It’s been raining. I’ve seen it!
I’ve seen it spattering on sidewalks and running down gutters. I’ve seen it bending leaves on trees and blades of grass.
I’ve heard it, too!
I’ve heard it drumming on the rooftops of houses and cars. I’ve heard it patter on umbrellas and rain jackets.
I’ve smelled it on the wind, I’ve felt it on my own feathers, and I’ve even tasted it. When was the last time you stuck your tongue out and got a drop on your tongue? (East Coasters may do that with snowflakes, but we in the West have to make do with what we can.)
So considering all of this water falling in such sense-filling abundance, I did something stupid: I got my hopes up. That’s the very thing I’ve warned you readers about. I’ve cautioned against doing it in this very column!
But I went and did it anyway. I think I was intoxicated—drunk on nothing more than simple H20.
For the first time in as long as I can remember, I saw relief to the drought—the local drought, California drought, all of it. Take that, dry, dusty ground! And don’t come back! At least, don’t come back for a while. We don’t want a flood or anything.
But then I went and looked up a map of the state on the U.S. Drought Monitor.
Big mistake!
Santa Barbara County—and San Luis Obispo County to the north, and a county or two to the south, and even more to the far north, up almost all the way to the Oregon border—is a dark, brownish red on the map. It’s like a Bing cherry. Or dried blood. One or the other.
I’m going to go with blood, because it’s more dramatic.
This is the map released Dec. 4, a day watered by rains after more days watered by rains.
And it just goes to show that a week of water does not a drought end.
The dried-cherry-blood color indicates “Exceptional Drought.” That’s the most severe level of drought—a full two steps worse on the scale than “Severe Drought” itself.
The full scale, if you must know, goes “Abnormally Dry,” “Moderate Drought,” “Severe Drought,” “Extreme Drought,” and “Exceptional Drought.”
Apart from some drips of blood/cherry juice on Texas and Oklahoma, as well as a weird blobby-thingie shooting out from Northern California into Nevada, the rest of the country is relatively well-hydrated. Definitely well-hydrated by comparison to California.
That’s because it takes more than some rain to stop a drought.
Also, a drought involves more than what you can see when you tilt your head back and look up at the sky. There’s water beneath your feet, too, even if it’s not the kind that’s immediately on hand to smell or catch on your tongue.
And that water’s going away.
On Dec. 2, the state’s Department of Water Resources announced that groundwater levels have notably decreased in six hydrologic regions, including the Central Coast. That means this area joins the Sacramento River, San Joaquin River, Tulare Lake, San Francisco Bay, and South Coast regions in drying out just a bit more.
Part of the problem is because droughts that eliminate water on the surface prompt people to start pulling more water from below the surface, and if nothing’s recharging that supply, it starts to drop.
So what do we do? A California Water Action Plan from former Gov. Gray Davis mentions “making conservation a way of life,” which basically implies—if not outright says—that our way of life now is anything but conservative. People like to spend: water, money, time. If our culture wants to get it and use it up—use up more of it than it got in the first place, in fact—then nobody’s going to stop it. Stop them? Stop us?
The State Water Resources Control Board announced—also on Dec. 2—that Californians are growing increasingly less gung-ho when it comes to residential water conservation. The press release is a bit hard to follow at first (is a decline in urban water conservation rates a good thing or a bad thing?), but the message is there: Either people are using less water because of the cooling, somewhat wetter weather, or they’re just tired of leaving the hose coiled and the shower stall unoccupied every other day.
“Heading into 2015, our reservoirs remain at historic lows and our snowpack is a fraction of what we need, so the stakes are even higher than this time last year.” So says State Water Board Chair Felicia Marcus.
But if you won’t listen to Felicia, who will you listen to, people of California? What will it take to get you to stop seeing a cloudy sky as the justification for opening a tap?
I have an inkling of idea: It will take that tap spitting out nothing but air one of these days. Then you won’t have a choice but to conserve.
None of us will.
The Canary has vowed to stop bathing until the snowpack returns. Send comments or tips to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Dec 11-18, 2014.