How the drought changed California forever
Carlos Gomez, 13, of San Jose, explores the dried up Guadalupe River near Santa Clara Street in San Jose, Calif., on Monday, July 11, 2015. (Jim Gensheimer/Bay Area News Group)
LAGUNITAS, CA - JULY 15, 2014: In this before-and-after composite image, (TOP PHOTO) Dry grasses partially cover a fire danger sign that is posted in Samuel P. Taylor state park on July 15, 2014 in Lagunitas, California. As the severe drought in California contiues to worsen, the State's landscape and many resident's lawns are turning brown due to lack of rain and the discontinuation of watering. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) LAGUNITAS, CA - APRIL 10, 2017: (BOTTOM PHOTO) Grasses partially cover a fire danger sign that is posted in Samuel P. Taylor state park on April 10, 2017 in Lagunitas, California. After record rainfall and snow in the mountains, much of California's landscape has turned from brown to green and reservoirs across the state are near capacity. California Gov. Jerry Brown signed an executive order Friday to lift the State's drought emergency in all but four counties. The drought emergency had been in place since 2014. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
SAN FRANCISCO, CA - JULY 16, 2014: In this before-and-after composite image, (TOP PHOTO) A woman walks her dog walker on a dried section of Bernal Heights Park on July 16, 2014 in San Francisco, California. As the severe drought in California contiues to worsen, the State's landscape and many resident's lawns are turning brown due to lack of rain and the discontinuation of watering. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) SAN FRANCISCO, CA - APRIL 10, 2017: (BOTTOM PHOTO) Much of California's landscape has turned from brown to green as California Gov. Jerry Brown signed an executive order Friday to lift the State's drought emergency in all but four counties. The drought emergency had been in place since 2014. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
SAN FRANCISCO, CA - JULY 15, 2014: In this before-and-after composite image, (TOP PHOTO) Headstones are surrounded by dead grass at the Presidio National Cemetery on July 15, 2014 in San Francisco, California. As the severe drought in California contiues to worsen, the State's landscape and many resident's lawns are turning brown due to lack of rain and the discontinuation of watering. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) SAN FRANCISCO, CA - APRIL 10, 2017: (BOTTOM PHOTO) Headstones are surrounded by green grass at the Presidio National Cemetery on April 10, 2017 in San Francisco, California. Much of California's landscape has turned from brown to green as California Gov. Jerry Brown signed an executive order Friday to lift the State's drought emergency in all but four counties. The drought emergency had been in place since 2014. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
EL DORADO HILLS, CA - MARCH 20, 2014: In this before-and-after composite image, (TOP PHOTO) Empty boat docks at the Folsom Lake Marina sit on the dry lakebed of Folsom Lake on March 20, 2014 in El Dorado Hills, California. Now in its third straight year of drought conditions, California is experiencing its driest year on record, dating back 119 years, and reservoirs throughout the state have low water levels. Folsom Lake, a reservoir located northeast of Sacramento, has seen its capacity dwindle over the past 2-1/2 years of drought with current levels at around 20% of normal. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) EL DORADO HILLS, CA - APRIL 11, 2017: (BOTTOM PHOTO) Boats sit docked at the Folsom Lake Marina on April 11, 2017 in El Dorado Hills, California. After record rainfall and snow in the mountains, much of California's landscape has turned from brown to green and reservoirs across the state are near capacity. California Gov. Jerry Brown signed an executive order Friday to lift the State's drought emergency in all but four counties. The drought emergency had been in place since 2014. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
EL DORADO HILLS, CA - MARCH 20, 2014: In this before-and-after composite image, (TOP PHOTO) Empty boat docks at the Folsom Lake Marina sit on the dry lakebed of Folsom Lake on March 20, 2014 in El Dorado Hills, California. Now in its third straight year of drought conditions, California is experiencing its driest year on record, dating back 119 years, and reservoirs throughout the state have low water levels. Folsom Lake, a reservoir located northeast of Sacramento, has seen its capacity dwindle over the past 2-1/2 years of drought with current levels at around 20% of normal. EL DORADO HILLS, CA - APRIL 11, 2017: (BOTTOM PHOTO) Boats sit docked at the Folsom Lake Marina on April 11, 2017 in El Dorado Hills, California. After record rainfall and snow in the mountains, much of California's landscape has turned from brown to green and reservoirs across the state are near capacity. California Gov. Jerry Brown signed an executive order Friday to lift the State's drought emergency in all but four counties. The drought emergency had been in place since 2014. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
WOODACRE, CA - JULY 15, 2014: In this before-and-after composite image, (TOP PHOTO) Horses graze in a field of dead grass on July 15, 2014 in Woodacre, California. As the severe drought in California contiues to worsen, the State's landscape and many resident's lawns are turning brown due to lack of rain and the discontinuation of watering. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) WOODACRE, CA - APRIL 10, 2017: (BOTTOM PHOTO) Horses graze in a field on April 10, 2017 in Woodacre, California. Much of California's landscape has turned from brown to green as California Gov. Jerry Brown signed an executive order Friday to lift the State's drought emergency in all but four counties. The drought emergency had been in place since 2014. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
NICASIO, CA - JULY 15, 2014: In this before-and-after composite image, (TOP PHOTO) A home stands next to a hill that is brown with dead grass on July 15, 2014 in Nicasio, California. As the severe drought in California contiues to worsen, the State's landscape and many resident's lawns are turning brown due to lack of rain and the discontinuation of watering. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) NICASIO, CA - APRIL 10, 2017: (BOTTOM PHOTO) A home stands next to a hill with green grass on April 10, 2017 in Nicasio, California. After record rainfall and snow in the mountains, much of California's landscape has turned from brown to green and reservoirs across the state are near capacity. California Gov. Jerry Brown signed an executive order Friday to lift the State's drought emergency in all but four counties. The drought emergency had been in place since 2014. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
OROVILLE, CA - AUGUST 19, 2014: In this before-and-after composite image, (TOP PHOTO) Low water levels are visible in the Bidwell Marina at Lake Oroville on August 19, 2014 in Oroville, California. As the severe drought in California continues for a third straight year, water levels in the State's lakes and reservoirs is reaching historic lows. Lake Oroville is currently at 32 percent of its total 3,537,577 acre feet. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) OROVILLE, CA - APRIL 11, 2017: (BOTTOM PHOTO) A view of Bidwell Marina at Lake Oroville on April 11, 2017 in Oroville, California. After record rainfall and snow in the mountains, much of California's landscape has turned from brown to green and reservoirs across the state are near capacity. California Gov. Jerry Brown signed an executive order Friday to lift the State's drought emergency in all but four counties. The drought emergency had been in place since 2014. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
In this before-and-after image, Lake Oroville's water level changed dramatically between 2014 and 2017.
By Paul Rogers | progers@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED: April 15, 2017 at 9:45 a.m. | UPDATED: April 17, 2017 at 2:49 p.m.
California's historic five-year drought is officially over, washed away with the relentlessly drenching rains, floods and snowstorms of this winter.
But just as tougher building codes and better emergency planning follow major earthquakes, the brutally dry years from 2012 to 2016 are already leaving a legacy, experts say, changing the way Californians use water for generations to come.
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"There's no question that we'll be better prepared for the next drought because of the lessons learned in this one," said Felicia Marcus, chairwoman of the State Water Resources Control Board in Sacramento. "This was the wake-up call of the century."
During the drought, Gov. Jerry Brown ordered the state's first mandatory water conservation restrictions on communities throughout California. Some of the rules — such as banning lawn watering within 48 hours of rain and hosing off pavement — remain. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
The drought's legacy includes landmark new laws aimed at limiting farmers from over-pumping groundwater; homeowners removing thousands of suburban lawns; voters approving billions in funding for new reservoirs; and vast expanses of forests dying off across the Sierra Nevada.
"Every drought has a lasting impact," said Jeff Mount, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California Water Center in San Francisco. "That probably goes all the way back to the Depression."
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The era of massive dam building in California began after the 1929-34 drought. Urban water conservation started in earnest during the 1976-77 drought. And the state's brutal 1987-92 drought prompted water departments in the Bay Area and Southern California to connect their networks of pipes together, to build huge groundwater storage banks and new local reservoirs, and to develop a statewide system of buying and selling water.
As a result of those changes, Californians were better prepared to handle the most recent drought, which saw the driest four-year period of any time back to 1895, when modern records began. Although some farm communities with limited groundwater suffered severely, California's overall economy grew during the drought, up 10 percent to $2.2 trillion from 2012 to 2015.
"We lost a third of our water supply," said Jay Lund, director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC-Davis. "And the impact to the agricultural economy was a 2-3 percent loss and the urban economy had almost no economic impact. To me that's remarkable."
The drought nevertheless left a lasting impact in at least five key ways:
1) Groundwater: After 100 years of allowing cities and farms to pump as much water as they wanted from the ground, without reporting it to the state or being limited, dozens of communities across California found themselves with precariously dropping water tables as the drought began. A study using NASA satellites in February found the ground in some areas between Merced and Bakersfield dropped as much as two feet as underground aquifers collapsed during the drought, cracking roads, water canals and pipelines.
A low-flow water emitter sits on some of the dry, cracked ground of an almond orchard in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta near Stockton in 2015. As the state entered a fourth year of drought, huge amounts of water were mysteriously vanishing from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, and farmers whose families for generations have tilled fertile soil there were the prime suspects. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
In 2014, Gov. Jerry Brown signed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, requiring local government agencies in areas with severely overdrawn groundwater to draw up plans by 2020 to bring it into balance. They will then have 20 years to do that, which will mean taking some farmland out of production, buying water from other areas, building percolation ponds to recharge aquifers and other costly solutions.
"We had to do something," said Paul Wenger, president of the California Farm Bureau Federation. "There's no argument on that from me. But some areas are going to really suffer."
2) Water wasting: Several high-profile rules put into place by the State Water Resources Control Board during the drought will continue forever. They include bans on watering lawns within 48 hours of rain, or washing cars without a shut-off nozzle on the hose, or cities watering grass on road medians using potable water. It's also illegal now to run a fountain that doesn't recycle water. And the state's 410 largest cities, water districts and private water companies will have to continue to report every month to the state water board how much water they are using.
"It would be bad if the message from this wet year went out that the problem is over," said Peter Gleick, co-founder of the Pacific Institute, an Oakland nonprofit that studies water issues. "We don't have enough water to waste. That's a hard one when you see floods and endless rain."
3) Proposition 1: In November 2014, during some of the worst months of the drought, California voters approved a $7.5 billion water bond to fund new reservoirs, recycled water projects, desalination and stormwater capture efforts. It passed with 67 percent of the vote. By comparison, the last water bond, Proposition 84, a $5.4 billion measure in 2006, passed with just 54 percent.
Water agencies are lining up to submit detailed plans for the money, which could pay up to half the cost of new reservoirs, and is scheduled to be awarded next year. Long-stalled projects like Sites Reservoir in Colusa County may finally be funded, and existing dams could be built higher.
"We had so much water this year that we could have caught if we had the storage," said Wenger. "I'm hoping we learned our lesson."
Homeowners across the state saved billions of gallons of water by removing lawns. (Courtesy of City of Santa Barbara)
4) Lawn removal and conservation: Urban Californians cut water use 22.5 percent between June 2015 and February 2017. Over that time, 2.6 million acre-feet of water was saved — enough to supply more than 13 million people for a year. Water agencies spent hundreds of millions of dollars during the drought giving rebates to people to install low-flush toilets, efficient washing machines, gray water systems and dishwashers. The Metropolitan Water District in Southern California spent $310 million alone in rebates for people to remove 160 million square feet of grass, which will save 21,000 acre feet of water every year.
Those lawns and water-wasting appliances aren't coming back. Lawns use 50 percent of all urban water during summer months, and as cities wrote new local rules limiting lawns in new homes and businesses, neighbors looked askance at homeowners who had bright green turf. Already, big water agencies in Los Angeles, Oakland, San Jose and other areas are using less water now than they were in 1990, despite population growth. Almost nobody expects water use to return to pre-drought levels.
"I'm not an advocate that every blade of grass has to be taken out of California, but I think you'll see a lot less lawn in the future," said Tim Quinn, CEO of the Association of California Water Agencies.
5) Environmental harm: Dry creeks and rivers led 18 fish species to crash to near extinction. And the drought killed 102 million trees across the state, most in the Sierra. That could increase fire risk for years to come.
The low water level reveals two chairs at the Almaden Reservoir in San Jose in 2014. (Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Area News Group)
"If the climate continues to be as warm as it has been recently," said Lund, "we could see very big changes in the mountains. We can't really manage it. We aren't going to put sprinkler systems in the forests."
Overall, experts say, the drought left nearly all residents of California — a state where even in a normal year most cities get only 15 inches of rain a year, the same as Casablanca, Morocco — much more aware of their water.
"This was a prolonged, very deep drought, many believe the worst in the historic record," said Quinn. "It was really dry, and now here we are with the wettest year ever. Welcome to California."
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Paul Rogers | Natural resources and environment reporter
Paul Rogers has covered a wide range of issues for The Mercury News since 1989, including water, oceans, energy, logging, parks, endangered species, toxics and climate change. He also has worked as managing editor of the Science team at KQED, the PBS and NPR station in San Francisco, and has taught science writing at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz.
progers@bayareanewsgroup.com
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