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Region’s water supplies are still low, despite recent rains

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on January 10, 2008 at 8:50 am

From the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, this story which recaps water supply conditions for many cities in the area:

Officials across the region continue to struggle with low water supplies and prepare for potential rationing despite the recent rains. Many cities in the San Gabriel Valley are raising water rates and implementing conservation measures. Glendora is planning to dig deeper wells to access shrinking underground water supplies.

san-gabriel-reservoir-buy-raphaelmazor.jpgLast year’s winter - the driest in 130 years of record keeping - is in large part to blame. That parched season has had a continued impact on water supplies in the Southern California, where demand for water is increasing while supplies are decreasing. “We’re just praying for more rain right now,” said Kirk Howie, assistant general manager with the Claremont-based Three Valleys Municipal Water District. “If we do have another dry year as we did last year, then … there are going to be some hard decisions that need to be made.”

The region has received more than 7 inches of precipitation since the rainy season began, putting rainfall above average for this point in the winter. But the past weekend’s storms are just the beginning of what’s needed to make up for the deficit caused by last year, experts said. “It’s a drop in the bucket,” said Bill Patzert, a climatologist with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Ca ada Flintridge. “We crept into this drought and we will crawl out even more slowly.”

In the San Gabriel Mountains, the reservoirs which supply the valley were almost dry; the spigots at San Gabriel Dam have not been opened up in more than a year. Groundwater levels have dropped almost 60 feet the past year, and water to replenish groundwater basins has not been available. Rationing is a real possibility:

Unless this winter is very wet, water rationing is a possibility beginning next summer. That hasn’t happened since 1991. But officials will first have to wait for word from the MWD as to how much water it can deliver. The MWD distributes water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River delta and the Colorado River to 26 sub-agencies that serve 18 million people in six counties.

The MWD board will consider plans to implement rationing in February or March, spokesman Bob Muir said. “We’re going to put a water supply allocation plan together in case we do face those same challenges (as in 2007),” said Muir, adding that is was too early in the year to predict what conservation or rationing measures would need to be taken.

Conservation is becoming increasingly important:

“If the public actually starts conserving water, we will be in fairly good shape,” said Brad Boman, engineering manager for Pasadena Water and Power. “If people don’t conserve, it could turn into a crisis.”

At this point, few cities have required mandatory conservation. But whether new rules are to be instituted on a wider basis may depend in large part on how much rain the region gets in the coming months. “If we have another year like we did last year,” Williams said, “everybody is going to start feeling the pinch.”

To read the rest of this article from the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, click here. The article has an extensive photo gallery of pictures taken at the San Gabriel reservoir, plus a video link as well.


Picture of the San Gabriel reservoir is by flickr photographer raphaelmazor. The picture is from a happier time, dated September of 2006, which was before the dry year last year. If you look carefully, you will see that the bathtub ring on the surrounding mountains is quite large, even at that time. Click on the picture to see it enlarged and to visit the flickr website, where you can see lots of great photos from this & other flickr photographers.

January 10, 2008 · Filed Under Conservation, Groundwater

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