Even if this winter’s much heralded El Niño delivers several rivers’ worth of rain, there was little hope expressed this week by a multitude of Santa Barbara water-district managers and water-board members that there would be any returning to the pre-drought days of indiscriminate lawn irrigation and car washing.
Setting the tone at the Association of California Water Agencies confab was ACWA chief and Sacramento lobbyist Tim Quinn, who stated, “We are living through a millennial drought. We’ve experienced the driest sequence of years in more than 1,000 years in California, and it’s hotter than it’s ever been.” Obviously, Quinn said, strong rains would help replenish groundwater basins, but he stressed, “We can’t assume El Niño will bail us out.”
The good news, he said, is that California water agencies have collectively spent $20 billion on infrastructure since the great drought beginning in 1987. Thanks to that investment, he said, California has absorbed the worst the current drought has to offer without sending the economy into a tailspin. The bad news is that more than 2,000 private wells in California’s Central Valley have gone dry, and more than 100 small water systems are now on the verge of collapse. Hydroelectric production statewide is down to the lowest levels since 1977, and more than half-a-million acres of agricultural fields have been fallowed. Eighteen species of fish, Quinn said, are threatened with extinction, water birds are struggling to make do without the flyway stopovers provided by rice farms, and the state’s coniferous forests are experiencing unprecedented die-offs.