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Good article on impacts of groundwater pumping (in California)

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The California Roundtable on Water and Food Supply (CRWFS) is a consensus-based forum to uncover obstacles, identify solutions, and take action to enhance water security for specialty crop agriculture, the public, and the environment.

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CA Roundtable on Water and Food Supply (2012)_From Storage to Retention

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The"Wrong" Way to Think About California's Water

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The"Wrong" Way to Think About California's Water

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Water is complicated. Nowhere is that more true than in California, and never more than during a major drought.

That may be why so much of the debate about how to manage California's scarce water supply is misguided.

The national press brims with photographs of emerald-green Palm Springs golf courses fenced off from sandy desert. Would-be presidential candidate Carly Fiorina blames the drought on "liberal environmentalists" blocking reservoir construction. Easterners gibe about the folly of growing thirsty almond trees in a dry climate.

But Palm Springs isn't emblematic of all California, the drought is not man-made and California's water problems stem at least partially from its role as breadbasket (or nut bowl) for the nation.

So here's a guide to the wrong ways to think about California water, and the glimmer of a better way.

Industry: It's not about bottled water. Consider this as a rule of thumb: Whenever you see water use denominated in millions of gallons, in California terms that's a tiny drop in a very big bucket.

Yet it's common to see users of tens or hundreds of millions of gallons demonized as perpetrators of the drought or profiteers in the face of statewide calamity. Aljazeera America and Salon last week both fingered Nestle, the owner of Arrowhead and many other bottled-water brands, as a public enemy: "While California sips its scarce water, Nestle gulps," Aljazeera declared. Salon labeled the company "despicable" for "making a killing - while California is dying of thirst."

Let's inject some perspective. The entire nation consumes a bit more than 10 billion gallons of bottled water per year. California's total water use, according to 2010 figures from the U.S. Geological Survey, is 38 billion gallons per day.

"There are plenty of reasons to avoid bottled water," says water and climate expert Peter H. Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute and a leading critic of the industry. "It's got environmental challenges, it's incredibly expensive, it's unnecessary, and it's not as well regulated as tap water."

In California, bottling plants may be responsible for localized overpumping of groundwater supplies and fail to provide adequate information about their activities; Nestle's operations on the Morongo reservation are especially opaque, as we reported last summer. These ills need to be rectified.

"They ought to be better regulated," Gleick says. "But we're not going to solve the drought by not bottling water."

Agriculture: Stop talking about the almond trees. Perhaps the best-known statistic about the state's nut crop is that it takes one gallon of water to grow a single almond. That's a cute version of the basic statistic, which measures how much water is required to bring an almond orchard to maturity over as long as four years. But many crops require just as much water or more - in excess of five gallons to raise a single head of broccoli, for example - and almost nothing is as demanding as beef.

In any case, the almond harvest was worth $5.8 billion in 2013, second only to milk and ahead of grapes. Walnuts and pistachios ranked sixth and 12th. These may be exactly the crops to which the state should be funneling its scarce water - high-value crops.

"For farmers, [almonds are] one of the highest-value commodities," says Ellen Hanak, director of the Water Policy Center of the Public Policy Institute of California. Therefore, she says, "the value of the water used on almonds is higher than on most crops." Fruits and nuts account for 45% of the total revenue of California agriculture, but consume only 34% of agricultural water - the only category for which the share of value is higher than the proportion of water.

"California farmers have been very responsive to economic opportunities," Hanak says. "It makes me nervous that someone sitting in Sacramento or Washington thinks they're better judges of what the crop mix should be."

A better way is to give farmers the incentive to engage in sustainable water use. "I don't care if they're growing almonds," Gleick says, "if they're not overpumping groundwater and not contaminating water supplies."

Urban use: The shame of turf. Gov. Jerry Brown has taken heat for supposedly giving farmers a pass in the statewide water use restrictions he imposed April 1, especially since agriculture accounts for about 80% of use. But many farmers already have sustained draconian cutbacks in allocations from state and federal water projects.

There's still plenty of excess to wring out of residential usage, even though daily urban consumption fell to 178 gallons per capita in 2010 from 232 in 1995, according to the Public Policy Institute of California - thanks largely to low-flow toilets, water-stingy washing machines and water-wise building codes for new construction.

The bloat can be found in outdoor residential use, which accounts for a third of all urban consumption. Ornamental turf lawns, especially in Southern California, should be replaced by succulents and other water-thrifty plants. "We need to look at lawns the way we look at smoking in restaurants," Gleick says, "as not a good idea anymore."

There isn't just one California. Those overwatered Palm Springs golf courses don't tell you much about California's drought any more than the nearly full reservoirs in parts of Northern California mean that the drought is mythical. Nor is there a "typical" California farmer: Some have senior water rights dating back 100 years, immunizing them from shortages; some are scrambling to buy every cubic foot they can acquire.

The only lasting solutions include creating a better-functioning water market with transparent pricing and transfers, so that water supplies end up where they're most needed and most economically useful. The market will never be perfect, because it's not always simple to move water from one region to another. And regulatory oversight will always be needed to keep users with senior rights from hoarding water, and ensuring that dependent users, whether farmers or city dwellers, aren't left dry.

Gleick's Pacific Institute reckons that improved efficiency could save 14 million acre-feet of water annually - more than twice the deficit of statewide usage compared with sustainable supply. (One acre-foot, or 325,851 gallons, is enough to supply a California family of five for a year at current average consumption levels.)

That requires not only Gov. Brown's mandated reductions, but regulations and perhaps public financing to encourage more efficient crop irrigation. Rules enacted last year by the Legislature aim to stem overpumping of groundwater, particularly by farms in the Central Valley, a significant threat to the state's long-term water health. But they won't be fully effective for decades; the drought underscores the importance of accelerating the schedule.

"If you're flood-irrigating a crop that could be grown with drip irrigation, I'd argue that you're not using water reasonably and beneficially," Gleick says. "The next step is for the state water board to say that."

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The wrong way to think about California water

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Water is complicated. Nowhere is that more true than in California, and never more than during a major drought. That may be why so much of the debate about how to manage California's scarce water supply is misguided. The national press brims with photographs of emerald-green Palm Springs golf courses fenced off from sandy desert.

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The company developing the plant here, Poseidon Water, has promised to counter the environmental damage. For instance, it will pay into a California program that finances projects to offset emissions of greenhouse gases.

Still, some scientists and environmental groups contend that if rainy conditions return to California, the plant here and others like it could become white elephants. Santa Barbara, northwest of Los Angeles, built its desalination plant a quarter-century ago and promptly shut it down when rains returned.

Australia is a more spectacular case: It built six huge desalination plants during a dry spell and has largely idled four of them though water customers remain saddled with several billion dollars' worth of construction bills.

"Our position is that seawater desalination should be the option of last resort," said Sean Bothwell, an attorney with the California Coastkeeper Alliance, an environmental coalition that has battled California's turn toward the technology. "We need to fully use all the sustainable supplies that we have available to us first."

The rising interest in desalination is not simply a matter of desperation, though that is certainly a factor in states with growing populations and few obvious sources of new water. Advocates say the technology has improved markedly over the past 20 years. While the water can cost twice as much as conventionally treated water, it is still less than a penny a gallon, and that is starting to look tolerable in parched regions.

Desalination has grown into a huge industry, with more than 15,000 plants operating around the world. Many are small and treat brackish groundwater, requiring much less energy and costing less than seawater treatment. The United States already has scores of these smaller plants.

Huge plants treating seawater have been rare here, but they exist elsewhere, particularly in chronically dry regions like the Middle East. In little more than a decade, Israel has moved from perpetual water crisis to a point where it will soon get half its water from desalination. Israeli engineers have become sought-after partners in many cities, and are involved in the Carlsbad project.

Interactive Graphic: How Has the Drought Affected California's Water Use?

The technological approach being employed here, and in most recent plants, is called reverse osmosis. It involves forcing seawater through a membrane with holes so tiny that the water molecules can pass through but larger salt molecules cannot.

A huge amount of energy is required to create enough pressure to shove the water through the membranes. But clever engineering has cut energy use of the plants in half in 20 years, as well as improving their reliability.

Future desalination plants also have the potential to blend well with the rising percentage of renewable power on the electric grids in California and Texas. Since treated water can be stored, the plants could be dialed up at times when electricity from wind or solar power is plentiful, and later dialed down.

However, as interest in desalination spreads, California and other states confront major decisions about the environmental rules for the new plants.

Both the intake of seawater and the disposal of excess salt into the ocean can harm sea life. Sucking in huge amounts of seawater, for instance, can kill fish eggs and larvae by the billions. Technical solutions exist, but they can drive up costs, and it is still unclear how strict California regulators will be with the plant developers.

Environmental groups argue that the embrace of desalination represents a failure to manage freshwater effectively. They want much more aggressive programs focused on conservation and on reuse of existing supplies, pointing out that half of municipal water here still goes to grass and other lawn plants. These arguments have sometimes carried the day, as they did when voters in Santa Cruz effectively killed a desalination plant.

Mr. Weston, the chairman of the San Diego County Water Authority, said his agency and others in the area had gone a long way toward embracing conservation. Since 1990, water use in the county has been cut 12 percent, even as the population has jumped 30 percent.

Long worried about water scarcity, the San Diego region helped to pioneer measures that ultimately spread across the country, including low-flow bathroom fixtures, more efficient washing machines and other innovations.

But these steps have not been enough to secure the region's water future, Mr. Weston said. Thus, the water authority decided years ago, long before the current drought began, to move forward on the desalination plant.

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For Drinking Water in Drought, California Looks Warily to Sea

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The company developing the plant here, Poseidon Water, has promised to counter the environmental damage. For instance, it will pay into a California program that finances projects to offset emissions of greenhouse gases. Still, some scientists and environmental groups contend that if rainy conditions return to California, the plant here and others like it could become white elephants.

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Water missing in the Delta -- Suspects are  farmers who have been tilling the soil in this area for decades.

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Public Policy Institute of California: California's Water: This set of short policy briefs highlights the state's most pressing water management challenges and outlines the actions needed to address them. 

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Public Policy Institute of California: California's Water: This set of short policy briefs highlights the state's most pressing water management challenges and outlines the actions needed to address them. 

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How You Might Be Contributing to California's Water Woes

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How You Might Be Contributing to California's Water Woes

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imple solutions to the water shortage?

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How Has the Drought Affected California's Water Use?

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An interactive map shows how much water California residents conserved in April and how much daily consumption they are being forced to cut under new mandatory restrictions.

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How much water is in the  foods we eat?

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From steak to mangoes, here are some water-hogging foods

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With California's drought worsening, there has been a growing focus on the amount of water needed to produce certain foods.

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Depleting the ground watr account. Also, other links covering from sewer to tap processing.

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The following is a script of "Water" which aired on Nov. 16, 2014. Lesley Stahl is the correspondent. Shari Finkelstein and Jennie Held, producers.
It's been said that the wars of the 21st century may well be fought over water. The Earth's population has more than doubled over the last 50 years and the demand for fresh water -- to drink and to grow food -- has surged along with it. But sources of water like rainfall, rivers, streams, reservoirs, certainly haven't doubled. So where is all that extra water coming from? More and more, it's being pumped out of the ground.

Water experts say groundwater is like a savings account -- something you draw on in times of need. But savings accounts need to be replenished, and there is new evidence that so much water is being taken out, much of the world is in danger of a groundwater overdraft.

California is entering its fourth year of a record-breaking drought. Last year was the driest since the state started keeping records more than a hundred years ago. And yet, pay a visit to California's Central Valley and out of that parched land you'll see acre upon acre of corn, almond trees, pomegranates, tomatoes, grapes. And what makes them all possible: water. Where do you get water in a drought? You take it out of the savings account: groundwater.
[Jay Famiglietti: When we talk about surface water, we're talking about lakes and rivers. And when we're talking about groundwater, we're really talking about water below the water table.]
Jay Famiglietti, an Earth sciences professor at the University of California, Irvine, is a leading expert on groundwater.

Jay Famiglietti: It's like a sponge. It's like an underground sponge.

He's talking about the aquifers where groundwater is stored -- layers of soil and rock, as he showed us in this simple graphic, that are saturated with water and can be drilled into, like the three wells shown here.

Lesley Stahl: You can actually pump it out of the crevices?

Jay Famiglietti: Imagine like trying to put a straw into a sponge. You can actually suck water right out of a sponge. It's a very similar process.

Sucking the water out of those aquifers is big business these days in the Central Valley. Well driller Steve Arthur is a very busy man.

Steve Arthur: All the farmers, they don't have no surface water. They've got to keep these crops alive. The only way to do that is to drill wells, pump the water from the ground.

Lesley Stahl: So it's either drill or go out of business?

Steve Arthur: Yes.

So there's something of a groundwater rush going on here. Arthur's seven rigs are in constant use and his waiting list is well over a year. And because some wells here are running dry, he's having to drill twice as deep as he did just a year or two ago. This well will cost the farmer a quarter of a million dollars, and go down 1,200 feet -- about the height of the Empire State Building.

"If we're talking about a deeper aquifer, that could take tens or hundreds of years to recharge."

Lesley Stahl: Are you and are the farmers worried that by going that deep you are depleting the ground water?

Steve Arthur: Well, yes, we are depleting it. But on the other hand, what choice do you have? This is the most fertile valley in the world. You can grow anything you want here. If we don't have water to grow something, it's going to be a desert.

He said many farmers think the problem is cyclical and that once the drought ends, things will be okay.

Lesley Stahl: Now when they take water out and it rains...

Jay Famiglietti: Yes.

Lesley Stahl: ...doesn't the water go back down there?

Jay Famiglietti: These aquifers near the surface, they can sometimes be replenished very quickly. If we're talking about a deeper aquifer, that could take tens or hundreds of years to recharge.

Figuring out how much is being depleted from those aquifers deep underground isn't easy. Hydrologist Claudia Faunt took us to what looked like someone's backyard shed, where she and her colleagues at the U.S. Geological Survey monitor groundwater levels in the Central Valley the way they always have -- by dropping a sensor down a monitoring well.

Lesley Stahl: So this is a well.

Claudia Faunt: This is a well. So we have a tape here that has a sensor on the end.

Lesley Stahl: Oh, let me see.

The Geological Survey has 20,000 wells like this across the country.

Lesley Stahl: It's a tape measure.

Claudia Faunt: It's a tape measure.

Lesley Stahl: How will you know when it hits water?

Claudia Faunt: It's going to beep.

By comparing measurements from different wells over time, they get the best picture they can of where groundwater levels stand. She unspooled and unspooled, until finally...

Lesley Stahl: Oh.

It startled me, as did the result: a five-foot drop in just one month.

Claudia Faunt: Right now, we're reaching water levels that are at historic lows, they're like...

Lesley Stahl: Historic lows?

Claudia Faunt: Right. At this site, water levels have dropped about 200 feet in the last few years.

Gathering data from holes in the ground like this has been the only way to get a handle on groundwater depletion. That is, until 2002, and the launch of an experimental NASA satellite called GRACE.

Lesley Stahl: What does GRACE stand for?

Mike Watkins: So GRACE stands for gravity recovery and climate experiment.

Mike Watkins is head of the Science Division at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. He was the mission manager for the latest Mars rover mission and he is the project scientist for GRACE.

Mike Watkins: So the way GRACE works is it's two satellites.

Lesley Stahl: Two?

Mike Watkins: They're actually measuring each other's orbit very, very accurately.

What affects that orbit is gravity.

Mike Watkins: As the first one comes up on some extra mass, an area of higher gravity, it gets pulled away...

Lesley Stahl: It goes faster.

Mike Watkins: ...from the second spacecraft.

And that's where water comes in. Since water has mass, it affects the pull of gravity, so after the first GRACE satellite approaches an area that's had lots of heavy rain for example, and is pulled ahead, the second one gets there, feels the pull and catches up. The instruments are constantly measuring the distance between the two.

Mike Watkins: Their changes in separation, their changes in their orbit are a little different this month than last month because water moved around and it changed the gravity field just enough.

So GRACE can tell whether an area has gained water weight or lost it.

Lesley Stahl: So GRACE is like a big scale in the sky?

Mike Watkins: Absolutely.

GRACE can also tell how much water an area has gained or lost. Scientists can then subtract out the amount of rain and snowfall there, and what's left are the changes in groundwater.

Lesley Stahl: It's kind of brilliant to think that a satellite in the sky is measuring groundwater.

Mike Watkins: It is fantastic.

Jay Famiglietti: I thought it was complete nonsense. There's no way we can see groundwater from space.

Jay Famiglietti started out a skeptic, but that was before he began analyzing the data GRACE sent back. The first place he looked was India. He showed us a time-lapse animation of the changes GRACE detected there over the last 12 years. Note the dates on the lower right. The redder it gets, the greater the loss of water.

Lesley Stahl: Oh, look at that.

He calculated that more than half the loss was due to groundwater depletion.

Jay Famiglietti: And this is a huge agricultural region.

"So we're talking about groundwater depletion in the aquifers that supply irrigation water to grow the world's food."

Lesley Stahl: Have they been doing the same kind of pumping...

Jay Famiglietti: Yes.

Lesley Stahl: ...that we're seeing in California?

Jay Famiglietti: Yes.

Lesley Stahl: It got so dark red.

Jay Famiglietti: Yeah, that's bad.

His India findings were published in the journal "Nature." But as he showed us, India wasn't the only red spot on the GRACE map.

Jay Famiglietti: This is right outside Beijing, Bangladesh and then across southern Asia.

He noticed a pattern.

Jay Famiglietti: They are almost exclusively located over the major aquifers of the world. And those are also our big food-producing regions. So we're talking about groundwater depletion in the aquifers that supply irrigation water to grow the world's food.

If that isn't worrisome enough, some of those aquifer systems are in volatile regions, for instance this one that is shared by Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey.

Jay Famiglietti: Turkey's built a bunch of dams. Stored a bunch of water upstream. That forces the downstream neighbors to use more groundwater and the groundwater's being depleted.

Lesley Stahl: Oh my.

Jay Famiglietti: We're seeing this water loss spread literally right across Iran, Iraq and into Syria and down.

Lesley Stahl: It's progressive.

"So the ground basically collapses or compresses down and the land sinks."

Famiglietti, who's now moved to the jet propulsion lab to work on GRACE, has started traveling around the world, trying to alert governments and academics to the problem, and he isn't the only one who's worried.

A 2012 report from the director of National Intelligence warned that within 10 years "many countries important to the United States will experience water problems ... that will risk instability and state failure..." and cited the possible "use of water as a weapon or to further terrorist objectives."

Lesley Stahl: Water is the new oil.

Jay Famiglietti: It's true. It's headed in that direction.

And what about our own food-producing regions, like California's Central Valley, which produces 25 percent of the nation's food. What is GRACE telling us there?

Lesley Stahl: 2008.

Jay Famiglietti: Right.

Lesley Stahl: '09.

Jay Famiglietti: And now things are going to start to get very red.

Lesley Stahl: 2010.

GRACE is confirming what the geological survey well measures have shown, but giving a broader and more frightening picture, since it shows that the rainy years are not making up for the losses.

Lesley Stahl: '14. Dark red.

Lesley Stahl: That's alarming.

Jay Famiglietti: It should be.

So much groundwater has been pumped out here that the geological survey says it's causing another problem: parts of the valley are literally sinking. It's called subsidence.

Claudia Faunt: So the ground basically collapses or compresses down and the land sinks.

Lesley Stahl: The land is sinking down.

She said at this spot, the ground is dropping several inches a year.

Claudia Faunt: And north of here, it's more like a foot per year.

Lesley Stahl: That sounds like a lot, a foot a year.

Claudia Faunt: It's some of the fastest rates we have ever seen in the valley, and in the world.

She says it's caused damage to infrastructure: buckles in canals and sinking bridges. Here the land has sunk six feet. It used to be level with the top of this concrete slab.

Lesley Stahl: And this is because of the pumping of the groundwater?

Claudia Faunt: Yes.

Lesley Stahl: Is there any limit on a farmer, as to how much he can actually take out of this groundwater?

Claudia Faunt: Not right now in the state of California.

Lesley Stahl: None?

Claudia Faunt: As long as you put it to a beneficial use, you can take as much as you want.

But what's beneficial to you may not be beneficial to your neighbor.

Lesley Stahl: When you dig a well like this, are you taking water from the next farm?

Steve Arthur: I would say yeah. We're taking water from everybody.

Lesley Stahl: Well, is that neighbor going to be unhappy?

Steve Arthur: No. Everybody knows that there's a water problem. Everybody knows you got to drill deeper, deeper. And it's funny you say that because we're actually going to drill a well for that farmer next door also.

"I can't believe how brave I am. 45 minutes ago, this was sewer water."

Making things worse, farmers have actually been planting what are known as "thirsty" crops. We saw orchard after orchard of almond trees. Almonds draw big profits, but they need water all year long, and farmers can never let fields go fallow, or the trees will die.

But with all the water depletion here, we did find one place that is pumping water back into its aquifer.

Lesley Stahl: Look, it really looks ickier up close.

We took a ride with Mike Markus, general manager of the Orange County Water District and a program some call "toilet to tap." They take 96-million gallons a day of treated wastewater from a county sanitation plant -- and yes, that includes sewage -- and in effect, recycle it. He says in 45 minutes, this sewage water will be drinkable.

Mike Markus: You'll love it.

Lesley Stahl: You think I'm going to drink that water?

Mike Markus: Yes, you will.

They put the wastewater through an elaborate three-step process: suck it through microscopic filters, force it through membranes, blast it with UV light. By the end, Markus insists it's purer than the water we drink. But it doesn't go straight to the tap. They send it to this basin and then use it to replenish the groundwater.

Jay Famiglietti: It's amazing. Because of recycling of sewage water, they've been able to arrest that decline in the groundwater.

Lesley Stahl: All right. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it.

All that was left was to try it. To tell the truth, it wasn't bad.

Lesley Stahl: I can't believe how brave I am. Forty-five minutes ago, this was sewer water.

Mike Markus: And now, it's drinkable.

He says it's a great model for big cities around the country. But it's not the answer for areas like the Central Valley, which is sparsely populated and therefore doesn't produce enough waste. So at least for now, it's continuing withdrawals from that savings account.

Lesley Stahl: Will there be a time when there is zero water in the aquifer for people in California?

Jay Famiglietti: Unless we take action, yes.

California has just taken action -- enacted a law that for the first time takes steps toward regulating groundwater. But it could take 25 years to fully implement.

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The following is a script of "Water" which aired on Nov. 16, 2014. Lesley Stahl is the correspondent. Shari Finkelstein and Jennie Held, producers. It's been said that the wars of the 21st century may well be fought over water.

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A dairy cow needs 4 gallons of water to produce 1 gallon of mik and a plethora of other water trivia facts.

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Ecotech Water, LLC | Leaders in LEED Water Conservation

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Water Restrictions They Should Have Passed

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Water Restrictions They Should Have Passed

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A no nonsense list of solutions

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After confronting the truth that we have only one year of water left, California passed new water restrictions today which are WIMPY AS HELL. Here, California, I fixed them for you.

Admittedly, the impact of these restrictions is lessened because many of the state's cities already have their own water restrictions. But even where the new mandates have good intentions, like restricting landscaping irrigation to two days a week or waiting until 48 hours after measurable rainfall before watering, they still fall painfully short. And some are just laughable. Restaurants can only provide water "on request"? Hotels should "offer" guests the option of not having their towels washed daily? So timid! (And I'm sorry, if you require more than one towel during the average hotel stay you probably shouldn't be allowed to stay in said hotel.)

Let's get real. Here's what California needs to do now.

Kill all lawns

It is time for California to join the decent people in the rest of the Western United States, where residents have the sense to let their lawns go dormant during the dry season. When the water that falls from the sky is not enough to perpetuate your yard's emerald hue, it is not okay to spew your hose upon it for hours at a time. Stop watering your lawn. If you're really attached to that swatch of turf, it will come back when it rains.

That includes golf courses

Any green space which was not expressly created for the public's use and well-being should also be required to "brown out." That means golf courses, corporate campuses. Exempt: Parks, schools. Cemeteries are allowed to paint the brown grass green.

And also car washes

What if a car wash was prohibitively expensive in the way that gas prices sometimes are? You wouldn't drive your car, right? You might not even own a car, right? Solves several problems at once.

Require cities to landscape with native plants

Even more effective than asking cities to cut back on watering public landscaping is requiring them to use native, drought-tolerant plants in the first place. This needs to happen yesterday. City landscapers can pass along their wisdom to the public through workshops at neighborhood nurseries, which should jack up the prices of non-native plants.

Implement lawn "buy back" programs

If the state really wants to get serious about changing the conversation around the drought it needs to pay people to make the change. Los Angeles already has a successful program which offers $3.75 per square foot for people who choose to replace their lawns with drought-tolerant plants. There is no reason why this can't be implemented across the state to foster true impact.

Ban the bottling of water in the state

Because bottled water is BULLSHIT. But also because most of the bottled water in the US comes from the places in California experiencing the worst drought.

Mandate enforcement of water restrictions

The biggest problem with these restrictions is that most of these restrictions carry no penalties whatsoever. There are fines, maybe, but no one reports the offenders, and no one follows up from the city. Wait, cities don't have the manpower to send the water police out in force? That's why we need to...

Launch a #waterhog campaign

See a green lawn? #waterhog Notice a business with sprinklers on? #waterhog Catch someone spraying down their Lexus? #waterhog Geotagged, hashtagged social media posts would not only file an official complaint with the state which could be followed up with a fine, like a 311 report does in many cities, but they also publicly shame the offender.

Appoint a water czar

California, land of celebrities who are using their large numbers of Instagram followers to promote caffeinated booze: Why hasn't a big name taken on this cause? Perhaps because most of them are too busy trucking in water for their own lawns? Jerry Brown needs a high-profile celebrity to deliver some real talk about the drought by posting overshare-y "if it's yellow let it mellow" videos to Snapchat.

Assemble a tech task force

Where is the Hyperloop for water? Why aren't there more desalination startups? Who is promoting dietary alternatives to meat and almonds and all the other resource-sucking foods which are parching the Central Valley? We have no shortage of people who are working every day to tackle stunningly brilliant solutions to the world's problems. Let's get them working on the biggest issue the state has ever confronted. Plus there's plenty of opportunity for tech companies to recoup some of their intellectual capital. For example, Google could simply repurpose its entire Glass team as Google Glass (of Water), and help envision a better, brighter future for California.

AP Photo/Jae C. Hong

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Here Are the Water Restrictions California Should Have Passed Today

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After confronting the truth that we have only one year of water left, California passed new water restrictions today which are WIMPY AS HELL. Here, California, I fixed them for you. Admittedly, the impact of these restrictions is lessened because many of the state's cities already have their own water restrictions.

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Almond Harvesting Facts- Invasion of Hedge Fund -- Almonds

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Almond Harvesting Facts- Invasion of Hedge Fund -- Almonds

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Pic and info on almonf harvesting

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On a sunbaked August morning, off a rural road in the heart of California's Central Valley, a low-slung tractor rumbles between neat rows of identical, light-green trees. To its right, a plume of dust billows up, thick enough to blot out the sky above the treetops. A chute on the truck sends a steady stream of almonds flying into the trailer hitched behind.

Another truck has already been through the orchard, armed with a giant metal forceps that grabs each tree trunk and shakes it violently for a few seconds, sending nuts clattering to the ground like a slow-moving hailstorm. Next, sweepers come through, mounding the almonds into long, narrow piles along the center of each row. Last comes the harvester to hoover them up.

As I gape at the efficiency on display-just a few workers and machines can harvest thousands of trees in several hours-an angry voice cuts through the truck's roar. "Hey!" It's a guy who looks to be in his 20s, slender, in a dusty baseball cap, a plaid shirt, and jeans. He says he's heard from my travel companions-a photographer and an almond specialist from the University of California Cooperative Extension named Gurreet Brar -that I'm a magazine writer looking into California's almond boom. He demands to know what my angle is. Am I going to blame almonds for the state's mounting water woes, like other articles have?

When I assure him I'm after the whole story, he softens. He declines to give his name or be interviewed at length, but says his family farms almonds, apricots, and raisin grapes. Now they're pulling the grapes to put in more almonds-raisins, he explains, aren't a very well-marketed crop, so it's harder to make a profit. And with that, he excuses himself to go manage the harvest.

His logic is unassailable. Almond products-snack mixes, butters, milk-are flying off supermarket shelves. The value of the California almond market hit $4.8 billion in 2012-that's triple the level of a decade earlier. Only dairy is worth more to the state than almonds and grapes. In fact, almonds, along with California-grown pistachios and walnuts, are becoming so lucrative that big investment funds, eager to get in on the boom, are snapping up land and dropping in trees.

There's just one problem: Almond orchards require about a third more water per acre than grape vineyards. In fact, they're one of California's thirstiest crops. It takes a gallon of water to produce a single almond-more than three times the amount required for a grape and two and a half times as much for a strawberry. There's more water embedded in just four almonds than there is in a full head of lettuce. But unlike row crops, which farmers can choose not to plant during dry spells, almond trees must be watered no matter what.

In the midst of the worst drought in California's history, you might expect almonds' extreme thirst to be a deal breaker. But it's not. In fact, the drought has had hardly any impact at all on the almond boom. The state's farmers bought at least 8.33 million young almond trees between July 2013 and July 2014, a 25 percent increase from the previous year. About a quarter of the saplings went to replace old orchards, but most of the rest were new plantings, some 48,000 acres' worth, an area equal to three Manhattans.

In order to thrive, almond trees need a Mediterranean climate, hot summers and mild winters. Those come free in the Central Valley. But steady access to water is just as crucial to an almond grove's success. So where is the water for all these new orchards coming from? No longer California's famed irrigation projects, which draw on the state's rivers and have slowed to a trickle during the drought. Instead, farmers are tapping into groundwater.

In all of the other water-scarce states in the West, authorities restrict how much water a user can pump out of the ground. But in California, landowners can drop a well wherever they want, unimpeded by the state. Some counties require permits for wells (though they're usually easy to get), and in a few Central Valley watersheds, things have gotten so contentious that courts have stepped in to limit water pumping. But mostly, California groundwater is yours for the taking. As the State Water Resources Control Board puts it on its website, "To get a right to groundwater, you simply extract the water and use it for a beneficial purpose."

As a result, Central Valley farmers have for years been drawing down groundwater at an alarming rate. Between 2003 and 2010, the valley's aquifers lost a total of 20 cubic kilometers of groundwater-enough to meet the household water needs of New York City for 11 years.

And then came the current drought, which started in 2011, when suddenly the region's groundwater was being pumped up at an estimated rate of nearly seven cubic kilometers per year. That's the same amount of water that everyone in Texas uses at home annually. Jay Famiglietti, a senior water scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who tracks groundwater depletion, points out that no one knows exactly how much water is left in the region's aquifers-mainly because the state's lax regulation means no one keeps track-but the current depletion rate has pushed the state "to the edge of a cliff," he recently wrote. Meanwhile, several recent studies suggest that the West is actually in the early stages of a multidecade " megadrought."

Experts worry that the combination of overpumping and drought could be catastrophic for the Central Valley, whose economy depends on being one of the world's most productive farming areas. Richard Howitt, an agricultural economist at the University of California-Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, told me that he considers the situation "a slow-moving train wreck."

You may think of almonds as the crunchy joy in your candy bar, the protein blast in your cereal. But to Wall Street, they have emerged as a white-hot global commodity-spawning a mini-gold-rush for the Central Valley, where more than 80 percent of the world's almonds, as well as increasing percentages of pistachios and walnuts (43 percent and 28 percent, respectively), are grown.

According to UC-Davis' Howitt, the shift to almonds and other tree nuts is part of a long-term trend in California, the nation's top agricultural state. Farmers in the Central Valley once grew mostly wheat and cattle. But over time, they have gravitated toward more-lucrative crops that take advantage of the region's rare climate. "It's a normal, natural process driven by market demand," Howitt says. "We grow the stuff that people buy more of when they have more money." Like nuts, which can replace low-margin products such as cotton, corn, or beef.

Then there's Hancock Agricultural Investment Group, a subsidiary of the sprawling Canadian insurance and financial services giant Manulife Financial. It manages $2.1 billion worth of farmland, mainly for large institutional investors like pension funds. Individuals can buy in-for a minimum investment of $5 million. HAIG owns at least 24,000 acres of almonds, pistachios, and walnuts, making it California's second-largest nut grower. In a recent report to investors, HAIG reported that its nut holdings delivered more than 30 percent in total return (income from crop sales plus land appreciation) in 2013, far outpacing gains from its other crops like wine grapes, apples, cranberries, corn, and soybeans.

But the largest California nut grower of all is neither an insurance conglomerate nor (exactly) a family operation. Paramount Farms, owned by the Beverly Hills magnates Stewart and Lynda Resnick, has more than 70,000 acres of almonds and pistachios, and claims on its website to be the "world's largest vertically integrated supplier" of those commodities, meaning that its operations control (and capture profits from) all the phases of production, from growing to processing and marketing. The power couple has also been adept at ensuring their nut and pomegranate plantations get plenty of surface water: They store it for dry years in the Kern Water Bank, a man-made, underground reservoir built by the state of California for public water storage. In an infamous deal in 1994, the Resnicks' holding company gained a controlling interest in the water bank, making their nut groves less directly reliant on groundwater. Meanwhile, they've ramped up their campaign donations at the federal level, where lawmakers have a say in how much surface water-which, unlike groundwater, is highly regulated by both the federal and state governments-makes it into the Kern bank.

Having previously turned island water (Fiji) and pomegranate juice (Pom Wonderful) into ubiquitous products-and amassed a $3.8 billion fortune -the Resnicks have more recently turned their attention to pistachios, hiring the Korean rapper Psy and Stephen Colbert ("They're wonderful. I'm wonderful...I think we're done") to pitch their Wonderful Pistachios brand.

According to Howitt, the flow of big money into almonds is a "rational response" to two broad economic factors: low interest rates, which make safe investments like bonds unattractive, and that ever-rising demand from China.

All summer long, the Central Valley is baking hot (100-plus-degree days are common) and dry as dust. Yet the valley ranks as one of the globe's most productive farm landscapes, accounting for a third of US-grown fruits and vegetables. Making it bloom requires moving titanic amounts of water, mostly from snowmelt flowing down from the eastern mountain ranges and into California's elaborate network of canals and aqueducts. Of this total-what the state refers to as "developed" water-agriculture uses about 80 percent, and almond groves suck up nearly 9 percent of that. That's more than enough water, notes Carolee Krieger of the California Water Impact Network, to supply the yearly household needs of greater Los Angeles, San Diego, and the San Francisco Bay Area combined-around two-thirds of California's population.

There's a financial metaphor that helps to explain California's dilemma. To live off surface water is to live off your paycheck. To rely on groundwater is to tap into your 401(k). Every draft you take is one that you won't be able to replenish, at least not easily.

The water-drilling frenzy is worst in the San Joaquin Valley, which contains the great bulk of California's almond and pistachio production. In most San Joaquin counties, the number of well permits nearly doubled between 2011 and 2013, an analysis of county records by the San Jose Mercury News found. This region is home to the epicenter of California's nut juggernaut-Kern, Fresno, and Tulare counties, together known as the Tulare Basin. Kern and Fresno counties are by a wide margin the state's leading almond producers, churning out 43 percent of California's total harvest, or about one of every three almonds consumed on Earth.

The Almond Board of California likes to point out that almond production has become considerably less water-intensive as farmers have turned to drip irrigation and other methods for squeezing more crop from each drop. Gurreet Brar, the University of California Cooperative Extension almond specialist, tells me that the amount of water it takes to produce a pound of almonds has fallen by a third since 1990. But amped-up production has more than offset efficiency gains. As recently as 1995, California orchards were cranking out 370 million pounds of almonds a year. In 2013, they produced 2 billion pounds-a five-and-a-half-fold increase. Today, 80 percent of almonds consumed around the world, and about 40 percent of pistachios, come from California.

And land devoted to almonds just keeps growing, expanding by 20 percent between 2007 and 2013 and now reaching 940,000 acres, an area larger than Rhode Island. Pistachios are spreading at an even faster clip. Between 2005 and 2012, pistachio acreage jumped 75 percent.

Last summer, as orchards grew, the drought persisted, and the water tables dropped, the panicked California Legislature finally did something that agriculture interests had successfully fought back for a century: It took a baby step in the direction of groundwater regulation. Legislation passed in September orders the state's watershed districts to create a framework for regulating groundwater-but the rules don't go into effect for six years, and no one knows yet how effective they will be. They could take decades to make a difference, and they are still weaker than those of other Western states-for example, they don't require a permitting process for new wells. Still, some farm groups-California's Agricultural Council and Farm Bureau, along with nut growers and processors- were outraged by the new legislation and lobbied against it.

The day after my trip to Fresno, I'm making my way down dirt roads alongside irrigation ditches, into a stand of new pistachio trees planted in neat, monotonous rows nearly to the horizon: some nine square miles of scrawny saplings, connected by drip irrigation tubes. It's like Iowa's endless cornfields, but with nuts.

Deep inside the orchard, I come upon a three-man crew working on a massive well. A red crane towers 30 or so feet into the sky next to a stack of 20-foot metal pipes. The crew shoos us back, but my guide for the day, John Burchard, the soft-spoken, energetic octogenarian who manages the local municipal water supply, can tell they're deepening a well.

A lanky man in dark dungarees, a long-sleeved blue work shirt, and a brown felt cowboy hat turned up sharply at the sides, Burchard has friendly eyes and a neatly trimmed white goatee. It's his job to deliver safe water to the 1,026 residents of Alpaugh, a hardscrabble farmworker town in the heart of the parched Tulare Basin. Tulare County granted 831 well permits in 2013- more than any other county in the San Joaquin Valley, and twice as many as in 2011.

Alpaugh was once rich in water -in fact, it was an island, sitting in the middle of Tulare Lake, the biggest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River before it was drained in the early 20th century to feed irrigation projects. Ever since, the lake-bottom land around it has been fertile farm country.

But these days, things are dire. Under a morning sun still cranking up to full fire, Burchard shows me one of the town's two active wells. For years, Alpaugh got its tap water from here. But as the drought dragged on, Burchard found the water table dropping a stunning 10 feet per week. By May, the well became inoperable. "If we kept using it, we'd soon be pumping air," he says.

So he had to switch to the town's other well, which is 100 feet deeper. It taps a different part of the aquifer with higher levels of naturally occurring arsenic. Burchard's first well was barely compliant with the EPA's arsenic limit, 10 parts per billion. The water from the deeper well had 30 parts per billion.

Meanwhile, under a recent decree from Gov. Jerry Brown, Burchard says he has to impose "severe" water use restrictions on Alpaugh's residents, as part of a statewide effort to combat the drought. People who already can't drink the water will now face tough rules on when they can water their lawns and gardens. As he explains what he calls this "bitter irony," I look around at the town's low-slung modest houses with their small yards supporting patches of grass and the occasional fruit tree. Peach trees that supply fresh fruit to cash-strapped families face water restrictions while the vast nut orchards around them thrive. Of course, any water savings Burchard manages to wring out of residents will amount to a rounding error compared to the water going to agriculture. In his irrigation district, just 2 percent of water goes to homes. The other 98 percent goes to farms.

When will California's nut boom end? Might some other country-say, China-just step in and put down massive plantings? Doubtful, says David Doll, an orchard adviser with the University of California Cooperative Extension. No other region has California's combination of land, climate, infrastructure, and research support to supplant it as the globe's almond king. "India and China have tried, and failed," he says.

The new groundwater legislation won't solve the problems-at least not any time soon. It takes a gradualist approach to an urgent problem-the state's most water-stressed districts don't have to submit sustainability plans until 2020, and then they have additional 20 years to prevent a "significant and unreasonable depletion of supply," which isn't clearly defined.

And the California Water Impact Network's Krieger fears that corporate farms will hijack the process. She says that the special water districts that the legislation calls on to regulate water are prone to takeover by private interests-like what happened when the Resnicks gained a controlling interest in the Kern Water Bank. "The last thing California needs is the privatization of our groundwater," she says.

On the other hand, California's nut industry may need strong regulation to save itself from its own thirst. In a September note to investors, Brett Hundley, an agribusiness analyst for BB&T Capital Markets, wrote that "the long-term viability of the industry depends on [effective regulation], given sustained declines in surface water availability." That is, without regulation, tree farms will use up the very water they depend on.

For now, Doll expects that the almond expansion will continue apace, ending only "when the crop stops making money"-if China loses its appetite for nuts, or the wells finally run dry. Until then, though, the orchards will surely keep growing. After my morning in Alpaugh, I headed about 40 miles south and west through Tulare County toward Lost Hills, a company town that houses the main almond-processing plant of the Resnicks' Paramount Farms.

This area was once home to King Cotton, and I still saw the occasional soft green field. But mostly, the roads were lined with almond and pistachio groves. For mile after mile, I sped past orchards, the bushy canopy studded with this year's bumper crop, gleaming and golden in the midday sun.

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On a sunbaked August morning, off a rural road in the heart of California's Central Valley, a low-slung tractor rumbles between neat rows of identical, light-green trees. To its right, a plume of dust billows up, thick enough to blot out the sky above the treetops.

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Video Before and After/ How to Save Water

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Video Before and After/ How to Save Water

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Disturbing pics before and after and some solutions

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california's drought: before and after - cnn video

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The scope of the problem becomes startling clear through images captured before the drought and what they look like today.

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Drought how to Save Water the California Way

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Drought how to Save Water the California Way

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Stats, accessible infographics

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Drought is not new to California. Most of its residents have been living with it for years, making them experts in conservation. We asked our readers in California how they have adapted to life with less water. Here are some of their suggestions.

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Drought is not new to California. Indeed most of its residents have been living with it for years, making them experts in conservation. We asked our readers in California how they have adapted to a life with less water. Here are some of their suggestions and tips on how to live with drought.

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Beneath California Crops, Groundwater Crisis Grows

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Beneath California Crops, Groundwater Crisis Grows

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Last week, Mr. Brown imposed mandatory cuts in urban water use, the first ever. He exempted farmers, who already had to deal with huge reductions in surface water from the state's irrigation works. Mr. Brown defended the decision on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday, saying, "They're providing most of the fruits and vegetables of America to a significant part of the world."

In normal times, agriculture consumes roughly 80 percent of the surface water available for human use in California, and experts say the state's water crisis will not be solved without a major contribution from farmers.

California's greatest resource in dry times is not its surface reservoirs, though, but its groundwater, and scientists say the drought has made the need for better controls obvious. While courts have taken charge in a few areas and imposed pumping limits, groundwater in most of the state has been a resource anyone could grab.

Yet putting strict limits in place is expected to take years. The new law, which took effect Jan. 1, does not call for reaching sustainability until the 2040s. Sustainability is vaguely defined in the statute, but in most basins will presumably mean a long-term balance between water going into the ground and water coming out. Scientists have no real idea if the groundwater supplies can last until the 2040s.

"I wish we could do it faster," Mark Cowin, director of California's Department of Water Resources, said in an interview. "I wish we would have started decades ago."

But Mr. Cowin noted that the state, after neglecting groundwater management for so long, had a lot of catching up to do. Years of bureaucratic reorganization and rule-drafting lie ahead. "This is the biggest game-changer of California water management of my generation," Mr. Cowin said.

In the near term, as the drought wears on and the scramble for water intensifies, farmers are among the victims of the drilling frenzy, as well as among its beneficiaries.

Growers with older, shallower wells are watching them go dry as neighbors drill deeper and suck the water table down. Pumping takes huge amounts of electricity to pull up deep water, and costs are rising. Some farmers are going into substantial debt to drill deeper wells, engaging in an arms race with their neighbors that they cannot afford to lose.

"You see the lack of regulation hurting the agricultural community as much as it hurts anybody else," said Doug Obegi, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco.

Against this backdrop, water-thirsty crops like almonds are still being planted in some parts of the Central Valley to supply an insatiable global demand that is yielding high prices.

The land devoted to almond orchards in California has doubled in 20 years, to 860,000 acres. The industry has been working hard to improve its efficiency, but growing a single almond can still require as much as a gallon of California's precious water.

The expansion of almonds, walnuts and other water-guzzling tree and vine crops has come under sharp criticism from some urban Californians. The groves make agriculture less flexible because the land cannot be idled in a drought without killing the trees.

Not even the strongest advocates of water management foresee a system in which California farmers are told what they can plant. As the new system evolves, though, the growers might well be given strict limits on how much groundwater they can pump, which could effectively rule out permanent crops like nuts and berries in some areas.

"We want to be careful in dealing with this drought not to go down the command-and-control route if we can avoid it," said Daniel Sumner, professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Davis. "It interrupts the flexibility, the creativity and the resilience that people in agriculture have already been using to deal with severe water cutbacks."

So far, the over-pumping of groundwater has helped farmers manage through three parched growing seasons.

They were forced to idle only about 5 percent of the state's irrigated land last year, though the figure is likely to be higher in 2015. The farmers have directed water to the highest-value crops, cutting lesser crops like alfalfa.

They have bought and sold surface water among themselves, making the best use of the available supply, experts like Dr. Sumner say. And the farmers' success at coping with the drought has meant relatively few layoffs of low-income farmworkers.

Still, costs are up and profits are down for many farmers and the thousands of small businesses that depend on them, spreading pain throughout the Central Valley and beyond. "It's been a tough couple of years, and it's just getting tougher in rural parts of California," said Dave Kranz, a spokesman for the California Farm Bureau Federation, a growers' organization.

Because groundwater has helped keep production up, replacing a large proportion of the surface water farmers have lost, the drought has not led to big price increases at the national level, even for crops that California dominates.

Once the drought ends, a growing population and a climate altered by human-caused global warming will continue to put California's water system under stress, experts say. A major question is how to manage the groundwater to get Californians through dry years.

Meeting that goal may have as much to do with how surface water is managed as with how much is pumped from the ground.

Several California experts used the metaphor of a bank account to describe the state's groundwater supply. Deposits need to be made in good times, they said, so that the water can be withdrawn in hard times.

Yet for decades, California farmers have been overdrawing many of the state's water-holding formations - its aquifers - even in years when surface water for irrigation was plentiful, the equivalent of overdrawing a checking account.

That will need to change, the experts said, with pumping being limited or even prohibited in wet years so that the underground water supply can recharge. Some land may need to be flooded on purpose so the water can seep downward.

The need for groundwater recharge may ultimately limit how much water farmers can have from the surface irrigation system, even in flush years - the same way that deposits in a bank account limit how many fancy dinners one can eat. Yet in a state where irrigation rights have been zealously guarded for generations, such limitations may not go down easily.

"It would be silly to think you are not going to have any fights," said Denise England, the water expert for Tulare County, toward the southern end of the Central Valley. She cited an aphorism of the West: "Whiskey's for drinking, and water's for fighting over."

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Beneath California Crops, Groundwater Crisis Grows

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Last week, Mr. Brown imposed mandatory cuts in urban water use, the first ever. He exempted farmers, who already had to deal with huge reductions in surface water from the state's irrigation works. Mr. Brown defended the decision on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday, saying, "They're providing most of the fruits and vegetables of America to a significant part of the world."

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Good source of visuals and stats. A scary discussion of where the Central Valley could be headed

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Last week when NASA announced that California is on its death bed and has only 12 months of water left, the news hit like a punch to the gut. "Data from NASA satellites show that the total amount of water stored in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins - that is, all of the snow, river and reservoir water, water in soils and groundwater combined - was 34 million acre-feet below normal in 2014. That loss is nearly 1.5 times the capacity of Lake Mead, America's largest reservoir," writes Jay Famiglietti of NASA.

Famiglietti adds: "Statewide, we've been dropping more than 12 million acre-feet of total water yearly since 2011. Roughly two-thirds of these losses are attributable to groundwater pumping for agricultural irrigation in the Central Valley. Farmers have little choice but to pump more groundwater during droughts, especially when their surface water allocations have been slashed 80% to 100%. But these pumping rates are excessive and unsustainable. Wells are running dry. In some areas of the Central Valley, the land is sinking by one foot or more per year."

Tensions are high in the state, and small conflicts are breaking out as people are beginning to steal water from others. Caroline Stanley of Refinery 29 writes: "As Tom McKay , the water crisis will likely have the biggest impact on the state's agricultural community - which currently accounts for a whopping 80% of its water usage. (According to Carolee Krieger, president and executive director of the California Water Impact Network, the almond crop alone uses enough water to supply 75 percent of the state's population.) But, recently, your average citizens are feeling it, too. People in the Bay Area are actually stealing water from their neighbors."

So what will happen when California turns into a dust bowl? Will the beauty and rich fabric of California's cultural history evaporate as well? SF Weekly put together a list of the top 51 reasons why California is America's greatest state, and you can read them HERE. BuzzFeed also points out the 32 reasons why California is the most beautiful place in the world and you can read them at BuzzFeed.com as well. And what about the amazing culture of spirituality, peace, tolerance, ingenuity, and love that permeates the Golden State - would we lose that too?

From another perspective, the North American food supply will also suffer a devastating blow because the state's agricultural production zone is smack dab in the middle of the drought's most severely hit area. And not only will California's farming industry come to a screeching halt - the little water that is left will be so filled with toxins and pollutants that it will be undrinkable for local residents. Mother Jones put together an eye-opening set of infographics which paint a disturbing picture, and you can study them below.

Mother Jones also points out that the lifeblood groundwater Californians are surviving on is 20,000 years old. Tom Knudson writes: "Such water is not just old. It's prehistoric. It is older than the earliest pyramids on the Nile, older than the world's oldest tree, the bristlecone pine. It was swirling down rivers and streams 15,000 to 20,000 years ago when humans were crossing the Bering Strait from Asia. Tapping such water is more than a scientific curiosity. It is one more sign that some parts of California are living beyond nature's means, with implications that could ripple into the next century and beyond as climate change turns the region warmer and robs moisture from the sky. 'What I see going on is a future disaster. You are removing water that's been there a long, long time. And it will probably take a long time to replace it. We are mining water that cannot be readily replaced,' said Vance Kennedy, a 91-year-old retired research hydrologist in the Central Valley."

The California water crisis is reminiscent of The Dust Bowl, also known as the Dirty Thirties - "a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the US and Canadian prairies during the 1930s" ( Wikipedia). "Severe drought and a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent wind erosion (the Aeolian processes) caused the phenomenon. The drought came in three waves, 1934, 1936, and 1939-40, but some regions of the high plains experienced drought conditions for as many as eight years. With insufficient understanding of the ecology of the plains, farmers had conducted extensive deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains during the previous decade; this had displaced the native, deep-rooted grasses that normally trapped soil and moisture even during periods of drought and high winds. The rapid mechanization of farm equipment, especially small gasoline tractors, and widespread use of the combine harvester contributed to farmers' decisions to convert arid grassland (much of which received no more than 10 inches (250 mm) of precipitation per year) to cultivated cropland."

The Dust Bowl resulted in a mass evacuation of the heartland, as tens of thousands of people were forced to abandon their farms. A similar evacuation is already underway in California as many farmers have been forced to give up. Unlike the Dust Bowl, however, California's crisis doesn't end with abandoned farms - it ends with abandoned cities.

SEE ALSO: Las Vegas Will Run Dry In 4 Years: Watch "LAST CALL AT THE OASIS" Documentary And Shit Your Pants

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R.I.P. California (1850-2016): What We'll Lose And Learn From The World's First Major Water Collapse

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Last week when NASA announced that California is on its death bed and has only 12 months of water left, the news hit like a punch to the gut.

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A Gorgeous—If Worrying—Portrait of What We're Up Against

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A Gorgeous—If Worrying—Portrait of What We're Up Against

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LOS ANGELES - For more than a century, California has been the state where people flocked for a better life - 164,000 square miles of mountains, farmland and coastline, shimmering with ambition and dreams, money and beauty. It was the cutting-edge symbol of possibility: Hollywood, Silicon Valley, aerospace, agriculture and vineyards.

But now a punishing drought - and the unprecedented measures the state announced last week to compel people to reduce water consumption - is forcing a reconsideration of whether the aspiration of untrammeled growth that has for so long been this state's driving engine has run against the limits of nature.

The 25 percent cut in water consumption ordered by Gov. Jerry Brown raises fundamental questions about what life in California will be like in the years ahead, and even whether this state faces the prospect of people leaving for wetter climates - assuming, as Mr. Brown and other state leaders do, that this marks a permanent change in the climate, rather than a particularly severe cyclical drought.

This state has survived many a catastrophe before - and defied the doomsayers who have regularly proclaimed the death of the California dream - as it emerged, often stronger, from the challenges of earthquakes, an energy crisis and, most recently, a budgetary collapse that forced years of devastating cuts in spending. These days, the economy is thriving, the population is growing, the state budget is in surplus, and development is exploding from Silicon Valley to San Diego; the evidence of it can be seen in the construction cranes dotting the skylines of Los Angeles and San Francisco.

But even California's biggest advocates are wondering if the severity of this drought, now in its fourth year, is going to force a change in the way the state does business.

Can Los Angeles continue to dominate as the country's capital of entertainment and glamour, and Silicon Valley as the center of high tech, if people are forbidden to take a shower for more than five minutes and water bills become prohibitively expensive? Will tourists worry about coming? Will businesses continue their expansion in places like San Francisco and Venice?

"Mother Nature didn't intend for 40 million people to live here," said Kevin Starr, a historian at the University of Southern California who has written extensively about this state. "This is literally a culture that since the 1880s has progressively invented, invented and reinvented itself. At what point does this invention begin to hit limits?"

California, Dr. Starr said, "is not going to go under, but we are going to have to go in a different way."

An estimated 38.8 million people live in California today, more than double the 15.7 million people who lived here in 1960, and the state's labor force exploded to 18.9 million in 2013 from 6.4 million people in 1960.

California's $2.2 trillion economy today is the seventh largest in the world, more than quadruple the $520 billion economy of 1963, adjusted for inflation. The median household income jumped to an estimated $61,094 in 2013 from $44,772 in 1960, also adjusted for inflation.

"You just can't live the way you always have," said Mr. Brown, a Democrat who is in his fourth term as governor.

"For over 10,000 years, people lived in California, but the number of those people were never more than 300,000 or 400,000," Mr. Brown said. "Now we are embarked upon an experiment that no one has ever tried: 38 million people, with 32 million vehicles, living at the level of comfort that we all strive to attain. This will require adjustment. This will require learning."

Interactive Graphic: How Has the Drought Affected California's Water Use?

This disconnect, as it were, can be seen in places like Palm Springs, in the middle of the desert, where daily per capita water use is 201 gallons - more than double the state average. A recent drive through the community offered a drought-defying tableau of burbling fountains, flowers, lush lawns, golf courses and trees. The smell of mowed lawn was in the air.

But the drought is now forcing change in a place that long identified itself as "America's desert oasis." Palm Springs has ordered 50 percent cuts in water use by city agencies, and plans to replace the lawns and annual flowers around city buildings with native landscapes. It is digging up the grassy median into town that unfurled before visitors like a carpet at a Hollywood premiere. It is paying residents to replace their lawns with rocks and desert plants, and offering rebates to people who install low-flow toilets.

At the airport that once welcomed winter-chilled tourists with eight acres of turf and flowers, city officials are in the early stages of replacing the grass with cactus, desert bushes and paloverde trees. The city had hoped to replace the entire lawn, but the project's $2 million price tag forced it to begin instead with three acres, said David Ready, the city manager.

"Years ago the idea was, come to Palm Springs, and people see the grass and the lushness and the green," Mr. Ready said. "We've got to change the way we consume water."
Fallow Fields
Other places face different threats to their way of life. Mayor Robert Silva of Mendota, in the heart of the agricultural Central Valley, said unemployment among farmworkers had soared as the soil turned to crust and farmers left half or more of their fields fallow. Many people are traveling 60 or 70 miles to look for work, Mr. Silva said, and families are increasingly relying on food donations.

"You can't pay the bills with free food," he said. "Give me some water, and I know I can go to work, that's the bottom line."

Richard White, a history professor at Stanford University, said the scarcity of water could result in a decline in housing construction, at a time when there has been a burst of desperately needed residential development in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco.

"It's going to be harder and harder to build new housing without an adequate water supply," he said. "How many developments can you afford if you don't have water?"

Greg Smith, 51, a web developer who works from his home in Escondido, said he was considering moving to Washington State because of his distress at what he described as the state's slow response to the drought.

"If this gets out of control, I'll probably end up leaving," Mr. Smith said. "This has been a problem for as long as I've been alive."

"I've watched this state get trampled by developers," he added. "They keep building homes, but where's the water going to come from?"

The governor's executive order mandates a 25 percent overall reduction in water use throughout the state, to be achieved with varying requirements in different cities and villages. The 400 local water supply agencies will determine how to achieve that goal; much of it is expected to be done by imposing new restrictions on lawn watering. The 25 percent reduction does not apply to farms, which consume the great bulk of this state's water.

State officials signaled on Friday that reductions in water supplies for farmers were likely to be announced in the coming weeks, and there is also likely to be increased pressure on the farms to move away from certain water-intensive crops - like almonds.
A New Normal
Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles, pointing to Mr. Brown's executive order and his own city's success in reducing water consumption, said he was confident that the state would find ways to deal with an era of reduced water supplies, in a way that would permit it to continue to grow and thrive.

"We have to deal with a new normal," Mr. Garcetti said. "That said, do we have enough water to sustain life here? Absolutely. Do we have enough water to grow economically? Absolutely."

"Cities that are much drier and truly desert - Phoenix, Las Vegas - have shown the ability to have economic growth," he said.

Allan Zaremberg, president of the California Chamber of Commerce, rejected the idea that the drought and the state's response to it would prompt industries to move away or stop adding jobs. "The rest of the economy is managing it, learning how to deal with it," he said.

This is hardly the first crisis California has faced; there has always been a tension between the natural beauty and delights of living in California and the external threats, be they the dizzying ups-and-downs of the state budget, the rolling blackouts during the energy crisis in 2000 and 2001, the earthquakes or periodic droughts.

"People on the East Coast always want to say that the glow of California is gone," said Felicia Marcus, the head of the State Water Resources Control Board, which is putting into effect the 25 percent reduction in water use ordered by Mr. Brown last week. "It isn't. I don't see it as any diminishment about our prospect of growth. There has to be a more evolved way about using the resources we have. We have a long way to go before we have tapped out our resources."

The critical question is the extent to which Mr. Brown has succeeded in persuading people here to shake long-held habits and assumptions.

"I'm not going to stop watering," said Matthew Post, 45, referring to the gardens around his Benedict Canyon home. "The state does not know how to arrange the resources they have, and so we have to pay for it," he said. "They say that they will raise the prices because there is a drought, but when the drought ends, will they reduce the prices?"

Much like the Gold Rush more than 150 years ago or the rise of Silicon Valley, the assumption of cheap and abundant water has been a crucial part of California's identity, history and economy.

And until recently, it seemed that the California dream was sustainable: booming cities, wide lawns in the suburbs, green golf courses in an otherwise parched landscape and, above all, a vibrant agricultural sector in places not much wetter than a desert.

Although there were serious droughts in the mid-1970s and late 1980s, the current water shortage and last week's executive order are a turning point for the state, and the West more generally, water experts say.

"The idea, at least until the latter part of the 20th century, was that water would be cheap and plentiful and the focus was on developing new supplies," said Heather Cooley, water program director for the Pacific Institute, an environmental research group based in Oakland. "Folks realize we have now reached the limits of supply, so the focus is on demand."

While the mandatory cuts in home water use are the first ever, efficiency has been slowly gaining ground in recent decades. Total water use in Los Angeles, San Francisco and many other urban areas is now lower than it was in 1980, despite the huge economic growth and population increases.

The latest restrictions represent a cultural change, as well as a lifestyle one, going well beyond taking shorter showers or forgoing the Sunday afternoon ritual of hosing down the family car.

Half of residential use is outdoors, primarily lawns, Ms. Cooley said. "And what Californians see as beautiful," she said, "has been a lawn that has been the standard for front yards and backyards."

Now, with utilities paying people to replace thirsty traditional grass turf with water-sipping native plants and other drought-tolerant shrubbery, long-held aesthetics are shifting. "This will change what Californians see as beautiful," she said.

But even a significant drop in residential water use will not move the consumption needle nearly as much as even a small reduction by farmers. Of all the surface water consumed in the state, roughly 80 percent is earmarked for the agricultural sector.

"The big question is agriculture, and there are difficult trade-offs that need to be made," said Katrina Jessoe, assistant professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Davis.

Bill Melzer, 72, a bond broker walking his dog on a sunny morning in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, said he was worried about the drought, about the prospect of higher fines for using too much water and about what might happen to the agriculture industry. But he said he was not worried about the future of his state.

"The dream of California now is probably different than back in the 1960s," he said. "Now it's more financial opportunity. I think before it was what we're looking at now - great weather, beach weather, tremendous diversity of lifestyle. Really, if you cannot find your lifestyle in this state, there is something wrong with you."

Dr. Starr, the University of Southern California historian, said the crisis would force California to do what was needed to carry on. "Our destiny is not just to be a fantasy place," he said. "As much as we enjoy the good life in California, we have to come to terms with Mother Nature, with our arid environment."

"Every time California has a problem - we ran out of electricity in the early 2000s, then we ran out of money, and now we are running out of water - people say California is over," Dr. Starr said. "It's not over. It's too important a part of American culture to be over. But it will change itself."

Opinion Op-Ed Contributor

The Many Droughts of California

Opinion Op-Ed Contributor

The Many Droughts of California

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Adam Nagourney, Jack Healy and Nelson D. Schwartz

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California Drought Tests History of Endless Growth

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LOS ANGELES - For more than a century, California has been the state where people flocked for a better life - 164,000 square miles of mountains, farmland and coastline, shimmering with ambition and dreams, money and beauty. It was the cutting-edge symbol of possibility: Hollywood, Silicon Valley, aerospace, agriculture and vineyards.

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The New Politics of the California Almond

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The New Politics of the California Almond

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The last several years have been heady ones for the California almond. Bolstered by increased domestic and international demand, as well as positive marketing about the nut's nutritional benefits, almonds have become California's largest cash crop.

Almonds are now California's largest food export, the sixth largest U.S. food export and the top specialty crop in America. The California crop is currently valued at over $6 billion dollars, according to the web site for Blue Diamond, the Sacramento based almond-processing collective that is the largest producer of almonds in the world.

But the drought is quickly changing the narrative on the nuts.

Now they're being blamed by the BBC for " sucking California dry." Similar claims have been made by liberal magazine Mother Jones, where a chart circulated widely on social media showed the total annual water use from the state's almond crop - about 3.5 billion cubic meters - to be about five times the water used by every resident and business in Los Angeles.

Surely nuts are not all to blame for the entirely of the state's water woes. But as Gov. Jerry Brown - himself a known almond aficionado - mandates the state's urban water users to cut their consumption by 25%, the almond is becoming a sort of short hand in the debate over how California should cope with historic water shortages.

The Great Almond Debate is a microcosm for bigger problems facing the state, raising questions about everything from how and how much California should grow, and illustrating how some of the state's most knotty problems are tangled further by an increasingly global economy.

The current Almond Debate also highlights the difficultly of long-term planning when it comes to resource management. Few were talking about record-breaking drought as all those almond orchards (and grape vines) were being planted across California over the last two decades.

Whose responsibility is it to try to anticipate these changes, and what power should they have to make rules to guide our growth?

Today, California produces more than 80 percent of the world's almonds. Increased domestic and global demand, particularly in emerging markets like India and China, have taken almond prices and demand to record levels.

In 2002, almonds were a $1.2 billion business in California. Today, it is five times that. California farmers have enjoyed the benefits of increased production and higher prices, and presumably the state as a whole has also benefitted from this almond boom. In 2013, there were 940,000 acres of almonds in California, according to the USDA.

Evolving dietary trends have increased momentum for the almond juggernaut. The average American now eats two pounds of almonds per year-more than twice as much as a decade ago.

It's not just us. The vast majority of California almonds - about 70 percent - are sold overseas. Almonds are the state's top agricultural export, with about $2.5 billion worth of nuts sold to other countries in 2012. To get a sense of the scale and value, that's about 2.5 times more than wine, the second-most-valuable California agricultural export, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Today's almond yields are more than three times what the state was producing in the late 1990s. A trip down Highway 99 provides the evidence of the almond boom in the Valley over the last two decades. Fields of seasonal crops like tomatoes and cotton have given way to permanent orchards from Tehama County to Kern.

As the LA Times' David Pierson reported last year, "There's twice as much almond acreage in California as there was two decades ago. Meanwhile, cotton acreage has dwindled to about 400,000 acres from 1.3 million acres over the same period."

It's easy to see why. Wholesale almond prices are about $3.50 per pound, an increase of about 250% from what they were in 2009.

Almonds are good business. But are they bad for California?

More almonds means more water. Unlike seasonal crops, almond orchards require water year round. Almonds now take up about 10 percent of the state's total water use.

The almond industry says their farmers are learning to be more efficient with water, and that the increase in orchards has not lead to an increase in the amount of water allocated to valley farms. But that hasn't stopped Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton from suggesting that the state should be more aggressive in regulating almonds and other thirsty crops.

Whether or not you believe that such a radical step is the answer, the new politics of the almond are undeniable. In drought-ravaged California, the nut is fast becoming a fissure in the debate over the allocation of diminishing, or at least uneven, natural resources.

The almond is the new shorthand in a long-running debate between rural and urban California, raising questions about the role of state regulation in shaping the future of the state, a high-protein touchstone highlighting a fundamental rift in the fight for California's future.

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The new politics of the California almond | The Grizzly Bear Project

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The last several years have been heady ones for the California almond. Bolstered by increased domestic and international demand, as well as positive marketing about the nut's nutritional benefits, almonds have become California's largest cash crop. Almonds are now California's largest food export, the sixth largest U.S.

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Further north, a smaller plant is expected to provide water for several towns around the Monterey Peninsula. But it won't come online for four years, long after a deadline for the local water company, California American, to stop sucking water from the Carmel River. Cal Am and local officials recently asked the state water board to delay that cutoff order - currently set for the end of 2016 - until the plant can be finished around 2020.

Meantime, a test well for the plant's subsurface intake, on a beach near the town of Marina, is pulling up a couple thousand gallons of saltwater per minute. Carmel Mayor Jason Burnett says that bolsters hopes that, pending the proper approvals, drilling of more slant wells could get underway in 2017.
Original Story:
Nowhere near enough water has fallen on California in years, and there's nothing you can do to make it rain.

So where else can we get water? One idea gaining traction is desalination: converting seawater into drinking water. While desal has long been confined by steep costs and environmental concerns, even some critics now say it merits a place in the state's water portfolio.

South of Los Angeles, in the city of Carlsbad, what will be the nation's largest desalination facility is nearly ready. For roughly a billion dollars, the plant will produce 7 percent of San Diego County's water. In Santa Barbara, a plant built amid the drought of the early 1990's, and idled by the return of rain, could come back online soon and provide 30 percent of the community's water.

Farther north, another desalination plant is expected to serve several towns in Monterey County. Jason Burnett, the mayor of Carmel, sometimes acts as a kind of spokesman for the planned project -- but he's hardly an evangelist.

"I'll say at the outset, I am not a fan of desal generally," says Burnett.

Apart from concerns about the expense, Burnett has a personal stake in desalination's environmental challenges. He's the son of two marine biologists, and his grandfather David Packard's Silicon Valley fortune was integral to founding the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Burnett himself worked on climate rules for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency before becoming Carmel's mayor.

"I've dedicated my professional life to working on climate change," Burnett says. "My family is very dedicated to the health of our oceans. So here I am advocating a project that has a large carbon footprint, and, if not done correctly, can hurt the oceans."

Burnett met me on a beach where the Carmel River flows out to the Pacific Ocean. Nearby, ladies in straw hats were hauling easels and paints out to the sand to capture the picturesque landscape. Wearing designer sunglasses and a crisp blue shirt, Burnett told me desalination was the community's last resort.

"We've explored a wide range of options," he says. "Everything was on the table -- harnessing icebergs and bringing them down, filling up huge balloons of water from up north and bringing them down."

It came to desal because the area's for-profit water supplier, California American Water Company, was told it had to find a new source. For decades Cal Am had relied on the Carmel River, but then came a cease-and-desist order intended to protect the river's threatened steelhead trout. There were years of wrangling and competing designs. A deadline was set for the end of next year -- a deadline Cal Am's proposed desal plant will not hit. All the same, a plan is moving forward.

"This is, at its core," says Burnett, "an environmental project."
Intakes and Outfalls
There are three main environmental considerations when building a desalination plant: how seawater is brought in, how the drinkable water is separated out, and what happens to the salt afterward.

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The simplest intake is essentially a straw in the ocean -- a design that risks trapping and killing sea life. One solution is to affix a grate to the end of such a pipe, but even then, tiny larvae and fish eggs can still be sucked in. Instead, regulators tend to prefer what's known as a "subsurface intake."

At a cement company's beachside site on Monterey Bay, California American is currently working on a proof-of-concept for this approach. They're using directional drilling, similar to the technology oil companies use to extract fossil fuels. The idea is to run a slant well hundreds of feet out, passing beneath the dunes to a spot under the waves. From below 200 feet of sand, and well insulated from any vulnerable sea life, Cal Am hopes to suck up a couple thousand gallons of water per minute.

It will take a huge amount of power to pump that much water, that far.

"Our energy bill is going up, no question," an engineer on the project told me.

This is the second concern with desalination: once the seawater gets to the plant, it has to be pushed through membranes fine enough that salt can't pass through them. That requires immense pressure - on the order of a pressure-washer.

An official at a smaller desal facility told me it took $25,000 of electricity per month to produce enough water for 1,200 homes. In Cal Am's case, they're hoping to reach a deal to power the plant using methane from a nearby landfill.

One other still-tentative design element addresses the third challenge of the desalination process: all that salt has to go somewhere.

Only about half of the saltwater piped into a desal plant is made drinkable. All the salt that's separated out ends up concentrated into the other half, in a kind of brine that's much denser than seawater. As a result, it doesn't easily mix back in.

If it's just dumped carelessly back into the ocean, it sinks, and can kill any marine life having the misfortune of dwelling on the seafloor below.

Blending the briny byproduct back into the ocean may involve sprayers, or in Cal Am's case, an existing outfall that the nearby Monterey Regional Water Pollution Control Agency uses to dispose of wastewater. It's a pipe that runs thousands of feet out to sea, with small holes spaced ten feet apart, so not too much brine would pour out in any one place.

The desal facility isn't expected to start delivering water to customers for several years, and in the meantime, it has to navigate a regulatory thicket of needed approvals.
Optional or Inevitable?
In recent years, desalination projects were considered in places like Marin County and Santa Cruz, only to end up sidelined amid skepticism. Between the environmental headaches and the cost of engineering work-arounds, critics argued the technology is often more trouble than it's worth.

To the extent that conservation's an option, it's much simpler and cheaper to do. Mayor Burnett says the towns along the Monterey Peninsula have just about wrung out that sponge for all it's worth: people there get by on 60 gallons per day -- less than half what many Californians use.

Susan Jordan with the California Coastal Protection Network is a longtime critic of desal. She says, indeed, communities should first exhaust their other options.

"If you're going to do something like desal," Jordan says, "you want to make sure you're doing everything you can in terms of conservation, water recycling, water re-use, and you don't want unsustainable development that just perpetuates your problem, or the state's problem."

That question of what constitutes sustainable development underpins the debate around desal. The counter-argument I heard from Scott Maloni, vice president at Poseidon Water, is: what if there are no alternatives?

"The larger concern is climate change, and what happens ten years from now and twenty years from now," says Maloni, whose company is building the big plant outside San Diego and hopes to add another like it in Huntington Beach. "Can you really count on the Colorado River or Northern California to continue to supply the vast majority of the state's population with water?"

I asked several people what percentage of California's overall water portfolio desalination might someday make up, and only Maloni was willing to venture a guess. He says such plants are most efficient when they're built big, thereby reaping economies of scale. Between that and the stringent permitting process, he says, you could probably count the number of viable sites on two hands.

"And so I think you could be looking at somewhere between 10 to 20 percent of the state's municipal and industrial demand," Maloni says.

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Why Isn't Desalination the Answer to All California's Water Problems?

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Further north, a smaller plant is expected to provide water for several towns around the Monterey Peninsula. But it won't come online for four years, long after a deadline for the local water company, California American, to stop sucking water from the Carmel River.

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Where we are waterwise

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It's nice to see that our numbers match up roughly to NASA's!

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California must receive three seasons of above-average rainfall to get back to a "manageable situation," said Jay Famiglietti, senior water-cycle scientist of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

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California drought: We need 11 trillion gallons of water in the bank

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California must receive three seasons of above-average rainfall to get back to a "manageable situation," said Jay Famiglietti, senior water-cycle scientist of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

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We're far from being out of the woods.

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The recent storms are doing wonders for the California psyche, but it will take more than a few days of rain to pull the state out of its precipitation doldrums.

Despite the steady patter, the Golden State is still wallowing in one of the worst dry spells in modern history. Just look at Lake Oroville, say the aficionados of agua. The water level in the primary reservoir for the State Water Project is lower than it has been in 37 years. In November, the Butte County lake fell below 1991 levels, the second-driest it has ever been.

"We've been flirting with the record," said Ted Thomas, spokesman for the California Department of Water Resources."It's in nature's hands whether Oroville reaches an all-time low or whether we begin to climb our way out of the drought, but it is certainly a very serious situation."

The second-largest drinking-water source in California is now holding 914,239 acre-feet, which is 26 percent of its 3.5 million-acre-foot capacity. That's 43 percent of the historic average for the date. It's also 34 percent less water than Oroville had a year ago at this time, when it held 1.4 million acre-feet. One acre-foot is enough water to cover an acre in one foot of water, the amount used by a typical family of four in one year.

The lake's all-time low of 882,000 acre-feet was reached on Sept. 7, 1977. Even if Oroville doesn't break that lowly record, it will undoubtedly take a long time for California to climb out of its parched hole. Experts say snowfall would have to reach 150 percent of normal this winter for California to make up the deficit caused by three years of drought.

"The drought has been unforgiving, and near-record lows at Oroville show just how grim the situation is," said Terry Erlewine, the general manager of the State Water Contractors, the nonprofit association of 27 public agencies that have contracts to purchase water from the state. "Stored water sustains California through dry years, but that water only lasts so long. We need storms this winter to refill our reservoirs."
A key resource
Lake Oroville may not be the biggest water storage facility in the state - the largest is Shasta Lake in Shasta County, part of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation 's Central Valley Project - but Lake Oroville is the reservoir most oriented toward urban and industrial uses. It provides water to 29 public agencies, including districts in Alameda, Contra Costa and Santa Clara counties. Together, they supply more than 25 million Californians with drinking water and irrigate more than 750,000 acres of farmland.

Water from the state and federal water projects combined irrigate some 9 million acres of farmland and quench the thirst of 38 million people.

Shasta Lake isn't any better than Lake Oroville. It is at only 23 percent of capacity, the same as Trinity Lake, the state's third-largest reservoir, in Trinity County. California's 12 largest reservoirs are all well below the historical averages for this time of year.

Oroville, which is in the Sierra foothills, is a key indicator of how the state is doing as a whole. It relies almost entirely on snowmelt, which is why climate change is such a worry in California. The snow that melts in the spring and summer in the Sierra contains up to 60 percent of California's water supply. Scientists predict that climate change will shorten winters and cause less snow to fall in the future.
Allotments slashed
The lack of water in the state caused Gov. Jerry Brown to declare a drought emergency in January. That led to drastic reductions in water allotments - many contractors got nothing - and forced residents to ration water and farmers to leave vast tracts of land fallow this past summer.

Orchard owners have had to pull out thirsty almond trees and dig new wells or deepen old ones. The wells have created a new emergency, further depleting the already over-tapped aquifer in the Central Valley and causing the ground in many places to subside.

As the drought worsened over the summer, agricultural interests and conservationists agreed that something had to be done to quench California's ever-increasing thirst. The question is whether the state should rely on existing reservoirs and conserve more or spend billions on storage projects and pipelines.

Conservationists are battling a proposed $25 billion tunnel project that would move water around the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the collection point for both the state and federal water projects. They have come up with a laundry list of possible alternatives, including water recycling, groundwater storage and even cloud seeding.

The state contractors complain that federal protections for fish, like the chinook salmon and the endangered delta smelt, have forced reductions in the amount of water they get from the delta. It is an example of how tensions are growing in almost direct proportion to the rate at which the water levels at Lake Oroville are sinking.

Water department officials admit they are feeling more optimistic now that Mother Nature has coughed up some rainstorms.

"We're hoping that these storms mean there will be the reversal of the dry trend that we've had and that we will start to climb out of this deep hole," said Thomas, the California Department of Water Resources spokesman. "We put our order in, but we don't know what's going to be delivered. We're hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst."

Peter Fimrite is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: pfimrite@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @pfimrite

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Rain soothes Californians, but state reservoirs in bad shape

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The recent storms are doing wonders for the California psyche, but it will take more than a few days of rain to pull the state out of its precipitation doldrums. Experts say snowfall would have to reach 150 percent of normal this winter for California to make up the deficit caused by three years of drought.

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As usual, i'm not sure how they arrive at the figure—especially when a generous sampling of major reservoirs currently has their collective levels at around 48%. But according to a news story today, the CDWR has ALL reservoirs at a collective 57% of average.

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The water in some of California's major reservoirs is nearing historic lows. The Department of Water Resources says statewide, all reservoirs are currently holding about 57 percent of their historic norms.

But levels are dropping significantly in some of the major reservoirs. Maury Roos, is the Chief Hydrologist with DWR. He says the Lake Oroville Reservoir is near the lowest level it's ever been.

Roos: It's not a whole lot above the minimum of record. It's 924,000 acre feet, the minimum we have was 882,000 thousand near the fall of 1977. That was a severe two-year drought, the worst two dry years we've had in a row."

One acre foot is enough to supply a typical residential household for a year.

Roos says right now the water levels are comparable to the last six year period of drought in the state in 1992. He says levels are typically at their lowest this time of year before the winter rains.

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Water Levels In California's Reservoirs Continue To Drop

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The water in some of California's major reservoirs is nearing historic lows. The Department of Water Resources says statewide, all reservoirs are currently holding about 57 percent of their historic norms. But levels are dropping significantly in some of the major reservoirs. Maury Roos, is the Chief Hydrologist with DWR.

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Don't forget about environmental needs for water; animals are also suffering from the drought.

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For untold millions of migrating ducks and geese, California wetlands serve as a crucial rest stop along a kind of freeway known as the Pacific Flyway. Dave Shuford, senior biologist for Point Blue Conservation Science, says irrigated farmlands are also crucial.

"We've lost 90 percent of all the wetlands in California," Shuford says, "and these birds used to depend on that."

In places like the Sacramento Valley, rice farmers would normally flood their fields after the harvest to break down leftover stalks. But this year, both farmers and birds have been forced to deal with less.

'We expect we'll see fewer salmon out in the ocean in a few years.' - John McManus, Golden Gate Salmon Association

"They're going to be concentrated in much smaller spaces, more likely to have disease transmission," Shuford says, "and there's also just less food resources for them for them to overwinter."

Already, an outbreak of botulism that officials say was exacerbated by drought has killed thousands of ducks, mostly mallards, near the Oregon border. A meager winter could also leave many birds frail as they head into next year's breeding season.

And in the rivers and streams that lace the flyway, the drought could leave a dent in populations of salmon, according to John McManus, who heads the Golden Gate Salmon Association. That's a coalition of fishermen, restaurants, businesses and tribes that rely on salmon for sustenance. McManus says more than 10,000 jobs in the state depend on salmon.

He paints a dire picture: salmon eggs need cold water, ideally 56 degrees or less. But the lower flows coming down the streams this year have been heated by the sun to near-fatal temperatures.

"Many of the eggs that are laid in river gravels this year are not expected to survive," McManus says. "We expect we'll see fewer salmon out in the ocean in a few years, when these fish would be adults."

Trickling streams have also been unusually clear and slow-moving this year. McManus says that's a deadly combination for baby salmon trying to dodge predators en route to the ocean.

"We don't have high flows that are moving them rapidly," he says. "We have very slow flows that are clear as a bell and make these salmon targets of predatory fish."

Environmental scientist Eric Kleinfelter, of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, saw a die-off of other fish in a small pond at the Cosumnes River Preserve, south of Sacramento. Hiking through tall, bristly grass near the edge of a marsh, Kleinfelter says as water levels dropped, the pond "obviously had issues with low dissolved oxygen," essentially suffocating the carp there.

"It was pretty dramatic. I remember looking over at that dead tree in the distance there," he says, pointing. "There were at least 25 vultures sitting in that tree, waiting for their morning meal of carp."

The preserve is also home to the giant garter snake, which is listed as a threatened species.

At five feet long, it's no anaconda, but it's plenty big as garter snakes go. And it needs water -- to find fish and frogs to eat, to hide from predators like coyotes and bobcats, and to help thermoregulate its cold-blooded body.

"They're definitely dependent on water, which is what made this project so urgent," Kleinfelter says.

In late summer, to help protect the rare snake, state wildlife crews actually piped in water from a nearby well. Other animals also appreciated the $72,000 delivery service.

"There were birds that were using the water there," Kleinfelter says. "You could see animal tracks coming up to the ditch and drinking out of the ditch."
Before and after shots of the snake marsh at Cosumnes River Preserve, south of Sacramento, where water was pumped in from a nearby well to help protect the giant garter snake. (Eric Kleinfelter/CA Department of Fish and Wildlife)
The stresses of the drought also extend to Point Reyes, where ranchers say tule elk are competing with their cattle for the same rye grasses.

And in some places, you can actually hear the drought. Bioacoustician Bernie Krause records animals in nature. For years, he's taken audio snapshots at Sugarloaf Ridge State Park in Sonoma County.

Up until recently, Krause's recordings featured dense layers of birdsong: white-crowned sparrows, juncos, towhees and woodpeckers, all with the steady hiss of a nearby creek underneath. But in his recording from this year, the creek is absent, an uneasy silence punctuated by a few lonely chirps.

"In 2014, not only did the stream drop off," Krause says, "but the bird density and diversity is way, way down."

It's a stark decline, but the number and variety of birds were already dwindling, so Krause is reluctant to pin that solely on the dry weather.

Researchers are still gathering data in the effort to assess the impact of the drought on wildlife -- so far.

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Parched: California Wildlife Suffers in Drought

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For untold millions of migrating ducks and geese, California wetlands serve as a crucial rest stop along a kind of freeway known as the Pacific Flyway. Dave Shuford, senior biologist for Point Blue Conservation Science, says irrigated farmlands are also crucial.

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Stan Porter - If you think it [running out of water] couldn't possibly happen in our country, our state, think again:

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Stan Porter - If you think it [running out of water] couldn't possibly happen in our country, our state, think again:

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The grandmother sat outside in her Sunday best next to a house with peeling paint, her canned iced tea resting on top of a washing machine that didn't work. She'd been without running water for four months.

Up an easy-to-miss dirt road, a 70-year-old woman moved 5-gallon jugs of water into her single-wide trailer. It was hard because she was weak from chemotherapy. Her water had stopped coming out of the tap three months ago.

This scattered Tulare County community may be the hardest-hit place in California's punishing drought. Of its 7,300 people, almost 1,000 have no running water.

Again and again, the answer was no.

At the local gas station where everyone stops for a cold soda, Johnson tuned in to the conversations.

"It was all, 'So-and-so's well ran dry,'" she said.

No public agency was keeping track. Until this week, California was the only Western state that didn't regulate groundwater, including an estimated 600,000 private, domestic wells mostly in more rural regions such as the Central Valley. Groundwater levels here have plunged by 60 feet or more in some spots, and tens of thousands of wells are in danger.

In July, Johnson decided to put together a list of people out of water in East Porterville. She figured that while she was at it, she should bring them water.

The Porterville Recorder ran an article that gave her phone number and address and said she was collecting bottled water for drought victims. The next day there were pallets of plastic bottles under her tarp carport.

Johnson deputized Matt Rogers, a 19-year-old former neighbor, as her right-hand man to make the deliveries. The calls from people needing water came as quickly as the donated bottles.

"I'd come home at night and cry," Johnson said. "I thought 'What are these people supposed to do?' They could be dying for lack of water and just get brushed under the carpet."

For months, scores of people had called the county, the next-door city of Porterville and the local water district to report dry wells. The answer was always the same: This agency isn't responsible for wells on private property.

But officials hadn't realized how many people were desperate.

Last month, volunteers, firefighters and county workers delivered a three-week emergency supply of drinking water to 300 homes.

In front of an East Porterville fire station, a storage tank was filled with water from a city hydrant that residents could use for bathing and flushing toilets. Signs warned in English and Spanish: "Do not use this water for drinking."

Nonprofit agencies began coordinating donations, grants and deliveries. Johnson was no longer a solo force. But she didn't stop her daily water runs.

"They're working their bejesus off at County Emergency Services," Johnson said. "But you've got to understand a place like East Porterville. Not everyone is going to fill out paperwork, and some people are hard to find."

On a day when the heat was pressing down like a waffle iron, Johnson and Rogers loaded up shrink-wrapped cases of bottled water.

Johnson pulled her lace-trimmed cowboy hat low. Her sunglasses had zebra stripes and rhinestones. She had elephants on her shirt and an elephant hanging from her rear-view mirror.

"Elephants this week. Next week it might be angels or horses," she said.

She used to be fickle about men too, until she married Howard, a physical therapist who prefers to stay in the background. They share a love of horses and 20 years ago bought a place with a corral in East Porterville, outside city limits.

"Did you guys even know that they say if you live on the east side, you're nothing?" Rogers asked her.

"Nobody's nothing," Johnson answered.

On a lawn as pale and scratchy as a hay bale, 9-year-old Destiny Carrillo attempted a cartwheel while her grandfather, Raul Carrillo, a house painter, watched.

"Hi, do you have water?" Johnson asked, pulling into their driveway.

"A little," he said. "But if two people take a shower, it's done."

Eight people lived in the tidy home. Destiny's mother, Veronica Carrillo, stepped out on a porch decorated with a small pot of geraniums.

"Thank you for the water. We didn't know where to go. We're grateful," she said, smoothing her daughter's hair.

On the next block, Manuel Dominguez, 84, didn't answer his door right away.

"Is he OK? He's old. He's always at home," Johnson said, adding another "Yoo-hoo!"

Dominguez came around the corner from the backyard, where he had been working on the pump of his well.

"He still doesn't want to believe that the ground is out of water," said his girlfriend, Gloria Acosta, 65, coming up the driveway with a stack of bottled water.

She used to bring 3 gallons of drinking water a day from her home in Porterville, but her landlord found out and put a stop to it. He was afraid it would run up his water bill. Now she has bought three cases of 24 bottles of water on sale for $7.98.

"Plus $2.38 CRV," she said. You keep track of stuff like that when you live on Social Security and baby-sitting money. Johnson added another 24-pack of water.

Dominguez's daughter Angie Nunagray came through the door with a 5-gallon jug of water for washing dishes. She cleans her father's house every day, being sure not to disturb his stacks of books, the loaded rifles propped in the corner or his collection of scissors covering one wall - because a man can never have too many scissors.

"I vacuum and dust, but you can't get it really clean without water," she said.

Dominguez pulled out a splintered guitar and sang Mexican waltzes. Acosta rolled her eyes.

"She thinks I'm loco, but she loves me," he said.

Down a dirt road, a schoolgirl carrying a flute case unchained a dog and they went for a walk, kicking up dust. A man washed his hands in a bucket of water. Places lucky enough to have a small pool of underground water had green lawns.

Ramirez agreed, but emphasized that she was strong enough to wheel the water in herself if she had to. She said she was a lucky woman. The last year was tough - her brother died, she fought cancer and the well ran dry in June. But she feels healthy now, her hair grew back, and look at her nice SUV.

"I didn't go to school or nothing and I got a car and a driver's license," she said. "I made a good deal and I can't even read or write."

Johnson's eyebrows lifted.

"Marcella, do you have those forms from the county for water deliveries? Do you need help filling them out?"

On the hood of Ramirez's car they puzzled over which boxes to check.

"Are you multiethnicity?" Johnson asked.

"Multi what?" Ramirez said. "I don't know what that means."

Back on the road, Johnson talked about the last time she'd seen rain.

"It was months ago. I was where I used to have lavender and so many flowers. I watched it dry up before it hit the ground."

On the main road through town, a mother gave her 6-year-old daughter a bath - in her clothes, in a blue plastic drum of nonpotable water. The girl giggled and ducked her head underwater to get out the shampoo.

Nearby, a tree swing swayed in a stir of hot air. Stairs led to the place where a trailer had once been, until a well ran dry and another family moved away to search for water.

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'Hi, do you have water?' In a Central Calif. town, answer is often no.

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The grandmother sat outside in her Sunday best next to a house with peeling paint, her canned iced tea resting on top of a washing machine that didn't work. She'd been without running water for four months. Up an easy-to-miss dirt road, a 70-year-old woman moved 5-gallon jugs of water into her single-wide trailer.

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If you're wondering about what the Merced Irrigation District is doing for the drought, check out their home page.

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If you're wondering about what the Merced Irrigation District is doing for the drought, check out their home page.

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MID - Merced Irrigation District - Default

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MID - Merced Irrigation District, Merced California. Irrigation Water, Electric, Hydro, Parks. Bill Pay

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Part of the problem with tallying ground water totals is that people don't have to report how much they're pumping out of private wells.

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To figure out how to protect Stanislaus County's groundwater resources, county officials know they must calculate how much groundwater is being pumped.

But most of the county's water wells are privately owned, and those doing the pumping currently don't have to tell anyone how much water they're using.

And many of them don't want people - especially lawyers - to find out.

At least that's what farmers who irrigate with well water have been telling the county's Water Advisory Committee.

That committee is crafting the county's new groundwater ordinance. Members are scheduled to discuss and vote on the ordinance Wednesday morning.

The current proposal would require well owners to start routinely disclosing their pumping data and water level measurements.

"There is a critical need for water well extraction data to analyze and understand the degree of groundwater depletion or recharge, to establish water budgets, and to balance conjunctive use of groundwater resources," the proposed ordinance explains.

But while county officials want that well data, they promise to keep it secret from the public.

The ordinance characterizes groundwater information as being "confidential and proprietary," and contends the need "to maintain the confidentiality of such information outweighs the public need" to see it.

So the county wants to exempt well data from California Public Records Act disclosure requirements.

Stanislaus County's top government attorney, John Doering, says this is legal.

The California Newspaper Publishers Association's lead attorney, Jim Ewert, says no.

Doering cites two government codes - one involving "trade secrets" and the other involving "geological and geophysical" and "plant production" data - as justification for denying the public access to groundwater records.

Ewert doesn't buy those arguments.

"They are claiming groundwater is a trade secret? Seriously?" Ewert said in response to Doering's legal citations. "What is unique about this info that creates a competitive disadvantage if known to competitors?"

Ewert said "there is not a single case" where groundwater data has been interpreted as being protected under the codes Doering cites.

Ewert and the newspaper association - to which The Modesto Bee belongs - routinely advocate for the rights of the public to access public information. The California Public Records Act guarantees that right in most cases.

"The California Constitution requires a narrow interpretation of any exemption that limits the public's right of access," Ewert said. "The county's interpretation of both these laws is a violation of this constitutional standard."

Bee Editor Joe Kieta agreed with Ewert's interpretation.

"Water is a shared resource, and any pump records maintained by government should be open for public inspection," Kieta said.

While the Water Advisory Committee is expected to vote on the proposed groundwater ordinance today, it won't be considered by the Stanislaus County Board of Supervisors until at least next month.

The committee will meet at 9 a.m. Wednesday in the Kirk Lindsey Alliance Center, 1020 10th St. in Modesto.

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Questions arise on plan to keep groundwater data secret

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To figure out how to protect Stanislaus County's groundwater resources, county officials know they must calculate how much groundwater is being pumped. But most of the county's water wells are privately owned, and those doing the pumping currently don't have to tell anyone how much water they're using.

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Some ideas on what we'll have to do to conserve water.

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The past few years have been California's driest on record. Forecasters predict that punishing droughts like the current one could become the new norm.

The state uses water rationing and a 90-year-old water distribution system to cope until the rains come. The system is a huge network of dams, canals and pipes that move water from the places it rains and snows to places it typically doesn't, like farms and cities.

"The system that we have was designed back in the 1930s through 1950s to meet population and land use needs of the time," says Doug Parker, director of the California Institute for Water Resources in Oakland.

"Now things have changed in the state and that system really hasn't evolved to keep up with the times in California," he says.

And so much has changed. First off, there weren't 38 million people here back then. The other problem is that they designed this system during an unusually wet period in the West. Turns out, droughts are pretty normal here.

"And the question is, how is that system going to perform in 2050?" Parker asks.

Not so well, unless some big changes come.

Parker says to picture it like this: You've got an old four-lane highway serving a city that everyone wants to move to. You need to add more lanes. But also some toll roads.

In water geek speak: Make it a 21st century water distribution system.

Gov. Jerry Brown is urging voters to approve a $7 billion water bond to upgrade that massive infrastructure system. The measure would pay for building two new large reservoirs and the expansion of dozens more.

There is also tens of millions of dollars earmarked for water recycling and reuse. Because, after all, you can't really build your way out of a drought if it doesn't rain again.

A sewage plant along the scenic coastline near Monterey Bay is already one step ahead.

"Yeah, I've heard it called 'showers to flowers,' which is a pretty good one," says Brian Lockwood, a hydrologist who helped set up the state-of-the-art recycled water waste plant.

"Much of the nation's strawberries, raspberries, blackberries and vegetable crops come from this valley," he says. "So we had to figure out, how can we protect the thriving agriculture industry of the Pajaro Valley?"

Lockwood's agency got to thinking. Why not capture all the waste water from all the cities here that would otherwise drain into the ocean, and instead, treat it, and pipe it back to farmers?

Seven million gallons of water now gets recycled here every day, and state drought relief money will soon allow the operation to expand. Farmers in the valley are happy about that.

"It supplements our wells, but it keeps us from pumping more water out of the ground," says Stuart Kitayama, a farmer who grows flowers and berries in the valley.

And this is a big deal in years like this one. At his farm, Kitayama measured 3 1/2 inches of rain all year. In a good year there's 20.

He says farmers like him were skeptical about this idea at first, but they're starting to see that to survive, they're going to have to get creative, and manage to live with less.

And a lot of people seem to think this state can manage its way through this drought.

Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, recently signed a sweeping executive order that aims to cut freshwater use in his city by 20 percent in the next three years.

"The ongoing drought has created a water crisis second to none," Garcetti said after signing the executive order. "We need bold action, and that is what I am delivering today."

LA wants to go local. Money is flowing to more of those showers-to-flowers projects and also storm water capture. The rains that do come in the future may come all at once, which could mess with the already crumbling infrastructure in the state.

This summer, a 90-year-old water main broke, sending 20 million gallons of precious water onto the streets in the Westwood neighborhood of LA. It made a drought-weary public cringe, but it also highlighted the fact that California cities lose an average of 15 percent of their water every year from leaky pipes and spills.

"It's gonna be a lift but we're gonna have to try," says Marcie Edwards, general manager of LA's Department of Water and Power.

She says fixing the city's plumbing system is also a top drought-coping strategy. Her agency cut its leaks by 40 percent in the past couple of years.

"We're going to be aggressively replacing both our main lines, our trunk lines, our valves," Edwards said. "So despite the fact that I think we're doing pretty good at that end, there's going to be more that's needed."

So, in the end, if California's going to cope in a drier world it may take an upgrade of all these things. The only certainty is that, if the big storms don't come for a fourth straight year, they're all about to get put to a serious test.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Transcript

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

The extreme drought in California has leaders thinking about how the state can survive in the future with a lot less water. There are predictions that punishing droughts like this one could be the new norm. So what can the nation's most populus state and one of the world's largest economies do if the rain doesn't come? NPR's Kirk Siegler went to find out.

KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE: These are extraordinary times in California - the driest years on record, water rationing and a water distribution system that's pushing 90 years old. It's a huge network of dams, canals and pipes that moves water from the places it rains and snows to places it typically doesn't like farms and cities. Doug Parker is someone who knows this thing inside and out.

DOUG PARKER: The system that we have was designed back in the 1930s through 1950s to meet population and land use needs of the time.

SIEGLER: I paid him a visit in Oakland where he heads the California Institute for Water Resources.

PARKER: Now things have changed in the state, and that system really hasn't evolved to keep up with the times in California.

SIEGLER: Think of all that's changed. First off, there weren't 38 million people here back then. The other problem is that they designed the system during an unusually wet period in the West. Turns out droughts are pretty normal here.

PARKER: And the question is how is that system going to perform in 2050?

SIEGLER: Not so well unless some big changes come. Parker says to picture it like this. You've got an old four-lane highway serving a city that everyone wants to move to, so you need to add more lanes, but also some toll roads. In water geek speak, make it a 21st-century water distribution system. So you have drought coping strategy number one - spend and build more.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

GOVERNOR JERRY BROWN: With the worst drought on record, we've seen devastation across California. Our reservoirs - way, way down - land where there used to be water.

SIEGLER: This is Governor Jerry Brown asking voters to approve a $7 billion water bond to upgrade that massive infrastructure system. The measure would pay for building two new large reservoirs and the expansion of dozens more. There is also tens of millions of dollars earmarked for water recycling and reuse because after all, you can't really build your way out of a drought if it doesn't rain again. And so we have drought coping strategy number two - efficiency, saving your way.

Let's take a trip over to the scenic coastline near Monterey Bay. There's a cool, misty sea breeze. Towering redwoods blanket the foothills. There's a sewage plant.

BRIAN LOCKWOOD: Yeah I've heard it called showers to flowers which is a pretty good one because...

SIEGLER: But this is no ordinary sewage treatment plant. Brian Lockwood is a hydrologist to help set up this, a state-of-the-art recycled wastewater plant.

LOCKWOOD: Much of the nation's strawberries, raspberries, blackberries and vegetable crops come from this valley, so we had to figure out how can we protect the thriving agricultural industry of the Pajaro Valley.

SIEGLER: So Lockwood's agency got to thinking. Why not capture all the wastewater from all the cities here that would otherwise drain into the ocean? Instead, treat it and pipe it back to farmers.

SIEGLER: Seven million gallons of water now gets recycled here every day, and state drought relief money will soon allow this operation to expand. Showers to flowers, get it? Stuart Kitayama is someone who actually grows flowers in this valley and some berries.

STUART KITAYAMA: It supplements our wells but it keeps us from pumping more water out of the ground.

SIEGLER: And this is a big deal in years like this. At his farm, Kitayama measured three and a half inches of rain all year. In a good year there's 20. He says farmers like him were skeptical about this idea at first, but they're starting to see that to survive, they're going to have to get creative and manage to live with less. That brings us to the third and final way California is trying to deal with the drought. A lot of people here seem to think this state can manage its way through this.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAYOR ERIC GARCETTI: Here we go.

(APPLAUSE)

SIEGLER: Here's the mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, signing a sweeping executive order that aims to cut freshwater use in this city by 20 percent in the next three years.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

GARCETTI: The ongoing drought has created a water crisis second to none. We need bold action, and that is what I'm delivering today.

SIEGLER: LA wants to go local. Money is flowing to more of those showers-to-flowers projects and also storm water capture. The rains that do come in the future may come all at once. And remember that infrastructure - the old highway? It's predicted that California cities lose an average 15 percent of their water every year due to leaky pipes and spills.

MARCIE EDWARDS: It's going to be a lift, but we're going to have to try.

SIEGLER: At the mayor's event, I met Marcie Edwards. She's general manager of LA's Department of Water and Power. She says fixing the city's plumbing system is a top drought coping strategy. Her agency has cut its leaks by 40 percent in the past couple years.

EDWARDS: We're going to be aggressively replacing both our mainlines, our trunk lines, our valves. So despite the fact I think we're doing pretty good at that end, there's going to be more that's needed.

SIEGLER: So in the end, if California's going to cope in a drier world, it may take some of all three of these things. The only certainty is that if the big storms don't come for a fourth straight year, they're all about to get put to a serious test. Kirk Siegler, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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Coping In A Drier World: California's Drought Survival Strategy

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The past few years have been California's driest on record. Forecasters predict that punishing droughts like the current one could become the new norm. The state uses water rationing and a 90-year-old water distribution system to cope until the rains come.

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The San Joaquin Valley town of Stratford has pumped so much groundwater that it has sunk 100 feet in two years!

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Beneath this small farm town at the end of what's left of the Kings River, the ground is sinking.

Going into the fourth year of drought, farmers have pumped so much water that the water table below Stratford fell 100 feet in two years. Land in some spots in the Central Valley has dropped a foot a year.

In September, the children of migrant farmworkers who usually come back to Stratford School a few weeks late, after the grape harvest, never came back at all.

But in Stratford - where the school has had some of the same teachers for 40 years, the auto parts store doubles as a coffeehouse and first names change but last names don't - survival isn't a given.

Even above ground, the town is sinking.

Arches at both ends of the town squarespell out S-T-R-A-T-F-O-R-D in the shape of a rainbow. Years ago there was a population sign, but people argue over the last number it gave. There are about 900 people left now.

The glory days, when the arches were entrances to burger joints and gas stations for Central Valley residents driving to Pismo Beach, faded decades before the drought.

"But nothing like this," said Josh Orton, manager of the farm equipment store his great-great-grandfather started in 1906. "There's just no water."

Two doors down at Hardin's Grocery, the inventory has evaporated to a puddle of chips, drinks, tobacco and pregnancy tests near the cash register.

Customers push open the door to the dim store and its empty shelves, hollering "Hey ya, Kenny, or " Hola, Kenny" over the door chimes.

" Oye, Carnal" - "hey, dude" - the Yemeni store owner with tired eyes answers in Spanish slang.

His name is Mahmod Alrihimi, but they've been calling him Kenny for 24 years, ever since he leased the business from Mr. Hardin, who still lives in a trailer behind the grocery. ("I don't know why 'Kenny.' Maybe it is easier for them to say?")

"I really love this town. I know so many families," he said.

A man put two packages of hot dog buns and a roll of paper towels on the counter.

"Hey, Kenny, OK if I pay for these after Friday?" he asked, lowering his voice.

Alrihimi nodded. But his stomach dropped. This was a man who had never asked for credit before.

The store owner had 29 receipts that constituted the week's IOUs. On the backs of two torn-up cigarette cartons, he wrote the running accounts: the ones where they owed $34, paid $12, then charged $8.

"It's too sad to say no. I think of their kids," said Alrihimi, a father of five.

"They don't have any money. I don't have any money. We're all trying to get through little-by-little-bit."

When he has to run errands, Darlene Lacey watches the store for him. She's been helping out since her husband died 13 years ago.

Alrihimi worries about her.

"I think that when people can't pay, she takes money out of her own pocket and puts it in the cash register," he said. "She is a very good-heart lady. But she has too little money."

Later that afternoon, when Alrihimi was at the bank, Lacey rang up two sodas for an elderly couple who asked for credit. Then she slipped $2 in the cash register.

"Kenny is hanging on by a thread," she said. "And, oh my gosh, our little town needs him."

Next door at the post office, a wall of boxes have "closed" stickers over them. They belong to families who've moved or haven't paid their bills.

The lone employee, Rick Kimball, is bending the rules and keeping mail for those still in town. ("They're working their tails off to get by. Seems like the least I can do.")

He likes learning about people by paying attention to their mail.

"The Hamiltons? Nice folks. All the women's first names start with "S" and all the men are named Tony," he said.

Johnny Caldeira, 36, picked up a package, then leaned his elbows on the counter to chat.

"I'm beginning to feel like a bartender," Kimball, a former parole officer and truck driver, told him.

"You're the hangout spot now," Caldeira said. "There aren't any other places left."

Caldeira went to Stratford School. Most of the classmates he graduated with in eighth grade are still in town.

"Adrian teaches fourth grade, Danny's in the reserves. The Meyers - George and Charlie - farm," Caldeira said. "They just lost their grandfather, old man Meyers. I think he was 100. We just lost Mr. Henry."

His former seventh-grade teacher, William Henry, persuaded Caldeira to go to college after he returned from the war in Iraq. This month the graduate takes the test for his credentials. He wants to teach in Stratford like the man who pushed him.

"Mr. Henry used to be in the Navy before he was a teacher, so when I came back, I could actually talk to him. He had seen things too.

"At first it was, 'How you doing? When you going back to school?' Then one day he comes in, slams down a college application and says, 'Now get your ass in school before I kick it.' That's a cleaned-up version. Mr. Henry had a mouth."

Each spring, the seventh- and eighth-graders still dance around a maypole, and there's always a festa at the Portuguese Hall.

But it's the Constitution Day Parade that is really something to behold, said David Orton, Josh's father.

The Navy base in Lemoore usually sends over a jet to loop around the arches. The ROTC kids from the high school the next town over march. A couple of farmers pull kindergartners on flatbed trucks. The Ortons add a tractor and Stratford School Principal Bill Bilbo rides his motorcycle - a crowd favorite.

"There are so many people in the parade that it leaves about 20 people watching," Orton said, shaking with laughter. "And the next year, we do it again. This town has a way of holding on."

The Orton family first came to farm in Stratford in the 1800s, when they got pushed off their Lemoore land by railroad barons.

Back then, their farm was on the edge of Tulare Lake - "the lake that once was." It had been the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi, some four and a half times bigger than Lake Tahoe. But the four Sierra rivers that flowed to the lake - the Kings, Kern, Kaweah and Tule - were dammed, diverting water that powerful landowners could own and sell. The crops for some 50 miles around Stratford grow on what would have been the bottom of a lake.

The tule fog that rises from the ground and blankets the Central Valley in a blinding thickness each winter is said to be a Yokut Indian curse that the stolen waters shall haunt this place forever.

"We're growing dirt," David Orton said. "It's a very popular crop around here right now."

On a Wednesday morning when the sky was still dawn-pink, Allyson Lemons and JD, her husband of 62 years, walked to the auto parts store. She carried a plate of fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies.

With all the town's cafes long gone, Chris Rodriques always puts on a pot of coffee at his family's store. On Wednesdays, Allyson and JD bring cookies. Last week it was her cornflake recipe.

The couple took their place at a long table with floral-patterned dinette chairs, where a group of neighbors had already settled in.

A couple of farmers read the Wall Street Journal. Dick Newton, 67, stretched out long legs while he checked college football scores in the local paper. Newton is one of the old families by dint of his mother's side, who settled in the area in 1905. His father's family didn't come till 1911.

They got to chatting about that time when Newton and his brother were water-skiing on the Kings River - there was water in it then - and from the far bank, Newton's brother shot an arrow at one of the Lemons' chickens. The arrow went right through the bird's neck and carried it to the front porch.

"You remember that?" Newton asked.

"Oh, do I," said Allyson Lemons. "I heard something. Came to the door. And it landed right at my feet. I cooked it up for dinner."

The Newton brother who shot the chicken is now farming marijuana on Orcas Island in Washington state, where the crop is legal.

Newton had a text from a farmer who said that 70% of his crop of pistachios were blanks - no nuts inside.

No one knew the reason for sure, but when the snows don't come and rain doesn't fall and even the fog thins, things go wrong.

On the other side of the square, Alrihimi opened for the day.

Three years ago he'd had a deli in back, with lines of field workers out the door twice a day. Now, he owed "so, so much money," he said.

The other week, a farmer had put a hand on his shoulder and said, "Kenny, when the rain comes, the money comes."

"I pray every day the water is coming back," he said. "I don't want to leave here."

He sat on a milk crate in the doorway of the store. Lacey pulled out a crate and joined him in the sunshine of another cloudless day.

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A parched farm town is sinking, and so are its residents' hearts

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Beneath this small farm town at the end of what's left of the Kings River, the ground is sinking. Going into the fourth year of drought, farmers have pumped so much water that the water table below Stratford fell 100 feet in two years.

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In Los Angeles, a dry winter could lead to tighter restrictions.

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No. Water shortages forced farmers to leave an estimated 500,000 acres unplanted this year. That accounts for only about 6% of the state's irrigated cropland. Growers in the Imperial Valley, who get water from the Colorado River, received full deliveries this year. Those Central Valley farmers who received no water from the region's big federal irrigation project pumped groundwater and bought supplies from districts that hold senior water rights.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Drought Watch: A dry winter could mean tougher restrictions

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
No. Water shortages forced farmers to leave an estimated 500,000 acres unplanted this year. That accounts for only about 6% of the state's irrigated cropland. Growers in the Imperial Valley, who get water from the Colorado River, received full deliveries this year.