumb the drought for Larger Lessons.

The drought doesn’t care. It just stays, a bad guest. All we can do is worry about it, become slaves to the weather page, keeping watch on high-pressure systems and scanning the satellite photo for the grainy swirls that indicate a building storm. Staying up to date on precipitation totals won’t make it rain, of course, but at least you feel you’ve done something.

An extreme form of this drought-watch obsession drove me to this spot last week. Here, in the high peaks and passes of the Sierra Nevada, is where the drought will end, when it ends, if it ends. There is underground water, Colorado River water, and coastal rainwater, too, but it is the Sierra snowpack that waters most of the state, and all last month, as rainstorms swamped Los Angeles, snow was falling here.

The northern storms didn’t produce anything as dramatic as Ventura County’s floating trailer houses, and they didn’t receive much attention, especially down south. But the more I read the small type on the weather page, the more I began to suspect that the drought watch was ending. I envisioned a Sierra buried beneath a pile of snow. It was a pleasing vision.

At the end of every winter month, the state, power companies and some water districts send teams across the Sierra to measure the snow and its water content. Last Thursday, Pacific Gas & Electric Co. hydrographers Frank Lynch and Dave Ward took me to see what the February storms had delivered.

There were hopeful signs heading into the mountains. For one thing, snowmobiles would be required to reach the survey course, located about a mile off the main road; last year, it was so dry the team simply drove to the spot. And overhead, gondolas rattled up the mountain, carrying skiers to slopes that a month ago were suited only for rock scramblers.

A Sacramento television crew had joined us. “With all that rain,” the reporter explained, “we’ve had a lot of calls from viewers asking, ‘How can you still say the drought is not over?’ We just have to keep reminding people, and reminding people, and reminding people: It’s not over. “

I nodded--and prayed silently for a laser-guided avalanche to deliver me from my tutor and his responsible wisdom. Apparently, though, the Great Snowmaker has lost all sense of irony.

We crunched off to watch Lynch and Ward work. At 25-foot intervals, the flannel-shirted surveyors plunged a metal cylinder through the snow, measuring depth, weight and water content. Lynch read out the numbers. Ward scribbled them down.

“Fifty-four.” Scribble, scribble.

“Fifty-eight.” Scribble, scribble.

“Sixty-two.” Scribble, scribble.

“OK, let’s go to the next one.”

Ten probes, and the drama was finished. Ward toted up the results, compared it to previous data, and peered into the camera for the obligatory sound bite: “The drought is still on. . . .”

There was, though, more to it. The survey here and at other Sierra survey courses found that the February snowfall had been about 150% of normal--a load of snow, enough to more than double the snowpack.

Does it mean the drought is over? No. Because December and January were so dry, the snowpack still is only 50% to 70% of normal. Also, because the state defines drought as anything less than a full water supply, it will take more than one normal season for the drought patrol to declare we’re out of the woods.

Do we have enough water? Almost certainly. The snowpack already is at the level we ended with last year, after the so-called March Miracle of storms, and that was more than enough to forestall statewide dehydration. Also, rains have replenished the reservoirs of smaller coastal cities such as Santa Barbara that don’t rely on Sierra water. And we have March and early April to go.

And so, the news up here is ambivalent. Again. It’s been that way for six years--always enough water to limp by, never enough to finish off the drought, and all its attendant forms of low-grade torture. Tiresome business, I know, but what can you do?