By Molly Sanchez
According to an LA Times opinion piece, California only has a year’s worth of water left in its reservoirs. You know we’re in a major drought, especially after facing one of the driest Januaries in our area in history. But did you know that our river basins lost millions of feet of water last year? As the LA Times piece explains, NASA satellite cameras show that the San Joaquin and Sacramento basins were 34 million acre-feet below normal this year. It’s just not good news no matter how you spin it.
When drought gets bad like this, people rely on groundwater, which can be taken from soil and rock foundations under the earth’s surface. Groundwater usually rises to the surface naturally but can be pumped up via wells. But it’s not a perfect solution because in many cases pumping is unsustainable. The LA Times article reports that now even some of the groundwater wells are going dry.
The answer to a water crisis like this is to engage in some serious conservation tactics, even if the concept of a drought feels foreign in a city like San Francisco (as opposed to people working in California’s farmlands, who feel the brunt of this dry streak). One study found that SoCal is better at conservation efforts than we are, and KQED reported that the Bay Area’s water conservation went from 21.6 percent conservation in December down to only 3.7 percent in January.
So in our personal lives we need to ration our water use, take quick showers, flush less, and halt the long baths. We also need to lean on our government officials to start thinking more seriously about managing the drought via legislation. And finally, as the LA Times article urges, we really need to “pray for rain.”
[Via The Los Angeles Times]
Image courtesy of Flickr user Bert Kaufmann.
