It’s time for Angelenos to take a much-needed reality check regarding the state of their current water supply.
Earlier this month, the California Department of Water Resources took the season’s final Sierra Nevada snowpack survey, which came out to a record low, making this past March and April the driest since 1921.
What this means is that California is slowly losing its main water supply ““ in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and reservoirs throughout the state ““ and it’s time for residents of Los Angeles County to realize how this issue hits close to home.
While it’s easy for us to brush off this tale of Los Angeles dwindling into an arid wasteland, with parched citizens roaming the streets in a dehydrated haze, we cannot see the water issue as an obsolete one.
State officials have already dubbed the water shortage “serious” and perhaps the worst it’s been in decades. The combined effects of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta’s damaged ecosystem and California’s daily water usage is finally starting to take a drastic toll.
Legislators are now stepping up with immediate solutions.
In February, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called for 20 percent per capita cuts in water use “across the board,” which could include drastic measures such as water rationing if significant action is not taken.
Currently, Southern California is significantly dependent on outside resources for its water supplies ““ from the Owens Valley, the Colorado River and through the State Water Project, which transports water to us from the Sierra Nevada region. Southern California’s reliance on imported water puts Los Angeles in a particularly dangerous situation with current water shortages.
Though Los Angeles County typically gets about 30 to 60 percent of its water from the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a big portion of our drinking and tap water is bought from the north and east, which is why a bigger effort needs to be made in terms of water conservation at both the local and statewide levels.
A statewide solution must first be made to address the environmental issues of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Due to years of constant irrigation and recent droughts, the delta’s natural ecosystem is slowly eroding. This is especially harmful for the local Chinook salmon and Central Valley steelhead trout populations.
A federal ruling last summer even restricted water deliveries to Southern California by 600,000 acre-feet of water to protect endangered species in the delta.
In addition to addressing environmental concerns up north, Southern California’s Metropolitan Water District and other local agencies should come up with infrastructure solutions to lessen Los Angeles’ dependence on outside water resources.
It is clear that Los Angeles’ trend of importing water is not going to end.
But perhaps through business incentives or utilizing Southern California’s underground storage facilities, we may be able to evade the effects of a total water-loss disaster.
Yet, the most important water conservation effort should go along the lines of Schwarzenegger’s proposition to cut down overall water usage by 20 percent.
This legislation must be taken into serious consideration, as it could outline the general course of action for California’s government regarding the incessant water shortage problem.
Conservation efforts need to be bumped up in order to reach Schwarzenegger’s quota ““ which would include everything from simply cutting down personal water usage to implementing more water reclamation plants.
Indeed, if businesses were to spearhead this conservation movement it would have the most dramatic impact within Southern California, and the effects would subsequently trickle throughout the state.
Overall, the ongoing issue of water shortage in the state of California does not have a quick and immediate solution, unless we expect a miraculous blizzard to hit the Sierra Nevada sometime soon. But Angelenos’ recognition of how this problem is not a foreign or ignorable issue will help jump-start substantial conservation efforts.
E-mail Chung at lchung@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.