State Warns of Drought Emergency : Water: Top officials say governor may call for usage cuts of up to 30% by midwinter if several storms do not hit Northern California.

Californians should prepare for the possibility of another statewide drought emergency this year and an appeal from Gov. Pete Wilson to curtail water usage by as much as 30%, state officials warned Monday.

With very little cushion left in the state’s depleted reservoirs, state resources Secretary Douglas Wheeler said the governor may have to call for strict conservation by midwinter.

It would be similar to an appeal Wilson made in 1991 that resulted in an unprecedented water conservation effort throughout the state.

“We were able to achieve 30% savings in 1991. It may well be that we have to call upon the people of California for savings of that much again or more,” said Wheeler.

But whether residents will be asked to forgo watering their lawns or taking long showers will depend upon the whims of Mother Nature, Wheeler said.

If “several big storms” move across Northern California in the next few months, Wheeler said a water crisis could be averted.

Maurice Roos, the state’s chief hydrologist and an expert on water needs, said the latest 90-day forecast from the National Weather Service shows some room for optimism. He said it predicts Northern California will be “a little bit drier” than normal but not nearly as dry as it was during the same period last year.

Until now, he said the weather has been following a pattern markedly similar to last year’s rainy season, which built up hopes with a wet October and then dashed them with an unusually dry November. This year, November rainfall in the Northern California watershed was six inches--four inches below normal.

For water supply purposes, officials only measure precipitation in Northern California--especially the Sierra--where it is collected and shipped south for use in Central and Southern California cities and farms. “The big water hole is the northern part of the state,” said Roos.

Wheeler and Roos said precipitation is critical because there is so little water to release from reservoirs. In a normal year, Northern California rainfall is about 50 inches.

Wheeler and Roos made their comments on the day before officials announce how much water the state expects to deliver in the coming year. Officials have privately told farming and urban districts served by the State Water Project that the initial announcement will call for deliveries of no more than 10% of the amount requested and maybe even less than that.

After six years of drought, Roos said, California’s 155 reservoirs are holding 1 million acre-feet less than they did last year. The only time that they dropped any lower, he said, was during the 1977 drought. An acre-foot of water is about 326,000 gallons, or enough to supply three families for a year.

Wheeler said there is still a small amount of water available for release, but by 1995 that will be gone if the drought continues.

Roos and Wheeler appeared at a news conference to announce that the state had invested $15 million over the last year in 45 different projects to protect fish and wildlife threatened by drought.

Wheeler credited the program, which included replanting of endangered fish and providing additional water to important habitats, with helping numerous species to survive.

But environmentalists complained that in some cases the program provided too little too late. David Behar, executive director of the Bay Institute of San Francisco, said the operation of the State Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project contributed to precipitous declines in the winter and fall chinook salmon run.

“They are nibbling at the edges,” said Behar. “They go after the easy things to do and they ignore the big-ticket items which take political capital.”

For example, he said, there were key periods when pumping from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta should have been curtailed to protect the salmon. He said doing that, however, would have angered farming and urban users of the water exports.