Catching Water : Conservation: An official hopes the county’s system of dams, storm channels and basins this year will capture enough for 140,000 families.

Enduring the complaints of customers can be tough for a water official in the middle of a desert during a drought.

But it gets even harder when it’s raining.

Since the onset of the recent rains, Los Angeles County water officials have fielded dozens of telephone calls and absorbed the jibes of radio personalities, all asking the same question.

“With so much rain and so much snowpack, why are we always in a drought?” asked KIIS-FM morning disc jockey Rick Dees earlier this week.

“If we can put a Tomahawk missile down Saddam Hussein’s chimney, why can’t we catch our water when it comes down and build a toilet handle that we don’t have to jiggle?” said Dees, who lives in North Hollywood near the Los Angeles River.

Dees’ on-the-air comments irked water officials.

“We have a lot of those guys on the radio that are shooting from the hip saying, ‘Wow, why don’t we do something,’ ” said Donald Nichols of the county Department of Public Works. “Well, we are.”

In light of those complaints, Nichols and other officials from his department and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power gathered Thursday at the banks of the Tujunga Wash in Sun Valley to highlight their water conservation efforts.

Yards from where they stood, a stream of water divided. Some of it flowed like molasses toward a series of catch basins where it is left to sink into the ground, recharging the underground San Fernando Basin.

The rest of the water rushes away toward the Pacific.

Nichols said he hopes the county’s system of dams, storm channels and catch basins this year will capture as much as 70,000 acre-feet of water, 3 1/2 times the average and enough for the annual needs of about 140,000 families. But Nichols and others concede that a larger proportion of this year’s rainfall will take the expressway to the ocean in the form of the Los Angeles River.

In an average year, the county captures about 20% to 30% of the area’s rainfall in dams and catch basins, and about 20% is lost to the ocean. Another 20% evaporates and about 30% sinks into the ground naturally.

This year, however, about 40% of the rainfall will be washed out, said Gerald Gewe, the city of Los Angeles’ director of water resource planning.

Houses, shopping malls, streets, parking lots and every other non-porous piece of property make it more difficult to capture rainwater by increasing runoff, Gewe said.

The ideal solution, he said, would be to build more catch basins and reservoirs.

“The problem is that the land is limited in the county,” he said. “We end up clearing away whole towns to do it.”

Others, however, argue that the county is not doing nearly enough.

“There are huge amounts of water going down the river that can be reclaimed,” said Lewis MacAdams, a director of Friends of the Los Angeles River, who favors a more holistic approach to water management that would connect flood control plans with water conservation.

MacAdams said that projects like the catch basins at the Tujunga Wash are good, but that there can be more of them, albeit on a smaller scale.