Experts say there is enough water ---- for now

By: DAVE DOWNEY - Staff Writer | Saturday, July 23, 2005 10:27 PM PDT ∞

They were ripping out lawns in Las Vegas and rationing water in Denver at the peak of the recent six-year drought, but in Riverside County, sprinklers were soaking golf courses and builders were framing houses as if the water would last forever.

"There wasn't even a blip in terms of continuity of supply, and even cost," said Bill Patzert, a climatologist with Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, in an interview last week. "No one even knew we were in a drought."

Indeed, residents of Riverside and other urban Southern California counties managed to weather the most recent drought with less pain than they felt during the one that struck in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Patzert said. Toward the end of that earlier drought, agencies hiked rates to spur families to conserve supplies.

The relative lack of pain is strong indication Southern California's supply is healthy, Patzert said. He said the region won't run out of water anytime soon, even though in Riverside County "they are handing out building permits like M&Ms," Patzert said.

"For the next two decades, we're good," he said.

Randy Record, who serves on boards of the giant regional wholesaler Metropolitan Water District and a local distributor, Eastern Municipal Water District, put it this way: "I don't wake up at 3 in the morning and take a shower because I'm worried that there won't be any water when I get up at 6."

Still, at some point California's relentless population growth may catch up with supply, and a future drought could trigger widespread shortages, said Andrew Chang, director of the Center for Water Resources at UC Riverside.

Lessons from ancient civilizations

There are skeptics out there who believe that will occur sooner rather than later, and the region may in fact be headed for disaster.

"The future's a little hazy," suggested John Roth, a Riverside County planning commissioner who often questions whether there is enough supply to serve proposed new housing tracts.

"You can talk to any of the water agencies and they'll all tell you there's no problem," Roth said. "To me, that in itself is a problem. They don't control the weather. Mother Nature doesn't talk to Metropolitan and to all these people who are sucking water out of the ground."

Riverside County Supervisor Bob Buster also has serious doubts.

"I'm very skeptical that enough water is there unless we really ransack agriculture, and I certainly don't think that is a wise move for California," Buster said. "Food, to me, is a national security issue, as well as the most important sector of our economy in this state."

Buster suggested California's leaders would do well to revisit the lessons of history.

"There have been many ancient civilizations that expired because they didn't handle their water resources properly and overran them," he said.

In any event, it is not like the next couple of decades will see smooth sailing along the water front. Local ground water supplies in Riverside County are overtaxed, Southern California has piped in all it can from distant snowy mountains and California will have to live with less water from the Colorado River.

"Down the line, our share of Colorado River water is going to be reduced by 800,000 acre-feet a year," Chang said. "When that happens (by 2015), it will be almost like having a localized drought."

At the same time, Metropolitan Water District projects total Southern California regional consumption to increase by about one-third to 6 million acre-feet a year, or by 1.5 million acre-feet, between now and 2020, said Steve Arakawa, Metropolitan group manager for water resources management.

Los Angeles-based Metropolitan provides half of the roughly 4.5 million acre-feet used by 18 million people in six counties each year, in a wide arc stretching from Ventura to the Mexican border. An acre-foot would cover a football field to a depth of 1 foot. It is how much on average two families use in a year.

2nd annual water symposium

The looming challenges facing Riverside County and the region will be the focus of the second annual Riverside County Water Symposium, scheduled for Wednesday in Corona. The daylong gathering of officials and experts will examine the region's supply, new state water laws, conservation and the need for government to set a good example on how to conserve.

Despite the challenges ahead, Southern Californians weathered the storm ---- or rather, the lack of storms over a six-year period ---- with relative ease compared to residents of Nevada and Colorado, Patzert said, because of the foresight Southern California leaders exercised in the early part of last century. Those leaders secured significant supplies from much wetter Northern California and the Colorado River.

Experts also say it has helped that Metropolitan came to grips last decade with the reality that there weren't many options for piping more water in from outside the region. In 1996, Metropolitan's board headed in a different, more diversified, direction. Since then, Arakawa said, the amount the agency has in storage in Southern California has increased tenfold. That is largely a result of building mammoth Diamond Valley Lake northeast of Temecula, which holds up to 800,000 acre-feet ---- enough to sustain 6 million people for a year, and storing in the ground surplus water pulled out of the Colorado in wet years.

"If we go into a dry year, we are able to deal with that blow pretty effectively because we have storage to draw on that we never had before," Arakawa said.

Metropolitan also is encouraging increased use of reclaimed waste water, for irrigating golf courses for instance, and experimenting with sea-water desalination on the North San Diego County coast. It is promoting conservation both inside and outside the home.

Arakawa said conservation alone could save 800,000 acre-feet a year by 2020, potentially cutting forecast regional consumption in half.

Conservation moving outdoors

Having already put much focus on low-flow toilets and other indoor use, Metropolitan and its affiliated agencies are increasingly turning attention to lawns and gardens. Advertisements are regularly heard on the radio urging people to avoid overwatering and to replace thirsty plants with native or nonnative varieties that require less water. Metropolitan's Web site also has a link to a site that provides an exhaustive menu of choices for low-water-use plants.

"I believe that we still have a lot that we can do painlessly in the way of conservation," said Record, chairman of the Riverside County Water Task Force, which plans to make a presentation at the symposium and present water-saving options to the county Board of Supervisors in the fall.

Record said the task force does not plan to recommend that area cities pass ordinances to limit the area of turf in one's yard or mandate other water-saving measures. Rather, he said he believes that home builders and existing homeowners will voluntarily make key irrigation and landscape changes that will save a lot of water, as they are presented realistic alternatives.

Record said he realizes, however, that the message the task force hopes to deliver to residents will be diluted if local agencies don't set good examples. Today, he said, the region is flush with bad examples, such as narrow strips of turf-covered medians.

"I love grass, but I don't know why you would put two feet of grass along a highway where there is no efficient way to irrigate it, where it results in water running down the street and where a worker must risk his life to mow it," Record said.

But Supervisor Buster said the government's example must go beyond water use and include careful regional planning for where, and how much, growth may occur.

"We are asking everyone to sacrifice, and yet we are promoting growth at the same time," Buster said. "It seems to me that something is out of kilter here."

Roth, of the Planning Commission, added, "They talk conservation, and I believe in conservation. But you can only conserve so much."

Looking to farms to quench thirst

Buster also suggested that inevitably the search for more water will reach deep into agriculture's well, which experts say accounts for three-quarters of the water used by Californians. He warned that California could wind up sacrificing much of the state's ---- and nation's ---- food supply by siphoning water from farms.

Others say the shift of some agricultural water to urban areas does not have to disrupt farming.

"Certainly we don't want them to stop farming so that our food costs a lot more money," Record said, adding that under some options, farmers could continue growing crops.

For example, urban areas could foot the cost of lining agricultural canals or installing drip irrigation systems on, say, cotton farms, said Ken Baerenklau, assistant professor of environmental economics and policy at UC Riverside. And the saved water could be shipped to cities.

On the other hand, Baerenklau said it will be difficult to move a lot of water around without building new aqueducts or expanding existing ones at great cost. That's because the state's extensive canal system is, in many places, filled to capacity.

As well, he said, it won't be easy to surmount political obstacles, as San Diego County found out recently. It took several years for officials there to negotiate the historic water transfer that will deliver Imperial Valley farm water to that county's thirsty growing cities for decades to come.

"Is there enough water out there physically? Yes, there is," Baerenklau said. "But it's not in the places where the growth is taking place. It's locked into a very well-established agricultural and legal structure, and it could prove very difficult to release it from that structure."

Contact staff writer Dave Downey at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2616, or ddowney@californian.com.

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