Over the period of the last 150 years the annual rainfall in Paso Robles, north of Santa Barbara in California, has varied from 5 inches per year to 30 inches per year. If there’s a pattern, it’s a complex one. Last year they got about 7 inches. They’ve been getting quite a bit of rain this month but not in unheard of amounts. The editors of the Wall Street Journal say that California has a water management problem:
California’s political leaders are obsessed with climate, so why don’t they prepare for droughts or deluges? The atmospheric rivers that are sweeping the parched Golden State should be a cause for relief, but they’ve instead given way to catastrophic floods and enormous water waste.
Scientists last fall forecast another warm and dry winter following three of California’s driest years on record. Yet storms this winter have already dropped tens of trillions of gallons of water across the state and more than a dozen feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Alas, little of the storm runoff is getting captured.
One problem is the state’s lack of investment in public works, especially storage and flood control. Drought has recurred throughout California history, punctuated by wet winters like this one. Two seven-year droughts that started in the late 1920s and 1940s spurred the construction of a massive system of canals, dams and reservoirs.
But few large water projects have been built since the birth of the modern environmental movement in the 1970s. Species protections for salmon and the three-inch smelt limit how much water can be pumped south through the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, which receives runoff from rivers in the North and the Sierra mountains.
The amount of water surging into the Delta on Friday could have filled a reservoir the size of Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy almost every 24 hours. Instead, nearly 95% of the Delta’s storm water this year has flushed into the Pacific Ocean. Such waste occurs whenever there’s a deluge and is why some reservoirs south of the Delta remain low despite the storms.
California isn’t unique in this regard but, as is not unusual, the split personality that afflicts many Americans is present in particularly exaggerated form in California. On the one hand they’d like the state to remain as wild as it’s always been. On the other they don’t like it when the wildness is inconvenient as it has been this rainy season.
There’s an old wisecrack. Sure California has four seasons: fire, flood, mud, and drought. With a small population that wasn’t so bad but now California’s population is huge.
Dams store water, but not perfectly. A lot is lost to seepage and evaporation, especially in the desert west and southwest.
Most of the good dam sites had dams built by the 1960’s. There are very few “good” sites left in the west, and those have significant problems, like flooding national parks.
Most water in the west is used for farming. Water turned deserts into fertile farms. Ultimately I think there will be tough choices between people and farms. And since people vote, urban areas with people will probably win.