How Did We Get Here?
Drought is nothing new to California.
Cycles of hydrologic scarcity are a feature of our state, as is the fact that most of us want to live where there’s the least amount of rain. This realization drove the construction of the large water projects of the 20th Century. The State and Federal Water Projects, the Los Angeles Aqueduct, and the Colorado River Aqueduct were all built to “move the rain” from mountainous regions of the West, where it is stored as snow, to farmers, homes, and businesses in the Central Valley and Southern California, where people flocked after the Second World War. The cities of Camarillo, Moorpark, Simi Valley, and Thousand Oaks were all incorporated only after State Water Project contracts were signed and city founders knew there would be a reliable source of water to grow on.
For four decades, it was reliable. As much Sierra snowmelt as we could use made its way through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, down the California Aqueduct, over the Tehachapis, and out to us, via Metropolitan and Calleguas Municipal Water Districts. There were droughts then, too, of course, but the system had storage to carry us through these dry spells. And as the population grew, we built more—in the 1980s and 1990s, the region invested over $5 billion in surface storage to prolong our ability to continue serving water in a drought.
In the first decade of the 21st Century, two major shifts began to threaten that ability. Changes in the climate started to reduce the amount of snow that accumulates in some years and a series of regulatory actions and judicial rulings slashed the amount of snowmelt that we were allowed to move south. Department of Water Resources releases have averaged less than half of contracted amounts over the last 15 years. There hasn’t been a 100-percent allocation since before the infamous Judge Wanger ruling on Delta smelt in 2006. This is not for lack of snow: despite a banner year in 2017 of 183 percent of normal, DWR was only able to fulfill 85 percent of its contracts. This year, for the second year in a row, we’re only receiving five percent—a first since the project was constructed in the 1960s.
Things are dire. It will be a dry summer. The District—and the region—need your help to get through it.
But things shouldn’t be this way.