Running on Empty
The California Aqueduct, bringing SWP water from the Sierras and Central California to a thirsty Southland. Photo by Steven Gute
California’s drought-besieged water crisis has been years in the making
This article originally appeared in the Red Canary Collective on June 1, 2022
BY NICHOLAS SCHOU
On a perfectly clear and sunny May 1 Sunday afternoon, a visitor at Lake Mead noticed what turned out to be a human body inside a rusting barrel along the water’s edge. Based on the tennis shoes that were still attached to the remains, police estimated the victim, who apparently died of gunshot wounds, to have been murdered some time during the 1970s and 80s. As it happens, that was when Las Vegas was still under the rule of organized crime and Lake Mead, the massive Nevada reservoir that provides water to both Las Vegas and much of Southern California, was about 40 feet higher than it is today.
Eight days later, another body turned up. Then, a few weeks after that, a lost boat.
The mounting archeological discoveries are driving home a deeply troubling reality: the Southwestern United States is deep into a staggering drought and is rapidly running out of water. Currently, 97 percent of California is in a state of extreme, severe or exceptional drought conditions, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. A recent University of California Los Angeles study reported that the region has experienced the driest 22-year period in the past 1200 years.
A dwindling Lake Mead as seen from the top of the Hoover Dam. Photo by Steven Gute
For years, environmentalists have pointed to the fact that Southern California, with its reliance on the Colorado River, the L.A. aqueduct, and yet another statewide network of pipes that brings water downhill and south from Northern California, was never destined to sustain the urban sprawl it has experienced in the past half-century or more.
But increasingly clear today is the fact that California itself—with a century-long history of myriad and arcane water agreements that include tens of thousands of stakeholders dominated by the agriculture industry, byzantine regulatory agencies and outdated infrastructure—is ill-equipped to handle the state’s current water needs, much less those of the future.
At root is this: there’s simply not enough rainfall to go around. That condition is exacerbated by that fact that when it does rain—and when it rains here, it often pours—California’s aging system of reservoirs and dams isn’t capable of capturing all that water.
Only in the past few months has California’s political leadership started to treat the problem as an emergency. On March 24, Governor Gavin Newsom instructed the California Water Resources Control Board (CWRCB), the state agency charged with regulating water usage, to consider banning the sprinkling of grassy lawns on just about all land other than private residences. Newsom also called on local water suppliers to step up water conservation efforts, warning that California’s state water network can now only supply local cities and water districts with approximately five percent of the water the system is designed to deliver.
“The only thing both governors have done is to put pressure on urban water users, but we only use 13 percent of the water. The public needs to understand that.”
On May 24, CWRCB followed up on Newsom’s order by issuing a statewide ban on watering lawns that adorn businesses, industrial facilities, college campuses, hospitals and many areas operated by homeowners’ associations.
Responding to Newsom’s order, the Metropolitan Water District (MWD), the largest municipal water district in California, which provides water to 26 cities and 19 million people in Southern California, also announced severe water restrictions for roughly one-third of its customers. This affects an estimated six million people in Ventura, Los Angeles and San Bernadino counties. So far, those residents are being warned to water their lawns just once a week. Under the guidelines, water districts that fail to reduce usage will be fined $2,000 per day. The restrictions went into effect June 1.
“This is an action we are taking right now, but it could get worse and if people don’t respond there is a reasonable possibility that a third of SoCal residents will not be able to do outdoor watering at all,” said MWD spokesperson Rachel Kimtich. “This is pretty unprecedented territory we are in right now. The conditions from climate change we are seeing everyone knew would come-all the models showed this would happen—but it is happening way faster.”
A state-mandated ban on any outdoor watering is on the table for as early as September if conservation efforts don’t improve the scarce water supply.
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California’s political leadership and the water regulatory bureaucracy from Sacramento on down to the rest of California is now clearly jumping into action to conserve water. But this organized response to the statewide water emergency ignores the largest drain on the state’s water supply: agriculture.
The impact on California’s water supply for agricultural irrigation, which, from almonds and alfalfa to wine grapes and recently, cannabis, are surprisingly thirsty crops, cannot be overstated. The state’s Central Valley breadbasket—which roughly spans from Butte County south to Kern County— even has its own separate water pipeline network, the Central Valley Water Project (CVWP). The CVWP dates from 1933 and runs east from reservoirs in the Sierra Mountains foothills to the Central Valley’s farming areas. But agriculture also uses a significant amount of the water delivered by the state’s other major water supply, the State Water Project (SWP), a system of pipelines that carries water from Northern California all the way to the Mexican border.
The parched Central Valley. Photo by Steven Gute
Created in 1960, the SWP provides the bulk of drinking water for the state’s two most populous metros, the San Francisco Bay area and Los Angeles region. Agriculture, though, takes a big gulp from this supply: about 30 percent of SWP water is directed to irrigation. Put both pipelines together and it turns out that agriculture uses roughly 80 percent of all state-delivered water in California, leaving only about 20 percent of the supply available for municipal and residential users.
As California’s population increases, the state’s water networks are increasingly stretched. Meanwhile, droughts are gaining in frequency and intensity in California. Recent record dry spells along and statewide heat waves have occurred in 1976-77, 1987-92, 2007-09 and 2012-16, the latter of which is the hottest drought in the state’s recorded history.
According to the California Water Resources Control Board (CWRCB), the impact of California’s drought on both pipelines is extreme. In 2022, SWP users received only five percent of their guaranteed water allocations, while CVWP users got exactly zero percent. Indeed, government water experts say that California’s changing climate, along with new and environment-friendly water regulations intended to keep Northern California’s rivers running at sufficiently higher levels have made the state’s water supply reliably unreliable.
“Overall, I have seen things change both in supply reliability and from impacts in regulation,” says Dimitri Polyzos, MWD’s resource planning team manager. “Those effects have hit our water supply in Northern California, so that year after year we see more restrictions on water being developed, but also Mother Nature becoming stingier.”
Polyzos points out that a big part of the problem for the state’s water network isn’t just the infrequency of rainfall and dwindling snowpacks in the Sierras and other watersheds, but also the intensity of the rainfall that does occur, which poses collection challenges for California’s reservoirs.
“The timing of everything is getting out of whack,” says Polyzos. “The system in California was built to handle precipitation in the mix between snowfall and rainfall, but the reservoirs are not as big as those along the Colorado River.”
Whereas Lake Mead and Lake Powell are able to contain roughly 40-million-acre feet of water, in California, reservoirs are only capable of holding about eight-million-acre feet. “It’s not built to handle a huge influx of rain at one time,” Polyzos says of California’s water supply system. “That’s part of the problem we are seeing.”
Kennedy worries about scientific studies that, by examining ancient tree rings, have determined California periodically suffers 50-year droughts.
From a water-collection standpoint, Southern California is cursed with some of the steepest watersheds in the nation. Rather than contain sudden deluges of water running downhill, the region’s cement-lined watersheds are constructed to carry the water quickly to the sea so that it won’t cause catastrophic flooding. But that’s just one aspect of a statewide failure of imagination when it comes to storing water.
A famous example is the state’s reservoirs inability to handle a major rainfall in February 2017 when the Oroville Dam, situated along Northern California’s Feather River, began to crack under the pressure of a heavy winter storm. The dam’s main spillway failed, threatening to deluge 180,000 downstream residents under a 30-foot wall of water. Although engineers were able to save the dam, untold quantities of drinkable water flooded through an emergency spillway during the crisis. The water ended up in the bay, not in storage.
Repaired after the 2017 damages, the ongoing drought has ensured that Oroville Dam is in no danger of spilling its banks anytime soon. Photo by Steven Gute
“That’s one example of how the infrastructure isn’t built to handle our changing weather,” Polyzos says. “There is a lot of work we have to do to get the infrastructure in place. There are some projects that are in planning phases to help alleviate this. It’s not just new infrastructure but how you use the system, so we are looking at how we release water from reservoirs. There are a lot of things we can do by operating
differently.”
Just south of Los Angeles and also affected by Newsom’s water restriction mandate, the Orange County Water District (OCWD) has already taken major steps to ease its reliance on dwindling water supplies from both the SWP network and the Colorado River. In 2008, the district built the largest water recycling plant in the world. The plant takes highly treated wastewater that would have previously been discharged into the Pacific Ocean and purifies it using a three-step advanced treatment process to produce not only safe, but high-quality drinking water.
Still, John Kennedy, OCWD’s executive director of engineering and water resources, says that, given California’s drought, OCWD has no choice but to enforce the state’s cutbacks.
“We support it; it was appropriate,” Kennedy says of Newsom’s order. “The last three years have been really dry, both with respect to normal precipitation and the Colorado River. So, we need to start ratcheting down and conserving more.”
In the past, Kennedy says, OCWD has implemented voluntary water restriction measures, which succeeded in conserving some water. “In the most recent drought from 2012 to 2016 everyone cut back, then we had some normal years and wet years,” he adds. “Now, it looks like we are in another dry season.
“Climate change has introduced a whole new level of uncertainty in planning for future water supplies,” observes Kennedy. “It is hard to know what hydrological conditions will look like 20 years in the future.”
Kennedy worries about scientific studies that, by examining ancient tree rings, have determined California periodically suffers 50-year droughts. “We have 40 million people in the state,” he says. “How would we survive that?”
Some point to desalination as a possible solution. In the early 1990s, Santa Barbara, which relies on the SWP for its water, opened a desal plant that went offline almost as soon as it was constructed thanks to a period of abundant rainfall and the relatively high cost of turning ocean brine into drinking water through reverse osmosis. The plant was reactivated in 2015, and five years later, nearby Montecito, a tony suburb full of lavishly landscaped estates, Hollywood celebrities, and private golf clubs, signed a 50-year water supply agreement with Santa Barbara to purchase its desalinated water.
Some environmental groups including the San Clemente, CA-based Surfrider Foundation, as well as Santa Barbara’s Heal The Ocean, have long opposed desalination because of its harmful effects on marine life (the plants kill microscopic organisms when they suck in water and then pump heavily salt-concentrated water back into the ocean).
The Claude “Bud” Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plant in Carlsbad, California. Owned by Poseidon Resources, the project cost a total of $1 billion. Photo by Steven Gute
These concerns, along with the high cost of producing desalinated water have so far stalled a major desalination project in Orange County that for years OCWD provided political support and promised economic backing. Poseidon Resources, which operates a desalination plant in Carlsbad, CA, has unsuccessfully sought to open a similar facility in Huntington Beach. The plant promises to produce up to 50-million gallons of drinking water per day, but on May 12, the California Coastal Commission rejected the $1.4 billion proposal, citing environmental and cost concerns as well as lack of demand.
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Perhaps the most significant but least understood aspect of California’s water crisis is the logistical nightmare posed by the state’s century-long history of granting exclusive water rights to various public and private owners—the so-called “paper water” system. Paper water, some experts and activists believe, must be reformed if the state is going to be able to survive the ongoing megadrought.
As of now, according to the CWRCB, there are 40,000 water rights holders in California, 10,000 of which are agricultural users. “Paper water” is water that exists solely as water rights claims in legal documents going back for more than a century. In today’s climate, the claims are simply no longer real or possible. The rights agreement promises holders a maximum amount of potential water per year. State records, however, show that for many years only a tiny fraction of that water has been delivered. In fact, California has recently given away 5.3 times more “paper water” than actually exists, much of it to agricultural users, as shown by research done from 2009 to 2012 by the California Water Impact Network (CWIN).
“Inaccurate and incomplete accounting of water rights has made the state ill equipped to satisfy growing societal demands for water supply reliability and healthy ecosystems.”
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, California’s farming sector produces only 2.8 percent of the state’s gross domestic product. Given that number, as well as the fact that agriculture uses approximately 80 percent of the state’s available water each year, CWIN argues that California must reform how it allocates water rights in order to have any chance of surviving future droughts. In other words, Sacramento must stop pretending that it can keep the spigots on for farmers trying to grow cotton in a near desert.
CWIN’s Executive Director Carolee Krieger notes that despite the state’s deepening water crisis, no California governor—including two successive Democrats, Jerry Brown and Newsom—have even come close to enacting any such reforms. “The only thing both governors have done is to put pressure on urban water users, but we only use 13 percent of the water,” says Krieger. “The public needs to understand that.”
So far, though, the agricultural sector’s oversized influence on state politics has remained something of a radioactive third rail in state politics, an unspoken bipartisan commitment to deny environmental reality in favor of political expediency.
Most political talk and media coverage of the issue focuses on how, through conservation measures, Southern California can wean itself off Northern California’s water. But this implies that urban conservation and cutbacks are going to be the savior of California water, when such efforts represent a drop in the bucket compared to the agricultural sector’s massive water use.
CWIN’s report on “paper water” and the crisis facing the SWP is bolstered by a 2014 study by then-UC Davis environmental scientist Ted Grantham, now head of UC Berkeley’s Grantham Lab. Drawing on extensive research of state water data, Grantham found that “inaccurate and incomplete accounting of water rights has made the state ill-equipped to satisfy growing societal demands for water supply reliability and healthy ecosystems.”
The report concludes that, without “needed reforms” and “additional public investment,” the state’s “growing human and environmental demands portend an intensification of regional water scarcity and social conflict.”
Grantham’s study was the first to deeply examine the potential crisis posed by both climate change and the state’s overdrawn and poorly managed water network, the SWP. Among other troubling discoveries, his research uncovered just how difficult it is for state regulators to know how much SWP water was being consumed. A major part of the problem is that the CWRCB’s individual consumers are only required to report their water usage every three years.
Grantham’s research also revealed that, statewide, about five times as much water has been allocated than is available in any given year. But even that gap is an understatement, because it doesn’t consider pre-1914 water rights holders, which in many cases are some of the biggest users. A CWRCB spokesperson confirmed that the agency does not have any figures on how much water is consumed by users whose water rights pre-date 1914, when the state enacted the Water Commission Act to issue water permits.
Fortunately, the same year Grantham’s report was published, California did begin to increase reporting requirements by post-1914 water users, requiring users to submit their usage more frequently. Another big improvement in California water policy, says Grantham, is the state’s 2014 requirement that municipal water agencies establish a plan to conserve local groundwater, which has also suffered drastic reductions in recent decades. Today, groundwater amounts to 40 percent of all water used in California. But without greater conservation efforts, that water may soon run dry.
During the recent drought, he notes, many groundwater wells, especially in poor, rural areas of the state, began to dry up, and in some locations, the ground began sinking into the earth as a result. In 2021, the U.S. Geographical Survey calculated that the Central California town of Corcoran had sunk by as much as 11.5 feet in some places thanks to over-pumping of groundwater by agriculture.
“We still have a long way to go,” Grantham concludes. “As we look towards the future, all the science indicates we are going to be experiencing more droughts like this more often.”