California drought: Feds announce low water deliveries to cities and farms — more shortages likely this summer

Providing a stark example that California’s hopes of ending its drought are dwindling after an extremely dry January and February, federal officials on Wednesday announced that cities will receive continued water cutbacks, and many Central Valley farms will receive no water this summer from the Central Valley Project, California’s largest water delivery system.

“We wish we had better news,” said Ernest Conant, regional director of the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that runs the project.  “Let’s keep our fingers crossed that we have some better precipitation in the next couple of months.”

So far, the Northern Sierra watersheds that fill many of the state’s largest reservoirs have received the least amount of precipitation in January and February of any January and February since 1921 when records began.

Through Wednesday, eight key weather stations in the Northern Sierra had received only 1.7 inches in January and February, less than 10% of the historical average of 18 inches.

Even though California was drenched with several huge atmospheric river storms in late October and December, raising hopes that the drought was ending, the bone-dry months since then have left the Sierra Nevada snowpack at just 67% of its historical average on Wednesday, and many major reservoirs with water levels well below where they were last year.

Facing a likely third year of drought with less water in storage, on Wednesday the Bureau of Reclamation announced that most cities south of the Delta that receive water from the Central Valley Project would receive just 25% of their contracted amounts, and most farmers in the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys would receive 0%.

Those numbers will be updated in May. They are the same as the final allocations a year ago. The big difference this year, however, is that most major reservoirs have less water in them now, similar to a dwindling savings account. Shasta, the state’s largest reservoir, for example, was 37% full on Wednesday. A year ago it was 49% full.

“Last year we started with higher storage,” Conant said. “Now we’re down quite a bit.”

The low water allocations mean more calls for water conservation are coming to Silicon Valley.

“We cannot relax. We need to accelerate our conservation goals,” said Gary Kremen, chairman of the Santa Clara Valley Water District, which provides water to 2 million people in Santa Clara County.

Last June, as the drought dragged into its second year, the district declared an emergency and asked residents in San Jose and other South Bay cities to reduce water use 15% from 2019 levels. Cumulatively, from June through December, residents have missed that target, cutting use by 8%.

And although the district’s 10 local reservoirs rose somewhat during the December rains, together on Wednesday they were just 25.7% full. Kremen said that he plans in the coming weeks to discuss with the district’s board whether it needs to increase its water conservation request to South Bay residents.

The agency is hamstrung because its largest reservoir, Anderson, near Morgan Hill is drained for earthquake repairs. It has several options this summer. They include pumping more local groundwater, spending tens of millions to buy water from Sacramento Valley farmers with senior water rights and water to sell, and drawing water out of the Semitropic groundwater bank in Kern County, where the district has stored water for dry years. All of those actions are likely.

The drought is serious, Kremen noted, and nobody knows how long it will continue.

“I’m worried about conservation fatigue,” he said. “People are being hit with a lot — COVID, Ukraine, the unhoused. Some people are overwhelmed.”

In some years, the federal water affected Wednesday makes up about a quarter of the Santa Clara Valley Water District’s total use.

Other large Bay Area water agencies, including East Bay MUD and the Contra Costa Water District, also receive Central Valley Project Water. But because they have more water stored in their reservoirs, their outlook is not as tight as the Santa Clara Valley Water District’s.

And some Bay Area residents, in Marin County and in San Francisco and the Peninsula, do not receive Central Valley Project Water and are not affected by Wednesday’s news.

Perhaps hardest hit are farmers.

Receiving no federal water for the second year in a row means many will have to pump already struggling groundwater supplies, while some will leave fields fallow.

“It’s devastating to the agricultural economy and those people who rely on it, the suppliers and the farmworkers. But unfortunately, we can’t make it rain,” Conant said.

The warming climate and its emerging weather pattern — sharp droughts followed by a year or two of extreme rain in California — are increasing calls for more reservoir construction to catch water during the wet years.

“California’s rainfall and snowpack patterns are changing,” said Federico Barajas, executive director of the San Luis & Delta-Mendota Water Authority, a Los Banos organization whose members irrigate 1.2 million acres of land, mostly in the San Joaquin Valley. “Our water management strategies must adapt to this change.”

Barajas said that billions approved last year by President Biden and Congress for highways, roads and water projects could help California modernize its water system. California voters in 2014 also approved $2.7 billion for new storage projects, seven of which are in the final review stages by the administration of Gov. Gavin Newsom, although critics say the process for handing out the money has taken too long.