Rain Helps, but More Needed to End Dry Spell

It may be raining outside, but there’s still a water shortage in California.

Water suppliers say it will take more than a few February storms -- a lot more -- to replenish half-full reservoirs, aqueducts and other critical portions of the state’s water supply system after the driest year on record last year and three consecutive years of low rainfall.

“So far our winter has not made up for the past couple of dry years,” said Jeff Cohen, spokesman with the California Department of Water Resources. “We would’ve expected larger amounts from the southern Sierra.”

Because the dry spell has also affected Northern California, the Oroville reservoir, a key part of the State Water Project, which supplies water to two-thirds of all Californians, is at 62% capacity, or 2.2 million acre-feet of water out of a possible 3.5 million acres. In October, the reservoir was at 34% of capacity. The last time the reservoir was at full capacity was in 1998, after El Nino storms.

An acre-foot of water, which would cover an area slightly smaller than a football field to a depth of one foot, is enough to supply a family of four for a year.

“At the rate we’re going, we would need two or three years of this before we would get back to our optimum level,” said Craig Miller, assistant general manager of the Orange County Water District. “With these storms, you’re kind of chipping away at the water deficit.”

The district, which supplies water to 2.3 million residential and industrial customers in north and central Orange County, has spent $15 million more on imported water this year to supplement its supplies from the Santa Ana River ground-water basin.

“It would need to rain like this every other week through April” for the water table to improve significantly, said district spokeswoman Jenny Glasser.

Frank O’Leary of the National Weather Service office in San Diego said regional predictions for the rest of February and March were for above-normal precipitation, with a net result of normal or slightly above normal precipitation for the season.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which serves the city’s 3.8 million residents, is closely monitoring the eastern Sierra snowpack, which feeds the state’s reservoirs and aqueducts and is at 79% of normal level.

Because the bulk of the department’s water is imported, Los Angeles officials are more concerned with snowpack than with local groundwater levels.

There is a definite immediate silver lining to the clouds, though. It reduces demand for irrigation water -- as long as people remember to shut off their automatic lawn sprinklers.

“We’re actually doing fine right now,” said Eddie Rigdon of the Metropolitan Water District, which supplies local water districts serving 17 million customers in Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and San Diego counties. “People always say the local rain doesn’t help much because we don’t have the (Sierra) snowpack we need, but ... it really lowers demand. All of your outside irrigation ceases basically.”

Rigdon said demand for water drops by nearly 50% with the arrival of rain. But he acknowledged it was temporary relief, “not anywhere near close to the storage relief you really need” in the state’s large reservoirs.

In Ventura County, forecasters said the storm boosted rainfall totals to normal or above-average levels, and the rainy season is not over.

“We are sitting pretty good for this year and we still have a month to go,” National Weather Service meteorologist Bruce Rockwell said. “March can be a wet month.”

Although the rain caused minor damage to strawberry crops, it was nonetheless welcomed. “We need the rain. We don’t want another dry year like last year,” said Ed Terry, a Ventura vegetable and strawberry farmer who serves as president of the Ventura County Farm Bureau.

Smaller water districts that rely more on local ground water were singing praises to the rain this week.

In the Antelope Valley, recent storms filled the reservoir behind Littlerock Dam, which provides water for more than 3,500 families.

“It went from nearly empty to spilling over,” said Dennis LaMoreaux, general manager of the Palmdale Water District.

*

Times staff writers Stephanie Stassel and Tracy Wilson contributed to this report.