https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-03-18/california-cuts-state-water-project-allocation-to-5-percent
We are experiencing climate change whiplash in real time with extreme swings between wet and dry conditions,” read a statement from Department of Water Resources Director Karla Nemeth.
The American Southwest has experienced its driest 22-year period in 1,200 years, research shows.
“Reservoirs are low, the snowpack is low, so we’re not going to see much refilling of those reservoirs as the snow melts, and as a result we just have less water to go around"
Earlier this week, officials with the State Water Resources Control Board announced that Californians significantly backslid in their efforts to save, and in fact used 2.6% more water in January compared with the same month in the baseline year of 2020.
In July, Gov. Gavin Newsom called on all state residents to voluntarily reduce water usage by 15%. Californians came far short of that target, with about 6.4% savings between July and the end of January, data show. Yet Newsom has so far stopped short of instituting mandatory restrictions
“These are absolutely unprecedented scenarios we’re finding ourselves in.”
Across the state, supplies are shrinking rapidly in response to the drying conditions. As of Friday, the statewide Sierra snowpack, most of which came from the heavy snowstorms in December, had fallen to 55% of average for the date, officials said.
Last year, drought conditions compelled officials to shut down Lake Oroville’s hydroelectric power plant for the first time since its completion in 1967.
On Friday, the Department of Water Resources said it will also submit a revised “temporary urgency change petition” that will enable deviations from typical water rights and usages through June, essentially allowing officials to release less water into the Delta and conserve stored water in the Oroville, Shasta and Folsom reservoirs. They are also planning to refill a notch in the Emergency Drought Salinity Barrier in the Delta, which will allow for reduced flows from upstream reservoirs through the end of November.
Some experts have been critical of the state’s strategy and response.
“They don’t really have a plan, other than to pray for rain and let other folks bear the worst consequences of their failures to plan,” said Doug Obegi, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Obegi also expressed concern that the temporary urgency change petition would enable the state to forgo water quality standards in the Delta that “protect farms, cities and fish and wildlife.”
“If the TUCP is granted it is likely that the violation of water quality objectives will lead to greater harmful algal blooms that threaten communities in Stockton and elsewhere, not to mention native fish and wildlife,” he said via email.
Officials have fewer and fewer options after the dry start to the year. March, typically the last month of California’s rainy season, is likely to end on a dry note, according to a precipitation outlook from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Drought Monitor shows that much of the state is under severe drought conditions, with an increasingly large area slipping into the “extreme drought” classification.
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/las-vegas-turns-on-low-level-lake-mead-pumps-designed-to-avoid-a-day-zero
Lake Mead holds back water for three U.S. states — Arizona, California, Nevada — as well as Mexico and several Native American tribes. A future in which Lake Mead declines so much that water could no longer pass through Hoover Dam would mark a large-scale crisis for the entire Southwest.
In addition, there would be cascading ecological impacts across a watershed that has already been significantly manipulated and a river that rarely reaches its delta.
It is not out of the realm of possibility, Mulroy added, that Lake Mead could one day fall so low that water could not pass through Hoover Dam. Her assessment of the situation came down to this: “I would work from the premise that it is going to happen, not that it's not going to happen.”
“This isn't a drought any more,” said Brad Udall, a senior water and climate research scientist at Colorado State University. “Let's not fool ourselves. It's aridification. It's the long-term drying and warming of the American West. And it's going to continue, and it's going to get worse.”
https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/27/us/water-intake-exposed-lake-mead-drought-climate/index.html
Across the West, extreme drought is already taking a toll this year and summertime heat hasn’t even arrived yet.
“This is a crisis. This is unprecedented. We have never done anything like this before and because we haven’t seen this situation happen like this before, we don’t have enough water to meet normal demands for the six million people living in the State Water Project dependent areas,” said Adel Hagekhalil, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, noting that conservation needs to begin in earnest now since water usage typically increases during the summer months.
The West is in its worst drought in centuries, scientists reported Monday. A study published in February found the period from 2000 to 2021 was the driest in for the region 1,200 years.
The human-caused climate crisis has made the West’s megadrought 72% worse, the study noted.
“We’re kind of in some uncharted territory, socially and economically,” Justin Mankin, assistant professor of geography at Dartmouth College and co-lead of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Drought Task Force, told CNN in March.
https://psmag.com/environment/yellow-seriously-let-mellow-bathroom-toilet-water-conservation-94758
Nothing has changed about people's attitudes, everyone is still acting like they are totally disconnected, they simply "need" their daily cheeseburgers and prissy "cleanliness" habits, psychological satisfiers which consume enormous, irreplaceable chunks of the natural world despite providing no substantial material benefit to anyone. People can't bear to imagine willingly foregoing any of this -- burgers, lawns and so on -- not while they are making so much more than the minimum wage! Ho ho, it is the poors who need fret about such things and go without! The slightly-less poor can continue paying for the right to waste endless water on their base frivolities because it is still artificially affordable, its price not reflecting the actual value and rapidly increasing rarity of clean fresh water in this country and on this planet.
Hey now go easy on OP, I mean I basically agree but we don't want him deleting all his posts again
