All this week, KCBS Radio is taking a look at California’s emerging drought crisis. In part one, Kathy Novak looks at how the dry conditions are affecting one region of the Bay Area.
Two years of underwhelming rain totals and snowpack means California is now going through another drought.
Combine that with record high dry vegetation growth, and the state could be looking at a potentially highly destructive wildfire season ahead. Sonoma County was one of the first area officially declared to be in a drought emergency, with rainfall at less than 40% of the average in some parts.
"The grass is pretty dry for mid-May. The grass is almost completely cured," said fire ecologist Dr. Sasha Berleman on a recent aerial tour of the region, pointing out areas that burned over the last few years.
Dr. Berleman is the Director of the Fire Forward Program at Audubon Canyon Ranch, which works to educate landowners about stewardship measures such as fuel management, as they face wildfires, climate change and drought.
"Absolutely drought is also worsening our fire seasons," she said. "And where we haven’t been doing successful stewardship for 100 years, we have way too many trees competing for very limited water."
Just last week, the conditions prompted Gov. Newsom to extend the drought emergency declaration to 41 of the state’s 58 counties.
"In the last few weeks we’ve lost roughly 500,000 acre feet of runoff compared to what we had anticipated," he said. "Which, put into language that I hope people can understand, is the equivalent to one million households receiving water for a year."
While the declaration still does not expend statewide, Peter Gleick, co- founder of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, said, “we’re absolutely in a drought. There’s no doubt about that.”
The latest update from the U.S. Drought Monitor shows 100% of California is considered to be at least "abnormally dry."
It’s the second year of this drought, which follows the last five-year drought that ended in 2017.
"It’s not just that this year’s a bad year, it’s that we seem to be having a string of droughts," said Dr. Gleick.
He said climate change is influencing extreme events, and our water systems are designed for a climate that no longer exists.
"The things that we did in the 20th century aren’t going to solve our problems in the 21st century. We built on all the good dam sites in California, and plenty of bad dam sites in California. We already take too much water out of the system and our ecosystems are collapsing, our fisheries are collapsing, our salmon are going extinct."
The good news is there are smart things we can and should do, from taking shorter showers to growing food with less water.
But he added if we don’t start managing our water systems differently, there will be more pressure on ecosystems and more tensions over who gets water in a state where wells are already running dry.
"It’s a terrible outrage that in a state like California, as rich as we are in money and technology and education, that there are vast communities that don’t have access to safe water - the most fundamental human right."
Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at how the drought is already impacting residents and farmers in the Central Valley.
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