Did you see that report from a few weeks back? The one from the NASA scientist who predicted that California has only a year of water left?
Um.
The L.A. Times, which ran the mouth-parching opinion piece, has since admitted that the original headline might have given state residents the wrong impression. It’s not that California is going to be out of water—you know, turning on the shower or kitchen sink and having only air and dust pour out—but that California is going to be out of its stored water. That’s the water you see just lying around in reservoirs like a lazy college grad who’ll start looking for a job tomorrow.
Just to let you know, we generally use the handily available water first: the stuff that comes from melting snowpacks and healthy rains. Since those are about as common as the Javan rhinoceros (non-biologist hint: not very) these days, people who still want to do stuff like irrigate their crops or quench their thirst start turning to other sources. Hence, reservoirs. Next in line is groundwater, which tries to get out of having to pitch in by hiding beneath our feet, but we figured out where it was a long time ago, so of course we began exploiting it.
You can’t hide from thirsty Californians.
The state’s Department of Water Resources reports that the sneaky groundwater basins contribute about 38 percent of the state’s total water supply in an average year. In a dry year, though (and in California, we just call that a “year”), it contributes up to 46 percent (“or more”).
So we’re potentially looking at half of the state’s water—or not looking at it, since we can’t see it—as a backup to a backup. The problem? The backup’s backup is, by all measures, historically low, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.
I learned this past week that the water underground isn’t simply sitting in subterranean pools, their still surfaces marred only by the occasional ripple from the flick of a blind cave-fish’s tail. In my mind, groundwater stores have been the sorts of places you find long-lost mythic artifacts and engage in games of wit by trading riddles with strange creatures who traded a life in the sun for the cool and the dark.
But no, reality is far less Tolkienesque. Some of this water is sort of suspended in porous clay, making less of a vast lake and more of a giant sponge. When we pull the water out, the dried up clay compacts, smashing into oblivion those countless little holes where water could hide. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. They’re not like those towels you get in a little tiny package, so they look like a squished up little ball until you soak them and they spread out to their full size.
When this clay flattens out, it can’t be un-flattened. No amount of Wile E. Coyote-level medical magic can restore its water-holding capabilities. So next time a good, solid rain comes (go ahead, I’ll wait until you stop laughing or, more likely, weeping), it doesn’t get soaked up and stored. It just goes away to wherever rain goes when it can’t find a place to stay. Maybe it crashes on the couch at its sister’s house, you know, just until things pick up again. And it plans to look for work tomorrow.
In all seriousness, though (and I apologize for the preceding irreverence, but I’m choosing to laugh instead of weep), this de-watering has literally been sinking California. The ground is dropping out from beneath farmers’ feet, with some media outlets reporting a foot-a-year loss in the San Joaquin Valley. Agriculturists are pushing their straws farther and farther into the earth for their wells.
Let’s hope that they don’t delve too greedily and too deep.
Journalist Lisa M. Krieger, writing for the San Jose Mercury News, called it a “perverse race for the bottom.” I’d call that falling.
I tried to look up groundwater data for Santa Barbara County, but “there was a problem with the request … ,” according to the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Water Information System.
I was going to go back to try to find a different database, but I realized that I actually had the answer I was looking for: There is a problem with the request. There is a problem with the multitude of requests throughout the state from farmers who don’t want to be the next one to accede another acre to dust, the next one to see a healthy plant shrivel and wither, the next one to see a way of life dry up and blow away.
Can you blame them?
Well, yeah, I guess you can. But should you? Will you?
The Canary is considering a move to the Great White North while there’s still some white falling from the sky. Send comments or suggestions to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 2-9, 2015.