Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [324]
The Department of Water Resources later estimated that ten million acre-feet of runoff—enough for the city of San Francisco for forty years—had poured out the Golden Gate in two weeks. The crew of a freighter miles out to sea that was plowing through huge waves off the Gate said the wash coming across the bow tasted almost like Evian.
Californians didn’t know it yet, but they were riding a meteorological roller coaster, and the great ’86 storm was the crest before the giant drop. During all but one of the five subsequent water years, the annual runoff of all the rivers emptying into San Francisco Bay was less than the runoff measured from February 14 to February 28 in 1986. By 1992, nearly all of the state had suffered through six dry or critically dry years in a row—the fiercest drought since the Dust Bowl, when California had seven million people instead of the thirty-one million who officially live there today.
Unlike the drought of the mid-Seventies, which held the state in a vise grip for a couple of years and suddenly let go, this drought was like a lobster headed for the pot—it clamped down savagely, held on relentlessly, and then really began to squeeze. By 1990, one of Santa Barbara’s two water-supply reservoirs was a plain of sun-cracked mud. The other, bigger one was about a quarter full. A few years earlier, therapists in southern California reported that they were seeing lots of people showing clinical signs of depression because the sun had disappeared for weeks. Now some of the same people were spray-painting their lawns green and hiring Indian rain dancers to try to coax in a cloud. Santa Barbara, a pretty city situated on a sliver of plain between hulking mountains and the sea, used to cherish its geographic isolation and its minimal water supply because both helped to constrain growth, which most people there abhor; it is the one major city in southern California that decided not to hook into the State Water Project. By 1991, however, panicked Santa Barbarans had voted to build a spur to the California Aqueduct through ranges of mountains, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, and to construct one of the world’s largest desalination plants, which will cost them many millions more.
Had it not been for a series of storms that came onshore in March, when the rainy season is usually about to end, the 1991 water year would have been the driest in California history. Until those storms arrived, precipitation in some parts of the state was less than 20 percent of normal, and measured runoff was as low as 5 percent of normal. Even when it did rain, hardly any runoff made it into the reservoirs—the famished landscape soaked it all up. Nineteen ninety-two—the year in which I am now writing—has been much the same. December and January, which are usually the wettest months, were numbingly dry, but toward the close of the rainy season, for two or three weeks, southern and central California were battered by storms. Not much of the runoff could be captured, because from Monterey south California has few reservoirs of real size—it doesn’t rain enough in the south to make building them worthwhile, and when it does rain it often rains violently, so the rivers carry great volumes of sediment and debris. (A small reservoir built on Malibu Creek in the 1920s had utterly silted up by the mid-1940s.) Meanwhile, northern California, where the real reservoirs are, was again bypassed by the biggest storms, and so, as I write this, the state is entering the dry season—and its sixth consecutive year of drought