A 6th year of drought is depressing, but LA County’s largest water supplier has some good news



LOS ANGELES >> Despite five consecutive years of drought, record-setting heat and water being diverted to protect the state’s native fish population, Southern California’s top urban water agency said Monday it has enough water stored up for nearly five years.

“That is pretty good,” said Jeff Kightlinger, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California during a press conference at its headquarters in downtown Monday. “Demand is down and supply is up. We’ve added to our drought resiliency even in the middle of a drought.”

Metropolitan, which supplies 19 million Southern Californians, was able to acquire more water from Northern California this year due to plentiful rain and snow in Northern California, he said. Also, conservation between 27 percent and 23 percent from June 2015 to June 2016 has decreased demand at the end of the State Water Project pipeline, which supplies one-third of the state’s water supply.

Mother Nature — with an El Niño that sputtered in southern and central California but produced in the north — has created a nuanced picture of the next rain year that began Oct. 1, experts said.

“The reality is that California is still in a drought. We’re just not in a state of emergency,” said MWD board Chairman Randy Record, of the Eastern Municipal Water District in Riverside County.

First, the bad news.

The last five years has produced a drought of unprecedented proportions, Kightlinger said. It has been the driest five years in a row in 120 years and actually, only two of the last eight years produced normal rainfall for California, he said. Tree ring evidence suggests droughts have lasted 800 years or longer, adding the spectre that drier and hotter is the climate of the future for Southern California.

“This may be the new normal. Something we will have to deal with going in and out of every water year,” Kightlinger warned.

Heat is added to the drought by man-made effects of global warming, when fossil fuel is burned producing carbon monoxide that gets trapped in the atmosphere, he said. The combination also caused more intense wildfires and is killing the state’s rare fish, placing more demands on precious water supplies.

In 2014, 95 percent of the state’s winter-run Chinook salmon died. This year, the state diverted more water to protect the salmon as well as the Delta smelt, endangered fish that live in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta where water is captured and sent south for use by farmers and urban residents of the state.

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MWD and Gov. Jerry Brown advocate building twin, 35-mile tunnel pipelines that would move the water around the delta to avoid sensitive species. If the so-called “California Water Fix” were already built, the state could’ve saved an additional 500,000 acre-feet of water, about as much water that currently rests in the San Luis Reservoir, said Mark Cowin, director of the California Department of Water Resources. (An acre-foot of water is 326,000 gallons or the amount used by two typical Southern California households in one year).

The good news is that conservation has reduced demand. Since June 2015, Californians have saved 2 million acre-feet, or about the amount of water used by 10 million people in one year, according to the State Water Resources Control Board.

Though conservation levels are slipping of late, overall conservation has freed up more water for storage in reservoirs and ground-water basins, Kightlinger said. MWD expects to add 300,000 to 500,000 acre feet to storage by the end of 2016, for about 1.5 million acre feet in reserves, he said. “That’s the first increase to regional reserves in four years,” he said.

Southern California uses less water today with 19 million people than it did in 1990 with 14 million people, he said.

But even with conservation and aggressive water storage, ground-water basins in the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys have reached historic lows. MWD wants to supplement storage by recycling wastewater at the Los Angeles County Sanitation District’s Joint Water Pollution Control Plant in Carson. With full approval expected in late 2018, the project could add 168,000 acre-feet per year of treated, recycled water into the underground basins of Los Angeles and Orange counties.

Despite successful storage, new water sources and continued conservation, the water supply picture remains reliant on rain and snowfall this winter, experts said on Monday.

“If we don’t see significant storms going into January, that is when the level of concern will go up,” Cowin said.

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