A Reservoir of Prevention

It’s been a while in Southern California since a single downpour made as many people as happy as the rain did this week. The New Year’s drizzle notwithstanding, even the commuters had been starting to get nervous. Dusty windshields, too-bright mornings, that rattle of orange trees in the night wind--you live here long enough, you know what that means.

Just three weeks ago, the ski runs were running on man-made snow. In the Sierra meadow to which the same two state hydrologists trek annually to measure the snowpack, scraggly weeds stood where there should have been thigh-high drifts. “Pretty low,” one of the state guys termed the moisture situation, with that hydrologist’s knack for understatement. That snowpack is a key source of Southern California water. It was maybe a quarter of what it should have been.

As the evidence mounted, so did the unease here. Though the reservoirs were fat with a two-year back-stock, there was no denying that this wet season was, ahem, dry. And, some theorized, getting drier. Satellite data were showing temperature patterns in the Pacific that seemed to indicate an end, maybe for decades, to the years of wetter winters in Southern California. As if it weren’t enough to be up to our ears in La Nina and El Nino conditions, we now had to worry about what one scientist was terming “a large disturbance in the force.”

Quietly, off the record, the water people in Sacramento dusted off contingency plans and began listening for “the D-word.” D as in that much publicized year when Santa Barbara was painting its lawns. D as in Drought. D as in Disaster.

And then the skies opened. For 10 days now, it’s been precipitating to beat the band all over California.

As your mom used to say, things have a way of working out.

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This business of things working out has become--to tempt fate--a kind of unsung habit. Though it’s been a while since Southern California’s last 911 moment, it’s still not unusual to hear people marvel that, nearly a month into the new year, we’re still astonishingly disaster-free. The century turned without even a little Y2K meltdown. All that fuss, and now Y2K is just yesterday’s Skylab, just another rusty castoff on that long, lonesome highway of buzz.

Part of the astonishment may have to do with this place’s ability to incite worry. As with any great beauty, there’s always that sense of too-good-to-last. Some people go into denial, some dig the pressure. There are homeowners out there who hoarded so many Y2K provisions they could hose down their roofs with canned chili and bottled water come the next brush fire.

But part also may be the lack of appreciation for actual, day-to-day competence. Maybe the least-reported thing about California in general is how well it works. To strain the example: All the hype aside, Y2K was a problem that was taken seriously and handled. This side of the story tends not to get noticed except as a sort of dodged bullet--as less a feat of foresight than unmasked exaggeration or blessed luck.

But all sorts of things have been getting handled. Prosperity buys many gifts, including time for planning and strategy. Who’d have thought, for instance, that the state would ever settle on a framework--problematic though it is at the moment--for measuring school performance? Or that California would find a way to start talking again about sprawl?

Or that, when things dried up--as they tend to do down here at the dry end of California--the state would find itself semi-prepared this time. This week’s rain notwithstanding, it was not by accident that the water watchers had that contingency plan on file and that cozy cushion in the reservoirs; water planners have been hustling since the last big drought.

The March 7 ballot sports a $1.97-billion bond issue for more water quality and conservation. Among other things, the money would fund underground water storage here. Big reservoirs are impressive, but they wreck habitats and tend to evaporate. It’s the biggest water bond issue in state history, but it could pay off for the average Southern Californian. If nothing else, it means fewer of those mind-numbing accounts of water wars that flare when reserves get low. Rain in a dry winter is nice, but true happiness here is a big, wet cushion, so big that we might not have to remember that other D-word--Desert--at all.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.