Letter from California: field notes on a state in drought.

AuthorMark, Jason

This was the year without a winter.

In January, not a single drop of rain fell in the San Francisco Bay Area, the first time such a thing has happened since recordkeeping began during the Gold Rush. Day after day, the skies were clear and the afternoon temperatures were in the seventies. It was awful. Without any rain or the typical cold winter winds, a thick haze developed over the bay and stuck around for weeks. An orange miasma choked the view from the Berkeley Hills to the Golden Gate, making the sun into a tarnished brass coin.

Meteorologists blamed it on something they've dubbed the "Ridiculously Resilient Ridge," a persistent wall of high pressure over the Pacific Ocean that pushed winter storms away from the state and kept temperatures so warm that there was little to no snowfall this year below 8,000 feet of elevation.

Then there's "The Blob." For nearly a year, a mass of warm ocean water as much as two to seven degrees Fahrenheit above normal has clung to the West Coast. The Blob--which stretches 1,000 miles from Mexico to Washington State and goes 300 feet deep into the water column--has contributed to the warm winter, and is likely to be a factor in a predicted hotter-than-average summer.

The weird weather has had many strange effects. My friend Victor complains that at his house he can now see the stars at night. Victor and his family live in San Francisco's Sunset District, on the far west edge of the city, hard against the ocean. Normally this area--dubbed the "Outside Lands" by the first white settlers--is fog-locked much of the year. Now, however, the summer fogs seem less dense, and the recent winters have been infamously cloud-free. "It's really frightening," Victor tells me.

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, essayist, and conservationist Wallace Stegner once wrote: "Aridity, more than anything else, gives the western landscape its character." West of roughly the 100th meridian, civilization is impossible--physically impossible--without some sort of system to capture and store water. California, especially its northern sections, may have more of a green tint than the red-and-orange stretches of Arizona, Utah, and Nevada, but this place is still, at best, a semi-desert. In a "normal" year (a phrase that seems increasingly anachronistic) between fifteen and twenty-five inches of rainfall land on most parts of the state. Nearly all of that comes in a brief winter window outside the prime growing season.

"We have tried to make the arid West into what it was never meant to be and cannot remain, the Garden to the World and the home of multiple millions," Stegner wrote in an essay titled, "Striking the Rock." That piece was published in 1987, at the tail end of some of the wetter years ever recorded in the West. In 1985, Fresno--the small city at the heart of the San Joaquin Valley--received more than fifteen inches of rain. This winter, Fresno got just over five inches; last winter, the figure was four.

The central problem is this: The state and federal water systems allocations are based on water we don't have. The numbers on the official paperwork are five times greater than the amount of water in the actual, physical hydrological system. The water allocation figures are fixed to a figment of history, a time when the state was wetter. California has hit overdraft.

"We shouldn't even be talking about 'drought'--it's climate change and the new normal," Conner Everts, a one-time drought manager for the city of Pasadena and now the executive director of the Southern California Watershed Alliance, tells me. "And because we've never managed water properly, when drought comes, we are exposed for allocating water that isn't there. This isn't going away, and it isn't going to be solved easily."

Everyone is anxious. According to a late February poll, 94 percent of registered voters in California say the drought is "serious," and more than two-thirds describe the situation as...

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