[Water_news] 1. DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS - Top Item for 2/09/09

Department of Water Resources

California Water News

A daily compilation for DWR personnel of significant news articles and comment

 

February 09, 2009

 

Top Item–

 

Dan Walters: Dry winter foretells big crisis

The Sacramento Bee – 2/08/09

By Dan Walters

We've heard and read a lot this winter about the terrific snow and ice storms that have buffeted much of the nation, sometimes destroying both property and lives.

 

We Californians, basking in sunshine, are having an equally disastrous winter. It's the third dry winter in a row, notwithstanding a little recent precipitation, and the specter of severe water shortages is hanging over the state, compounding its severe economic woes.

 

The Sierra snowpack is just 60 percent of what would be considered normal and, barring a late-season onslaught of storms, water agencies will impose sharp cutbacks.

 

An Internet Web site maintained by the state Department of Water Resources – cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/ current/RES – catalogs how major Northern California reservoirs have been drawn down. The biggest, Shasta, can hold 4.6 million acre-feet of water but is more than two-thirds empty, while Oroville, with a capacity of 3.5 million acre-feet, also is less than a third full.

 

The climatic conditions that are causing severe storms elsewhere in the nation have been blocking the usual flow of storms into California. We can't change those conditions, but we could have, and should have, recognized the potential peril of drought years, even decades, ago and prepared for it with more storage, more wastewater reclamation, more conservation – in other words more intelligent action.

 

It has been, in the largest context, another political failure and another bit of evidence for the thesis that California has become functionally ungovernable.

 

Water politics are fundamentally the same as those of the deficit-ridden state budget, of our failing public education system, of our worst-in-the-nation traffic congestion, and of our inadequate health care system. California is a uniquely complex society, and every one of those issues – and many more that could be listed – has a complex array of interest and pressure groups, dubbed "stakeholders," that usually cancel out each other.

 

Professional water managers and hydrologists have been warning California for decades that as the state's population grows and its economy evolves – especially water-dependent agriculture – the state's need for potable water also increases. But the diametrically hostile philosophical and economic positions of myriad water stakeholders make it virtually impossible for political officeholders and/or voters to settle on a practical scheme to meet that need.

 

That's especially true because water programs, by their nature, are very long-term while politics is, unfortunately, a very short-term activity.

 

The water situation will not improve by itself as the state's population continues to grow. And if the predictions about global warming prove true, it will get much worse because there will be less snow and more rain even in years of normal precipitation, which means we will need more storage capacity to even out the ups and downs of weather cycles. #

 

http://www.sacbee.com/walters/story/1607863.html

 

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DWR’s California Water News is distributed to California Department of Water Resources management and staff,  for information purposes, by the DWR Public Affairs Office. For reader’s services, including new subscriptions, temporary cancellations and address changes, please use the online page: http://listhost2.water.ca.gov/mailman/listinfo/water_news . DWR operates and maintains the State Water Project, provides dam safety and flood control and inspection services, assists local water districts in water management and water conservation planning, and plans for future statewide water needs. Inclusion of materials is not to be construed as an endorsement of any programs, projects, or viewpoints by the Department or the State of California.