WASHINGTON, Jan. 6, 2016 - California is starting to claw
its way back from its long, deep drought and, what’s more, is preparing better
for the next one.
Though downpours flooded some parts of the country in recent
weeks, the water supply outlook for much of America’s biggest farming state
remains iffy. The state depends on massive snow buildup in the Sierra Nevada
mountains plus plentiful rain elsewhere through winter months to feed its
reservoirs and aquifers for year-round water supplies. But even after a
favorable start to its five-month winter rainy reason, most of its main
reservoirs are just a fourth to a
third full and at about half of their average levels. Water levels are low,
too, in the huge Colorado River reservoirs in Nevada that also help supply
Southern California.
“It’s hard to imagine that we’d have enough water
replenishment… to fill a four-year hole in one year,” says Dave Kranz,
spokesman for the California Farm Bureau Federation.
On the other hand, water in California’s mountain snowpack is running
5 percent to 10 percent above average. “Certainly we are in much better shape
that we were a year ago,” he says.
What’s more, there are several factors promising better water
availability in California. On the seasonal weather front, the National Weather
Service (NWS) and other forecasters say the rain-producing El
Niño pattern that arrived this fall will last through the state’s wet
season, spurring the odds of reservoir and groundwater replenishment. And the
NWS is projecting a rainy
January in Southern California.
Richard Howitt, agricultural expert at the UC Davis Center
for Watershed Sciences, says the drought has probably been hardest on almond,
pistachio, citrus and stone-fruit and grape orchards and vineyards of the San
Joaquin Valley in Southern California. There, farms have little groundwater and
are extremely dependent on river and reservoir allocations, and many farmers got
just 10 percent of usual distributions in 2015. As a result, he says, they’ve
abandoned annual-crop acres through the drought, using their water for trees,
which are highly stressed, and “they’ve been just getting by.”
So, he says, in 2016 farmers across the state’s huge Central
Valley need “a really good fill-up of the dams.” Valley farmers idled about
550,000 more crop acres than usual last year because of the drought, he said,
and that land will start coming back into production if farmers can get bigger
irrigation water allocations this year.
For the longer term, Howitt echoes many Californians: “What
we need to do is manage our underground water better. And people are making
steps in that direction.”
California voters and state agencies are already moving on
several fronts to build and expand water storage projects and plan more
efficient use of surface and groundwater. Cities are investing in wastewater
recycling. The San Diego region, for example, has built the largest seawater
desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere, taking pressure off available
water resources. And the Almond Board of California, which notes that growers
have already cut water use per almond by a third in the past 20 years, has
launched a new initiative to further enhance water management and efficiency in
the orchards.
Meanwhile, the California Water Resources Control Board
(Water Board) has begun to dole out cash from $7.2
billion in water supply and infrastructure improvement bonds that voters
approved a year ago, including $2.7 billion for expanding water storage. One
recent allotment is $5 million to help residents on private wells and small
water systems who are facing water emergencies. (See other aid for emergency
water projects at Drought.CA.Gov.)
Kranz says farm groups hope the state will aggressively
pursue several surface water storage initiatives, especially reservoirs for
seasonable water retention, that are proposed for water bond funding. Two big
ones are the Sites
Reservoir to pump water from the Sacramento River for later return for
seasonal downstream use, and the Temperance
Flat Reservoir, to similarly draw San Joaquin River for later use.
Rob Vandenheuvel, manager of the California-based Milk
Producers Council, says of the proposed water storage projects: “We absolutely
need that infrastructure.” Though the drought has hurt forage crops and
pastures and has added to dairy farm costs, he says, state and federal water
regulation has hit dairy farms there harder than the drought itself.
“Thousands of acre-feet of the Sacramento River’s fresh
water are dumped into the Pacific Ocean to protect an endangered species, the Delta
smelt, a 3-inch fish… so we are not able to move that water down into the
Central Valley… where we grow the nation’s food. That (restriction) is a
man-made component of the drought, and it’s significant,” he says. So he wants
water storage expanded along with regulations that will allow more efficient
use of the water that is stored.
Also, for the first time in the state’s history, the
California Legislature last year mandated local water control agencies to
establish new frameworks for sustainable, local groundwater management by 2017.
Those entities are starting to develop their water use plans now; implementation
of the plans and related rules is ordered for 2020.
Last spring, Governor Jerry Brown kicked off his state’s new
focus on water use with a statewide mandate for a 25 percent reduction in
consumption by this February. The Water Board has been riding shotgun on that
executive mandate, assigning reduction targets of 4 to 36 percent for each
community. The board estimated in December that statewide water use reductions
had already reached 27 percent. Now, it’s proposing a
2016 extension of the order, which features reduced water savings for some
cities that are, for example, themselves investing in recycling and other water
saving efforts.
#30
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