? for CA residents. What are the drought effects like?

[WVvan]

Just finished an article in National Geographic that was about the California drought. It mainly covered farming such as one farmer in the Central Valley who has adapted by starting to grow cacti. Even thought cities use less than 11% of California's water I was wondering if the drought was having much effect on non-farm folk.
Since the only living* Californians I know hang out here it seems a good place to ask the question.

(* An aunt of mine moved to Long Beach many years ago but she's passed away.)

[PatO]

It's a popular topic in the news and I strongly believe there is no exaggeration presented. All of the San Diego county reservoirs are low with a few just being puddles. On the way home from work just now I noticed many of the the neighbors are just letting their lawns die. And these are plots of just a couple hundred square feet. I turned of my irrigation last winter and just hand watering my shrubbery as I have no lawn front or back. I do not think we've had 3"'s of rain this year - someone correct me if I'm too far off. My last 2 months water & sewer bill was $189, $73 for water consumed; 19 HCF and a $40 base with the rest of it being sewer. I suspect that is pricy compared to what you pay. I had a 21% reduction from last year same period. It's real and we are constantly reminded from the media to the dead lawns to the dry as tinder hills and mountains. It was a treat to drive to Denver several months ago and see green. The other sad and depressing thing is the now 4 year drought in Anza Borrego Desert State Park. Everything living thing is stressed out there. IMO

Pat

[Skyl330]

In Northern Cal. I had a six hundred dollar penalty last month. For using the same amount of water I always do. They are hitting pretty hard. A lot of people I know had worse.

It's scary how low Lake Shasta has been. Looks more like a small river.

Good to see a little rain starting to fall now.

[Tapatio]

Been living in this state for 48 years, nothing new.

[BajaSportsmobile]

What is new is the number of people wanting to use the same quantity of water.

Originally Posted by Tapatio

Been living in this state for 48 years, nothing new.

[E350]

Tapatio has got it right. So does BajaSportsMobile. Me? (Also a native Californian.) Read below and you decide.

I live maybe 200 feet from the Sacramento River. It has been running high for the past four months, for what I don't know. My wife water skis 3 to 4 times a week and we drive to and from work in Sacto. on the levee so we see how high the river is every day. They may say that they want to drain Folsom Lake, Lake Shasta, Lake Oroville etc. for the salmon spawning,* but puzzle me this:

Before there were dams,
And before there were levees,
Wasn't the Sacramento River only a trickle this time of year?

Of course it was. Because when the Sierra snow melts the rivers would flow, then at this time of year when there is no more snow in the Sierras to melt (and man made dams weren't yet built to collect and warehouse water from previously melted snow), the rivers stopped flowing and dried up. Period. So what did the salmon do then?

They time their spawning for when the water is naturally low. Go figure.

Man made dams and man made levees have done great things for salmon and other wildlife. It is just a fact. And I am a whitewater kayaker (and a former environmentalist). And a dam on a river means water for release in the Summer months for kayaking too. So all us animals win.

We don't have a drought in California, we have Gerry Brown as Governor. Look at Tapatio's drought index for 1976 and you will see there was a "drought" when he was Governor then too.

Now Brown wants to build intake tunnels into the Sacramento River in Northern California to divert it South 400 miles to Southern California.

The City of Sacramento conserved 21%-24% water usage over last year.** What Chumps they are!

Sacramento doesn't need to conserve! Sacramento doesn't need no stinkin' water meters! There are two dam controlled rivers that run through Sacto., the American and the Sacramento which actually confluence in Sacto. Sacto will never run out of water.

L.A. ("City of Angels what a friggin' misnomer that is) used 15-17% more water this year than last year!** Pigs!

L.A. does not need this water. L.A. does not deserve this water!

Look at Tapatio's graph and you will see that California does not have a "drought." To be sure, our rainfall varies wildly, and our storage could be improved.

But what California does have is a corrupt Governor who wants to pretend that California is in a crisis so he can build tunnels to steal Northern California water to send it to Southern California to reward his political contributors.

L.A. doesn't deserve this water! Desalinate you pigs!* (*What else would you call a 15%-17% increase in water usage this year over last when everyone else is trying to conserve?)

* Environmentalism is unequivocally an emotional and mental disorder completely unhinged from the reality of the physical world.

** Source:

http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2014/jul ... districts/

Compare:

— American Water Company Sacramento District (Sacramento County), down 24 percent.
— Sacramento Suburban Water District (Sacramento County), down 21 percent

— City of San Juan Capistrano (Orange County), up 37 percent.

— City of Garden Grove (Orange County), up 32 percent.

— Rancho California Water District (Riverside County), up 21 percent.

— El Toro Water District (Orange County), up 20 percent.

— San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, up 19 percent.

— Vallecitos Water District (north of San Diego), up 18 percent.

— American Water Company Los Angeles District (Los Angeles County), up 17 percent.

— Water Service Company Palos Verdes (Los Angeles County), up 17 percent.

— City of Pasadena (Los Angeles County), up 15 percent.



Mark Twain once said of California, "Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting."

Jack Nicholson once starred in a movie called "China Town" which is about when corrupt politicians stole the water from the Mono Lake watershed. It is happening again right before our eyes and the environmentalists are too mentally brainwashed to recognize it. Brown named his water stealing plan the "Bay Delta Conservation Plan" for a reason -- environmentalists love big government and love things with environmental sounding names. The "conservation" part of the plan consists of decomissioning some Northern California Delta farmland and turning it back to wetlands so that the same water that used to grow crops on that land can be shipped to the Southern California Westlands Water District to grow crops on that desert (d-e-s-e-r-t for Christ's sake!) farmland. Go figure. Environmentalists are stupid and Brown knows it.

[WVvan]

I hope I haven't just inadvertently stuck a stick into a hornets nest.

[E350]

WVvan: Keep your eyes closed or open them and live in the real world. There are hornets nests all around. When yours gets poked, you want me there to back you up or at least give you a fair hearing don't you? I am old. Sometimes when a person gets old, the thing they treasure most is truth.

P.S. The Giants are going to the World Series again. If it makes you feel any better, I will try really hard not to post...

[daveb]

Funny how it works out here. In my town not too much has changed but I am more careful about water waste. The city did change their regulations and billing. The fact is anytime they have an opportunity to squeeze more from the public they will and now they have a perceived thought they will put into action under a disguised threat. The fact is this is a man made drought out here and climate change basically has nothing to do with it. Records are made and records will always be broke. I see these same weather cycles each decade. But it's true that population has an impact. A lot of numbers and stats are thrown around making the this a news event and people get sucked in to the skewed information these idiots pump out. I've always laughed at the media when they say a certain movie pulled in a record amount of movie goers and how much was made at the box office. Yeah, there are more friggin people that can go and a dollar today doesn't get you what it did in the past. In a sense it doesn't mean crap about the quality of the movie or how much was made, just that more people went because there are more people.
Big cities on the coast need to build more desalination and water purification plants. Settlers broke their backs to convert the central valley into one of the worlds most productive Ag regions in the world by holding back water that was wasted heading to the ocean after the snow melt. Dams provided the water needed during dry seasons and we need more. One argument by the enviros is we grow things the world doesn't use as a food staple. Of course what dictates what is grown is by world demand so there is the reason why nuts, grapes, and other foods are grown here but if things got worse you can bet this place could be a huge food staple producer for the USA.
And it's true about Salmon, at least in the rivers that surround my neck of the woods. Most the rivers chosen to take fish counts today on the Tuolumne and Merced were dried up by September before dams were in place. Sure, October and November rains did their job in wet years but the river flows were not stable like today and were a trickle in comparison. In the 1800's, the Tuolunme river was the last southern valley river in respect to the Sac delta that had a Salmon run and the Merced river had none. These runs were minimal because very little rainfall produced enough to fill a dry stream. Today the Merced has a large hatchery above Snelling Ca. The Delta Smelt wasn't even here at one time and was brought in along with Bass and other predatory fish. Our company put radio trackers in yearling Salmon and found them in the bellies of Stripped Bass in the Sac Delta...they never made it to the ocean. Yet the enviros continue to push laws to protect these fish by forcing water to be turned down the rivers at a higher rate year after year without regard to why the Salmon counts are low in the first place. The common dry years we get from time to time need to be taken into account. 2013-2014 has been a drought year compared to normal, but from time to time dry years are the norm here and releasing water for fish is insane. Our local reservoir is doing much better than others and hasn't reached the low levels I've seen in previously years yet we continue to send water down for the Salmon while throwing huge restriction on the public and more importantly farming. But like I said, records are made to broke. Time to think about the future and fix this man made screw up. I guarantee it won't be population control.

This state poorly regulate things and should be an example of how not to run America. Some lawmaker is even trying to pass a law that people on ground water pumps must add water meters.

This situation can all be solved with a common sense approach but somebody has to budge. The problem is that there is lack common sense in a large number of people in our state and they are being swayed by the TV and Hollywood, the media and a handful of crafty politicians who are backing an agenda. There must be compromise or the future will be bleak.
Sorry for the rant.

[rob_gendreau]

Yes, there is a drought. The effects, of course, depend on a lot of complex factors. Water is owned; some farmer can water all he wants because he has superior rights to that water, while someone else downstream is hosed. CA (and most of the west) has an appropriative water rights system. Unless you're willing to revoke some very very old legal precedent, you get anomalies where some have incentives to conserve and some don't.

And conservation, which is enforced (or not) among a bazillion irrigation districts and municipal utilities, also varies a lot, depending on that district's supply and users. We aren't in this boat (cough) together, again because water is like land; it's not equally distributed and can't be.

I found it odd that E350 somehow perceives environmentalists being in league with Gov Brown re the peripheral canal/tunnels. Environmentalists have been fighting the transport of water around the Delta for like a million years. They even defeated a proposition on it. But maybe I just misunderstood.

Some outdoor areas are as dry as I've ever seen them. Like the western Mojave. The southern part of the state, somewhat paradoxically, has gotten quite a bit of monsoonal rain in the last coupla years. DVNP, eg, keeps having roads washed out. Flowers displays in the desert are for crap. And our fire season has been longer, although in some ways not as bad since fuel buildup has lessened.

Rivers and streams may or may not be lower; some are still running normal flows due to dam releases for irrigation, fish, etc. Depends. BTW, I do think the Sacto ran in the summer even before damming. At least up to Sacto, although I'll bet it was much saltier. I've read accounts about people taking boats up through there in the summer in the 1800s.

Lots of ponds and little streams near me in the Bay Area are as dry as I've ever seen, and I was here in the droughts in the 80s. That was a longer drought, IIRC, but this one has had less rainfall in a year.

But the state has apparently suffered worse droughts historically, per tree ring data. Europeans didn't even get here until quite recently, so we don't have long climate records. Be interesting to see how it gets handled...or not. Make sure you fill your SMB tanks before you drive here....