Watered-down supplies

Making do with less water

Californians are facing a future of pinched water supplies as the population grows, agriculture thirsts and legal, political and natural events play out in unpredictable ways. The city of San Diego, like many Southern California agencies facing reduced supplies, has announced mandatory water conservation efforts.

Why don't we have enough water?

It's easy to blame it on the current drought plaguing the Western states, but that's only a small part of the answer.

If the drought ended tomorrow, experts warn that Californians would still have to resign themselves to a future with less and less water that will cost them more and more. That's a hard lesson to learn in a state where much of the culture revolves around swimming pools, green lawns, boating, fishing, skiing and snowboarding. And in a state where irrigation is the basic fuel for a $36.6 billion agriculture industry, the largest in the nation. It's no wonder that most Californians think an ample water supply is almost a birthright.

In a typical year, an almost unimaginable 61 trillion gallons of water fall on California in the form of rain and snow, state water officials say. That's 1.6 million gallons for each of the state's 38 million residents, whose average annual usage is a fraction of that, about 163,000 gallons per household. And that doesn't even count the trillions more that fall on the Rocky Mountains, feeding the Colorado River that supplies much of Southern California's water and recreation.

Yet every year, drought or no drought, there is less and less water to go around. That's because an unrelenting series of natural, political and legal problems keep squeezing the state's ability to get water from where it falls to the ground – mostly in the northern Sierra Nevada and the Rockies – to the people who need it, most of them in Southern California.

The mounting threats to the state's future water supplies led Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last year to call for a permanent reduction of 20 percent in water usage by 2020.

The drought, that dirty trick being played by Mother Nature, may not be to blame for all the problems, but it's bad enough.

It hit home hard for city dwellers in San Diego and the rest of Southern California last week. The region's biggest water wholesaler, the Metropolitan Water District, warned that the loss of 70 percent of its supplies from Northern California via the State Water Project will require mandatory reductions in water use and higher water bills for most residents and businesses.

The drought was the last thing California needed in the face of water supply problems that just keep piling on.

Many of the problems arise in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a sweeping estuary northeast of San Francisco.

The delta was once a vast sea-level swamp whose chief natural function was to nurture fish and funnel Northern California rivers into San Francisco Bay. It is now carved by 1,000 miles of meandering levees into a jigsaw puzzle of streams and sloughs diverting much of the water to giant pumps that channel it to 25 million people in the Bay Area and Southern California and 3 million acres of farmland. On a plane from San Diego to Sacramento, the delta presents a placid landscape of gleaming waterways surrounding large islands of lush farmland. But that idyllic scene disguises a set of enormous problems that have already begun to restrict the water supply for the state's growing population. Solving them is likely to cost billions, but water agencies, environmentalists and politicians have yet to agree on what to do and who will pay for it.


