California’s extreme drought: “Unprecedented conditions may result in unprecedented actions.”

Lake Oroville 2Trucking in water, temporary pipelines, mobile desalination plants and modifications of water quality control standards are some of the measures under consideration to confront the exceptionally dry conditions, water officials told the Delta Stewardship Council at their January 23rd meeting.

Conditions are bad, to say the least – there’s been almost no precipitation this year, virtually no snowpack, and long-range forecasts continue to predict continued below-average precipitation.  Every day new records are broken.  “We’re basically in uncharted waters,” Delta Watermaster Craig Wilson told the Delta Stewardship Council at their January meeting.  “Unprecedented conditions may result in unprecedented actions.”

Wilson was on hand to discuss the actions the State Water Board is planning, noting that the Governor’s drought proclamation directs the State Water Board to take consider modification of water quality control standards and objectives and curtailing water diversions, as well as to expedite transfers.  He noted that the Board’s transfer process is working quite well.  “The question is how much water will really be available to transfer, and only time will tell on that,” he said.

The water board will have to consider possible modification of water quality standards and objectives in the Delta, as the more stringent water quality standards for objectives such as significantly higher Delta outflow and stringent salinity standards will kick in on February 1st.  “If nothing is done about that and given the low natural runoff that’s occurring, if the projects attempted to meet that standard, the reservoirs would virtually be drained,” Wilson said.  “I’m not sure if even there would be enough water to meet those standards even if that happens, so we’re going to expect some requests for relief.”

‘Term 91’, a condition in the junior water right permits that authorizes the Board to curtail diversions under certain conditions, have been in effect since May – another unprecedented occurrence, and more curtailments may be needed, Wilson added.    “The Board certainly could consider extending term 91-like curtailments on a wider range of more senior permits and licensees, and under a worst case scenario, even to riparian users.  It could be that drastic.”

DSC Kiteck Slide 7 Shasta InflowElizabeth Kiteck, with the Central Valley Project Operations, presented an inflow forecast for Lake Shasta which only served to underscore the dire conditions.  “What you see is that the 10% and the 50% are dropping rapidly to meet the 90% numbers,” she said.  “Usually they will start coming together closer to April to May, but we’re starting to see that they are converging this early, and they are converging to a very dry projection for inflow for this water year.”

The outlook for the foreseeable future looks bad, Tom Gohring with the Sacramento Water Forum told the Council.  The conditions are worse than they were in 1976-77 and those that do projections are finding their analyses useless right now.  “We are so far off the book that history will not give us any clue about what is going to happen over the next 6 or 9 months.  We have never experienced this before,” said Gohring.  “Our history of dealing with these kinds of years leaves us no clues as to how much worse it will get.”

Bill Croyle, Drought Manager for DWR, said the Governor’s Drought Task Force is discussing how all of the agencies and resources can come together and deal with our existing policies and procedures.  “Every day we’re getting new information about the impacts of these dry conditions on small communities, the environment, on agriculture, on labor, and so with that information, we’re being forced to try and plan and do advance planning as well as respond to those impacts,” he said.

“This is where we’re going to test ourselves,” he replied.  “This is has to be team ball.  This is about all of us at all levels of government getting in the groove that we can all work together and solve this problem and hopefully not just during this dry season.  We’ve got to come out of this … we’ve got to change some things.”

Written by Chris “Maven” Austin