A Drought That Won’t Die--Experts Insist It’s Still On : Storms: They say state’s snowpack and reservoirs aren’t yet high enough to ensure full water deliveries.

Los Angeles already has received more rain than it typically gets in an entire season. Snowfall in the Sierra Nevada has been so heavy that roofs have collapsed. Santa Barbara’s once-parched reservoir is spilling over its banks.

Finally, the Great California Drought--six scorching years of soap-and-rinse showers and official pleas to not flush toilets--has been washed away, right?

Well, yes and no, state officials and water experts say. Although you may feel like an earthworm caught in a puddle, the incredible truth--bureaucrats and non-bureaucrats insist--is that California’s water problems are not yet behind us.

“Things have improved, and if it keeps raining like it has been, the drought will be over,” said Maurice Roos, the state’s chief hydrologist. “But at this point all we can say is that it will be better than last year.”

Huh?

In other words, says Tom Murphree, a climate researcher at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, it takes a lot more than two months of a Noah-style deluge to undo six years of desert-style aridity.

Murphree predicts that unusually wet weather caused in part by a lingering El Nino condition in the Pacific Ocean will break the drought by winter’s end, but he cautioned against rushing Mother Nature.

“It would be very imprudent to assume the drought is over,” Murphree said.

Yes, some areas of the state, from Marin County to Santa Barbara, have been soaked with so much water since early December that reservoirs are brimming and the drought--at least as a practical matter--is history.

Officials from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which provides about half of the region’s water, and from the Los Angeles City Department of Water and Power said Tuesday that supplies are plentiful enough to ensure no mandatory water rationing will be instituted this year.

But no, the snowpack in the northern and central Sierra Nevada, the major source of the state’s water supply, is not deep enough to guarantee normal deliveries to millions of customers from San Jose to San Diego. As of Tuesday, the Sierra snowpack was 180% of normal for this time of year but still less than two-thirds of the total for the typical wet season.

In past years, most recently 1988, heavy precipitation in January was followed by unusually dry weather in February and March. With that scenario in mind, officials insist there are no assurances that the snowpack can replenish reservoirs drained nearly dry by six years of drought.

Even if the snow and rain continue at a torrential pace, officials say, it could take two years or more to fill the reservoirs. Despite the storms of the past two weeks, the state’s 155 major reservoirs have only refilled to two-thirds of the normal supply for this time of year, according to the state Drought Center in Sacramento.

“Until those reservoirs get up to higher operating levels, it is hard to say there will be no water shortages,” said George Baumli, general manager of the State Water Contractors, which represents agencies that receive water from the State Water Project.

Baumli acknowledged that continued use of the term drought does not ring true with the public.

“At this point, it is probably better to talk about water shortages,” Baumli said. “If you talk about the drought, there is a credibility problem there. People are getting flooded away and it doesn’t make sense to them to say there is a drought.”

But in a state such as California, where an intricate web of canals and aqueducts links the water fate of north and south, it is impossible to determine the existence of a drought through simple dictionary definitions.

Last year, for example, much of Southern California received above-average rainfall, but the precipitation bypassed important mountain peaks in the central and northern state where much of the state’s water is collected.

Was the drought over in Southern California at that point? In purely technical terms, some would say yes because 1992 was not an abnormally dry year here. But in practical terms, state and weather officials said no because the region’s water shortage remained unchanged--although many areas dropped mandatory water rationing for political reasons. The same questions have surfaced this year.

“Eighty-five percent of our water comes from hundreds of miles away,” said Jerry Gewe, director of water resource planning for the DWP. “Therefore what happens in our immediate experience is not the total decider of our water supply.”

To further complicate matters, the state has no widely accepted definition of drought. Officially, the state determines how dry a year has been by measuring the runoff from several rivers in Northern California. The runoff is computed into an index, which is used to compare the year’s runoff to previous years.

For the first time since the drought began in 1987, state officials are predicting a runoff index that is above normal. Drought Center spokesman Dee Davis, however, said the prediction has only a 50% probability of accuracy, and even if it proves to be true, it may not translate into enough runoff to replenish the reservoirs. Officials won’t know for sure until April or later, Davis said.

“There is no consensus on what the drought is,” Davis said. “If you talk to a meteorologist, he will say one thing. If you talk to the water (district) managers, they’ll say another. Agriculture will say things won’t be back to normal until their farm practices are back to normal.”

There is also a so-called non-hydrological drought--referred to by some as the “regulatory drought”--that looks beyond rainfall and snowpack to more fundamental water shortages created by environmental regulations on water use and the growing demands of an increasing population. The state has added more than 3 million residents since the drought began, as well as several important restrictions on water deliveries aimed at protecting fisheries and wildlife.

“We have a supply-and-demand drought that cannot be resolved by precipitation because we have increased demands on a finite supply,” said Douglas Wheeler, secretary of the California Resources Agency, which oversees the state’s water policies. “We need to better manage the water and store the precipitation when it does occur. Unless we take action now, we may not be able to provide the water we’ll need 20 years from now.”

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