THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
"California wells run dry as drought depletes groundwater"
By TERRY CHEA, Associated Press
4 OCTOBER 2022
FAIRMEAD, Calif. (AP) — As California's drought deepens, Elaine Moore’s family is running out of an increasingly precious resource: water.
The Central Valley almond growers had two wells go dry this summer.
Two of her adult children are now getting water from a new well the family drilled after the old one went dry last year.
She’s even supplying water to a neighbor whose well dried up.
“It’s been so dry this last year."
"We didn’t get much rain."
"We didn’t get much snowpack,” Moore said, standing next to a dry well on her property in Chowchilla, California.
"Everybody’s very careful with what water they’re using."
"In fact, my granddaughter is emptying the kids' little pool to flush the toilets.”
Amid a megadrought plaguing the American West, more rural communities are losing access to groundwater as heavy pumping depletes underground aquifers that aren’t being replenished by rain and snow.
More than 1,200 wells have run dry this year statewide, a nearly 50% increase over the same period last year, according to the California Department of Water Resources.
By contrast, fewer than 100 dry wells were reported annually in 2018, 2019 and 2020.
The groundwater crisis is most severe in the San Joaquin Valley, California’s agricultural heartland, which exports fruits, vegetables and nuts around the world.
Shrinking groundwater supplies reflect the severity of California’s drought, which is now entering its fourth year.
According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, more than 94% of the state is in severe, extreme or exceptional drought.
California just experienced its three driest years on record, and state water officials said Monday they’re preparing for another dry year because the weather phenomenon known as La Nina is expected to occur for the third consecutive year.
Farmers are getting little surface water from the state’s depleted reservoirs, so they’re pumping more groundwater to irrigate their crops.
That’s causing water tables to drop across California.
State data shows that 64% of wells are at below-normal water levels.
Water shortages are already reducing the region’s agricultural production as farmers are forced to fallow fields and let orchards wither.
An estimated 531,00 acres (215,000 hectares) of farmland went unplanted this year because of a lack of irrigation water, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
As climate change brings hotter temperatures and more severe droughts, cities and states around the world are facing water shortages as lakes and rivers dry up.
Many communities are pumping more groundwater and depleting aquifers at an alarming pace.
“This is a key challenge not just for California, but for communities across the West moving forward in adapting to climate change,” said Andrew Ayres, a water researcher at the Public Policy Institute of California.
Madera County, north of Fresno, has been hit particularly hard because it relies heavily on groundwater.
The county has reported about 430 dry wells so far this year.
In recent years, the county has seen the rapid expansion of thirsty almond and pistachio orchards that are typically irrigated by agricultural wells that run deeper than domestic wells.
“The bigger straw is going to suck the water from right beneath the little straw,” said Madeline Harris, a policy manager with the advocacy group Leadership Council for Justice and Accountability.
She stood next to a municipal well that’s run dry in Fairmead, a town of 1,200 surrounded by nut orchards.
“Municipal wells like this one are being put at risk and are going dry because of the groundwater overdraft problems from agriculture,” Harris said.
“There are families who don’t have access to running water right now because they have dry domestic wells.”
Residents with dry wells can get help from a state program that provides bottled water as well as storage tanks regularly filled by water delivery trucks.
The state also provides money to replace dry wells, but there’s a long wait to get a new one.
Not everyone is getting assistance.
Thomas Chairez said his Fairmead property, which he rents to a family of eight, used to get water from his neighbor’s well.
But when it went dry two years ago, his tenants lost access to running water.
Chairez is trying to get the county to provide a storage tank and water delivery service.
For now, his tenants have to fill up 5-gallon (19-liter) buckets at a friend’s home and transport water by car each day.
They use the water to cook and take showers.
They have portable toilets in the backyard.
“They’re surviving,” Chairez said. “In Mexico, I used to do that."
"I used to carry two buckets myself from far away."
"So we got to survive somehow."
"This is an emergency.”
Well drillers are in high demand as water pumps stop working across the San Joaquin Valley.
Ethan Bowles and his colleagues were recently drilling a new well at a ranch house in the Madera Ranchos neighborhood, where many wells have gone dry this year.
“It’s been almost nonstop phone calls just due to the water table dropping constantly,” said Bowles, who works for Chowchilla-based Drew and Hefner Well Drilling.
“Most residents have had their wells for many years and all of a sudden the water stops flowing.”
His company must now drill down 500 and 600 feet (152 to 183 meters) to get clients a steady supply of groundwater.
That’s a couple hundred feet deeper than older wells.
“The wells just have to go deeper," Bowles said.
“You have to hit a different aquifer and get them a different part of that water table so they can actually have fresh water for their house."
In March, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order to slow a frenzy of well-drilling over the past few years.
The temporary measure prohibits local agencies from issuing permits for new wells that could harm nearby wells or structures.
California’s groundwater troubles come as local agencies seek to comply with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which Gov. Jerry Brown signed in 2014 to prevent groundwater overpumping during the last drought.
The law requires regional agencies to manage their aquifers sustainably by 2042.
Water experts believe the law will lead to more sustainable groundwater supplies over the next two decades, but the road will be bumpy.
The Public Policy Institute of California estimates that about 500,000 acres (202,000 hectares) of agricultural land, about 10% of the current total, will have to come out of production over the next two decades.
“These communities are going to be impacted from drinking water supplies and loss of jobs," said Isaya Kisekka, a groundwater expert at the University of California, Davis.
“There’s a lot of migration of farmworkers as this land gets fallowed."
Farmers and residents in the Valley are hoping for help from above.
“Hopefully we get a lot of rain,” Chairez said.
“There’s a big need: water."
"We need water, water, water.”
___
Follow Terry Chea on Twitter: @terrychea
___
The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/calif ... 86b3cbc1e9
ON THE TIMES WE ARE NOW IN
Re: ON THE TIMES WE ARE NOW IN
THE WASHINGTON POST
"A California city’s water supply is expected to run out in two months"
Josh Partlow
10 OCTOBER 2022
COALINGA, Calif. — The residents of this sun-scorched city feel California’s endless drought when the dust lifts off the brown hills and flings grit into their living rooms.
They see it when they drive past almond trees being ripped from the ground for lack of water and the new blinking sign at the corner of Elm and Cherry warning: “No watering front yard lawns.”
The fire chief noticed it when he tested hydrants in August — a rare occurrence as Coalinga desperately seeks to conserve water — and the first one shot out a foot-long block of compacted dirt.
The second one ejected like a can of Axe body spray.
The schools superintendent could only think drought on the first day of school when a 4-year-old fell onto unwatered turf, breaking an arm; or when the chain saws dropped three coastal redwoods outside Henry F. Bishop Elementary that had withered and died.
Superintendent Lori Villanueva even lost a portion of her own right lung last year from a drought-aggravated illness, valley fever, that’s caused by breathing soil fungus whipped up off the dry ground.
But what lies ahead might be far worse for the 17,000 residents living amid the oil derricks and cattle farms on the western edge of the state’s Central Valley.
Coalinga has only one source of water — a shrinking allotment from an aqueduct managed by the federal government — and officials are projecting the city will use up that amount before the end of the year.
That looming threat has left city officials racing between meetings in Sacramento and phone calls to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation seeking to increase their water supply.
Some residents have begun stockpiling five-gallon water jugs in their homes, while many expect major spikes in their water bills.
If Coalinga can’t find relief, it would be forced to buy additional water on the open market at exorbitant prices that could swamp the city’s budget.
‘The worst we’ve seen’: Ranchers threatened by historic heat and drought
That was the grim scenario facing Mayor Ron Ramsey when he rapped his knuckles on the table and cursed at a City Council meeting in early August.
Everyone but Ramsey had just voted to ban watering front yards and to ramp up penalties on overuse — measures they conceded would not save nearly what was needed.
But it was more than Ramsey could stomach.
“It’s too much."
"Too fast,” Ramsey told the room.
On top of that, he said, it wasn’t fair.
“Go to the state capitol and they got green grass, don’t they?” he said.
“They can do it, but why can’t we?”
Coalinga, named for its history as a coal mining town, is a small Republican outpost in liberal California.
The city had already defied state leadership in 2020, passing a resolution that declared all businesses essential to avoid mandatory pandemic closures.
When it was time for the state to distribute covid-19 relief funds to municipalities, Coalinga didn’t get any.
The water shortage felt to some like another kind of retaliation.
“How do you not give farmers water when they feed everybody unless you’re trying to put them out of business?” asked Scott Netherton, owner of Coalinga’s lone movie theater and executive director of its chamber of commerce.
“It feels like we’re being singled out, small towns,” he said.
“It’s like they’re trying to force them out to where you’ve got to move into the bigger cities.”
Coalinga’s brackish groundwater has never been a reliable option.
Before a canal was completed in the early 1970s that connected Coalinga to a major aqueduct, the city relied on water delivered by train.
After a 1983 earthquake that destroyed some 300 homes in town and spread concerns about water contamination, residents resorted to donations; Anheuser-Busch sent drinking water to Coalinga in beer cans and bottles.
But the drought has made residents question the very survival of their city.
“We’ve never been this bad where they said we’re going to run out of water,” Mayor Ramsey said.
A future with far less access to water
The most severe drought in the American West since the 9th century is now in its 23rd year.
All across the region, communities are confronting shortages worse than they have ever known.
The biggest reservoirs have fallen to record lows.
Whole neighborhoods have lost their water supply as wells have gone dry.
States along the dwindling Colorado River are negotiating water cuts that could bring dramatic disruptions to some of the country’s most important agricultural belts.
The hotter and drier climate has forced California and other states to reckon with a future in which they will have access to far less water, even as populations continue to grow.
In August, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) presented a 19-page plan to deal with the expected loss of 10 percent of the state’s water supply by 2040.
“The hots are getting a lot hotter."
"The dries are getting a lot drier,” Newsom told reporters at the time.
“We have to adapt to that new reality, and we have to change our approach.”
California started the year with its driest four months on record.
Snowpack in the Sierra Nevada this year was a small fraction of the historical average.
Depleted reservoirs have led to restrictions on outdoor watering for millions of state residents.
Coalinga’s water comes from the San Luis Reservoir, about 90 miles to the north, and is delivered along a portion of the California Aqueduct that was built in the 1960s and helped fuel the region’s agricultural growth.
This is part of the Central Valley Project, a network of dams, reservoirs and canals now severely hobbled by drought.
‘Where there’s bodies, there’s treasure’: A hunt as Lake Mead shrinks
Farmers received no allocation from that network this year; municipalities and industrial users were limited to what the Bureau of Reclamation calculates as their “public health and safety” needs — a first in the history of the Central Valley Project, which dates to the 1930s.
For Coalinga, that meant 1,920 acre-feet of water — a quarter of its historic allotment and just over half of what it expected to consume this year.
Federal officials raised that in April to 2,500 acre-feet — a level that still fell more than 1,000 acre-feet short of what Coalinga needed.
An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons, what it would take to cover an acre of land with one foot of water.
Over the summer, city officials calculated the city’s supply would run out by mid-September.
Beyond that point, if Coalinga kept using water from the aqueduct, it would belong to someone else.
“You don’t have the right to take that water,” was the message Sean Brewer, Coalinga’s assistant city manager, said he got from Reclamation officials.
The bureau said in a statement that it had been working closely with Coalinga on its “unique water supply circumstances and challenges.”
Brewer agreed that the bureau has been “extremely helpful” even as its “hands are tied.”
Federal officials gave him names of vendors who might sell the city the extra water it needed.
But as Brewer worked his way down the list of irrigation districts, farmers and other private interests, the news wasn’t good.
“Nobody has water to sell right now,” he said.
Those who do are not selling it cheap.
“I cringe when I say this,” Brewer told the City Council on Aug. 4, as he reported that water that normally cost the city $190 per acre-foot was being sold on the open market for as much as $2,500 per acre-foot.
The city might need up to $2.5 million to buy enough water to last the year, he said.
The city’s entire budget is $10 million.
“We just don’t have $2.5 million to buy water,” City Council member Adam Adkisson said in an interview, calling the water prices “criminal.”
“In a natural disaster, you can’t increase the cost of bottled water 2,000 percent; you’d go to jail for that,” he said.
“But somehow these people can increase it 2,000 percent and everything’s just fine.”
Fear of that kind of “drought profiteering” prompted state Sen. Melissa Hurtado (D) to write Attorney General Merrick Garland in May asking for an investigation into the anti-competitive practices of hedge funds and other investors that “literally steal our most life dependent resource from ourselves and future generations in exchange for a profit.”
Hurtado talked to Adkisson in August as he was searching for a solution for Coalinga and found him “in panic mode.”
“The price of water, the cost of water, is increasing, but it’s not just going to be to the Central Valley; it’s going to be statewide,” Hurtado said.
“We’re in a crisis situation in a matter of weeks, I think.”
‘What do you do when the water runs out?’
In the High Times marijuana store — a burgeoning industry for Coalinga, which has two prominent dispensaries downtown and a pot farm run out of a defunct prison owned by Bob Marley’s son Damian — manager Luis Zamora is just starting to register a new level of concern about the water crisis.
“Just in the last probably two days, I’ve had people asking me, like, what do you do when the water runs out?”
He laughed.
“Exactly."
"What do you do?”
Coalinga has tried to get tough on water waste.
The city has code enforcers and even police officers patrolling for water violations.
The city put a moratorium on building swimming pools, raised water rates several times and last year began imposing “drought fees” for overuse.
But the city soon voted to refund the $277,000 it had raised in fees because water use wasn’t declining enough.
“It was supposed to be a deterrent,” said Netherton, the chamber of commerce’s executive director.
“It wasn’t deterring anybody.”
Zamora has been slowly stockpiling five-gallon water bottles at home — he’s up to nine of them.
He has stopped watering his lawn and watched as his neighbors’ yards have also turned brown.
But others’ lawns in town are still green, and residents are keenly aware who is still watering.
Facing a new climate reality, Southern California lawns could wither
“They encourage people to kind of rat each other out, out here,” Zamora said.
“So if you water, people will be taking pictures of you.”
“I’m watching your yard,” Mary Jones, a Coalinga resident, told Mayor Ramsey at an Aug. 18 City Council meeting.
Ramsey, who had by then accepted the ban on watering front lawns, resorted to spraying on his own remedy to keep his lawn looking nice.
“Hey, you know why mine’s green?” he asked Jones.
“I painted it.”
“I would paint mine, too, but it’s dirt,” she responded.
“I can’t fool anyone with dirt.”
A short-term reprieve
Coalinga’s two biggest water users sit next to each other on a lonely two-lane road several miles outside of town.
The Pleasant Valley State Prison and the Department of State Hospitals-Coalinga, a psychiatric hospital for sexually violent predators, together consume about 20 percent of the city’s water allocation.
And both institutions have told the city they can’t conserve more water than they already do.
Outside the psychiatric hospital, there is a long row of coastal redwoods that appear green and bushy, a landscaping flourish Coalinga residents view with increasing suspicion.
“Go look at our coastal redwoods in our medians; they’re all dead."
"The ones at the school?"
"Dead,” said Adkisson, the council member.
“I think there’s opportunities for them to conserve when it comes to landscaping.”
The hospital has operated under a drought plan for the past eight years.
The facility has removed most grass from “non-patient care areas,” has removed shrubs and plants, has resorted to controlled shower times, closely monitors leaks and “continues to make every effort” to use water efficiently, according to Ralph Montano, a spokesman for the Department of State Hospitals.
“Unfortunately, [the hospital’s] coastal redwoods are brown and dying from lack of water also,” Montano said in a statement.
The prison did not respond to requests for comment.
City officials argued that the burden of saving water on behalf of the two state-run institutions was unfairly being borne by residents.
In August, with Coalinga just weeks from running out of water, the Bureau of Reclamation responded by increasing the city’s allotment by 531 acre-feet “to assist with meeting public health and safety needs,” the bureau said in a statement.
But Coalinga officials say they are still about 600 acre-feet short and that buying additional supplies remains extremely expensive.
They now project they will run out of water sometime in early December.
When that happens, no one knows exactly what to expect.
“You don’t want to say that they’ll never turn the water off."
"I don’t see how they could,” Mayor Ramsey said.
“I hate to say this, but with the government we have right now, you never know.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-cal ... 7855c2a04d
"A California city’s water supply is expected to run out in two months"
Josh Partlow
10 OCTOBER 2022
COALINGA, Calif. — The residents of this sun-scorched city feel California’s endless drought when the dust lifts off the brown hills and flings grit into their living rooms.
They see it when they drive past almond trees being ripped from the ground for lack of water and the new blinking sign at the corner of Elm and Cherry warning: “No watering front yard lawns.”
The fire chief noticed it when he tested hydrants in August — a rare occurrence as Coalinga desperately seeks to conserve water — and the first one shot out a foot-long block of compacted dirt.
The second one ejected like a can of Axe body spray.
The schools superintendent could only think drought on the first day of school when a 4-year-old fell onto unwatered turf, breaking an arm; or when the chain saws dropped three coastal redwoods outside Henry F. Bishop Elementary that had withered and died.
Superintendent Lori Villanueva even lost a portion of her own right lung last year from a drought-aggravated illness, valley fever, that’s caused by breathing soil fungus whipped up off the dry ground.
But what lies ahead might be far worse for the 17,000 residents living amid the oil derricks and cattle farms on the western edge of the state’s Central Valley.
Coalinga has only one source of water — a shrinking allotment from an aqueduct managed by the federal government — and officials are projecting the city will use up that amount before the end of the year.
That looming threat has left city officials racing between meetings in Sacramento and phone calls to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation seeking to increase their water supply.
Some residents have begun stockpiling five-gallon water jugs in their homes, while many expect major spikes in their water bills.
If Coalinga can’t find relief, it would be forced to buy additional water on the open market at exorbitant prices that could swamp the city’s budget.
‘The worst we’ve seen’: Ranchers threatened by historic heat and drought
That was the grim scenario facing Mayor Ron Ramsey when he rapped his knuckles on the table and cursed at a City Council meeting in early August.
Everyone but Ramsey had just voted to ban watering front yards and to ramp up penalties on overuse — measures they conceded would not save nearly what was needed.
But it was more than Ramsey could stomach.
“It’s too much."
"Too fast,” Ramsey told the room.
On top of that, he said, it wasn’t fair.
“Go to the state capitol and they got green grass, don’t they?” he said.
“They can do it, but why can’t we?”
Coalinga, named for its history as a coal mining town, is a small Republican outpost in liberal California.
The city had already defied state leadership in 2020, passing a resolution that declared all businesses essential to avoid mandatory pandemic closures.
When it was time for the state to distribute covid-19 relief funds to municipalities, Coalinga didn’t get any.
The water shortage felt to some like another kind of retaliation.
“How do you not give farmers water when they feed everybody unless you’re trying to put them out of business?” asked Scott Netherton, owner of Coalinga’s lone movie theater and executive director of its chamber of commerce.
“It feels like we’re being singled out, small towns,” he said.
“It’s like they’re trying to force them out to where you’ve got to move into the bigger cities.”
Coalinga’s brackish groundwater has never been a reliable option.
Before a canal was completed in the early 1970s that connected Coalinga to a major aqueduct, the city relied on water delivered by train.
After a 1983 earthquake that destroyed some 300 homes in town and spread concerns about water contamination, residents resorted to donations; Anheuser-Busch sent drinking water to Coalinga in beer cans and bottles.
But the drought has made residents question the very survival of their city.
“We’ve never been this bad where they said we’re going to run out of water,” Mayor Ramsey said.
A future with far less access to water
The most severe drought in the American West since the 9th century is now in its 23rd year.
All across the region, communities are confronting shortages worse than they have ever known.
The biggest reservoirs have fallen to record lows.
Whole neighborhoods have lost their water supply as wells have gone dry.
States along the dwindling Colorado River are negotiating water cuts that could bring dramatic disruptions to some of the country’s most important agricultural belts.
The hotter and drier climate has forced California and other states to reckon with a future in which they will have access to far less water, even as populations continue to grow.
In August, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) presented a 19-page plan to deal with the expected loss of 10 percent of the state’s water supply by 2040.
“The hots are getting a lot hotter."
"The dries are getting a lot drier,” Newsom told reporters at the time.
“We have to adapt to that new reality, and we have to change our approach.”
California started the year with its driest four months on record.
Snowpack in the Sierra Nevada this year was a small fraction of the historical average.
Depleted reservoirs have led to restrictions on outdoor watering for millions of state residents.
Coalinga’s water comes from the San Luis Reservoir, about 90 miles to the north, and is delivered along a portion of the California Aqueduct that was built in the 1960s and helped fuel the region’s agricultural growth.
This is part of the Central Valley Project, a network of dams, reservoirs and canals now severely hobbled by drought.
‘Where there’s bodies, there’s treasure’: A hunt as Lake Mead shrinks
Farmers received no allocation from that network this year; municipalities and industrial users were limited to what the Bureau of Reclamation calculates as their “public health and safety” needs — a first in the history of the Central Valley Project, which dates to the 1930s.
For Coalinga, that meant 1,920 acre-feet of water — a quarter of its historic allotment and just over half of what it expected to consume this year.
Federal officials raised that in April to 2,500 acre-feet — a level that still fell more than 1,000 acre-feet short of what Coalinga needed.
An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons, what it would take to cover an acre of land with one foot of water.
Over the summer, city officials calculated the city’s supply would run out by mid-September.
Beyond that point, if Coalinga kept using water from the aqueduct, it would belong to someone else.
“You don’t have the right to take that water,” was the message Sean Brewer, Coalinga’s assistant city manager, said he got from Reclamation officials.
The bureau said in a statement that it had been working closely with Coalinga on its “unique water supply circumstances and challenges.”
Brewer agreed that the bureau has been “extremely helpful” even as its “hands are tied.”
Federal officials gave him names of vendors who might sell the city the extra water it needed.
But as Brewer worked his way down the list of irrigation districts, farmers and other private interests, the news wasn’t good.
“Nobody has water to sell right now,” he said.
Those who do are not selling it cheap.
“I cringe when I say this,” Brewer told the City Council on Aug. 4, as he reported that water that normally cost the city $190 per acre-foot was being sold on the open market for as much as $2,500 per acre-foot.
The city might need up to $2.5 million to buy enough water to last the year, he said.
The city’s entire budget is $10 million.
“We just don’t have $2.5 million to buy water,” City Council member Adam Adkisson said in an interview, calling the water prices “criminal.”
“In a natural disaster, you can’t increase the cost of bottled water 2,000 percent; you’d go to jail for that,” he said.
“But somehow these people can increase it 2,000 percent and everything’s just fine.”
Fear of that kind of “drought profiteering” prompted state Sen. Melissa Hurtado (D) to write Attorney General Merrick Garland in May asking for an investigation into the anti-competitive practices of hedge funds and other investors that “literally steal our most life dependent resource from ourselves and future generations in exchange for a profit.”
Hurtado talked to Adkisson in August as he was searching for a solution for Coalinga and found him “in panic mode.”
“The price of water, the cost of water, is increasing, but it’s not just going to be to the Central Valley; it’s going to be statewide,” Hurtado said.
“We’re in a crisis situation in a matter of weeks, I think.”
‘What do you do when the water runs out?’
In the High Times marijuana store — a burgeoning industry for Coalinga, which has two prominent dispensaries downtown and a pot farm run out of a defunct prison owned by Bob Marley’s son Damian — manager Luis Zamora is just starting to register a new level of concern about the water crisis.
“Just in the last probably two days, I’ve had people asking me, like, what do you do when the water runs out?”
He laughed.
“Exactly."
"What do you do?”
Coalinga has tried to get tough on water waste.
The city has code enforcers and even police officers patrolling for water violations.
The city put a moratorium on building swimming pools, raised water rates several times and last year began imposing “drought fees” for overuse.
But the city soon voted to refund the $277,000 it had raised in fees because water use wasn’t declining enough.
“It was supposed to be a deterrent,” said Netherton, the chamber of commerce’s executive director.
“It wasn’t deterring anybody.”
Zamora has been slowly stockpiling five-gallon water bottles at home — he’s up to nine of them.
He has stopped watering his lawn and watched as his neighbors’ yards have also turned brown.
But others’ lawns in town are still green, and residents are keenly aware who is still watering.
Facing a new climate reality, Southern California lawns could wither
“They encourage people to kind of rat each other out, out here,” Zamora said.
“So if you water, people will be taking pictures of you.”
“I’m watching your yard,” Mary Jones, a Coalinga resident, told Mayor Ramsey at an Aug. 18 City Council meeting.
Ramsey, who had by then accepted the ban on watering front lawns, resorted to spraying on his own remedy to keep his lawn looking nice.
“Hey, you know why mine’s green?” he asked Jones.
“I painted it.”
“I would paint mine, too, but it’s dirt,” she responded.
“I can’t fool anyone with dirt.”
A short-term reprieve
Coalinga’s two biggest water users sit next to each other on a lonely two-lane road several miles outside of town.
The Pleasant Valley State Prison and the Department of State Hospitals-Coalinga, a psychiatric hospital for sexually violent predators, together consume about 20 percent of the city’s water allocation.
And both institutions have told the city they can’t conserve more water than they already do.
Outside the psychiatric hospital, there is a long row of coastal redwoods that appear green and bushy, a landscaping flourish Coalinga residents view with increasing suspicion.
“Go look at our coastal redwoods in our medians; they’re all dead."
"The ones at the school?"
"Dead,” said Adkisson, the council member.
“I think there’s opportunities for them to conserve when it comes to landscaping.”
The hospital has operated under a drought plan for the past eight years.
The facility has removed most grass from “non-patient care areas,” has removed shrubs and plants, has resorted to controlled shower times, closely monitors leaks and “continues to make every effort” to use water efficiently, according to Ralph Montano, a spokesman for the Department of State Hospitals.
“Unfortunately, [the hospital’s] coastal redwoods are brown and dying from lack of water also,” Montano said in a statement.
The prison did not respond to requests for comment.
City officials argued that the burden of saving water on behalf of the two state-run institutions was unfairly being borne by residents.
In August, with Coalinga just weeks from running out of water, the Bureau of Reclamation responded by increasing the city’s allotment by 531 acre-feet “to assist with meeting public health and safety needs,” the bureau said in a statement.
But Coalinga officials say they are still about 600 acre-feet short and that buying additional supplies remains extremely expensive.
They now project they will run out of water sometime in early December.
When that happens, no one knows exactly what to expect.
“You don’t want to say that they’ll never turn the water off."
"I don’t see how they could,” Mayor Ramsey said.
“I hate to say this, but with the government we have right now, you never know.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-cal ... 7855c2a04d
Re: ON THE TIMES WE ARE NOW IN
NBC NEWS
"16 dead after Buffalo area hit by ‘devastating’ snowstorm, governor says"
Story by Phil Helsel and Dennis Romero
26 DECEMBER 2022
Sixteen people have died after a freezing blizzard with high winds struck the Buffalo, New York, area in a storm that the state’s governor has described as “devastating.”
The dead have been found outside or in cars, and reports of even more deaths were being checked out Sunday night, Buffalo police said in a statement.
"Authorities have additional 911 calls regarding dead bodies that police are also working diligently to get to confirm and recover," the department said.
"BPD also is working very hard to complete welfare checks in an effort to reduce potential deaths."
The department 's storm-related death toll grew to 10 from six earlier Sunday.
Police recovered a total of four bodies and have confirmed there are at least six others, the department said.
Outside the city, in Erie County, an additional six weather-reported deaths have been reported.
The national figure for deaths related to the extreme holiday weather over the weekend was 46 by late Sunday, according to an NBC News tally.
Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said at a news conference some of the dead were found after impassable roads delayed emergency responses.
The county's deaths, reported in Amherst and Cheektowaga, also included a person who was inside a structure, he said.
Others appeared to succumb to cardiac-related events while clearing snow, Poloncarz said.
Diving temperatures can constrict arteries and boost blood pressure, adding to the danger of manually clearing snow.
Gov. Kathy Hochul said at the same news conference that she has surveyed some of the damage: “It is devastating."
"It is going to a war zone."
"The vehicles along the sides of the roads are shocking.”
Buffalo was under a driving ban, and Mayor Byron W. Brown said police were asking people with snowmobiles to assist in search and recovery efforts.
Hochul said the scale of the storm will be worse than that of the famous blizzard of 1977 in its intensity and ferocity of the winds.
That storm was blamed in 29 deaths, according to the Northeast Regional Climate Center.
State police were involved in over 500 rescues, Hochul said, including helping the elderly get to hospitals and delivering a baby.
New York State Police Acting Superintendent Steven A. Nigrelli confirmed two incidents of looting in the Buffalo area.
"They are still under investigation as we speak," he said during Sunday evening's news conference with the governor.
"Those are isolated incidents."
"It’s not reflective of the great community."
More than 13,000 customers in the state were without power early Monday, according to grid tracker PowerOutage.us.
Poloncarz said power might not be fully restored until Tuesday.
"Substations froze."
"They were snowed under."
"We had a report that one substation had an 18-foot drift onto it," he said.
"And when they got in the substation was frozen."
"They still don’t even know to the extent the damage that occurred in the substation."
Much of Buffalo is impassable, Poloncarz said.
He urged people from areas where conditions had improved not to travel to Buffalo to rescue family and friends.
Officials have rescued “hundreds and hundreds” of people, some of them with snowplows, as they were the only vehicles able to reach people stranded in cars, Hochul said.
“This will go down in history as the most devastating storm in Buffalo’s long, storied history of having battled many battles, many major storms,” she said Sunday.
By around 10 a.m., about 43 inches of snow — or more than 3½ feet — had fallen at Buffalo’s airport over the previous 48 hours, according to the National Weather Service.
There was a period of hours when officials could not send out emergency service crews or Department of Public Works crews, Poloncarz said.
It is believed to be the first time that Buffalo's Fire Department was unable to respond to calls, he said.
“It was bad is the best way to put it,” Poloncarz said.
“It was as bad as anyone has ever seen it.”
Utility company National Grid had said that because of the “unprecedented severity” of the storm, some crews could not reach the areas where they were needed.
The company had said Sunday that restoration work was being conducted around the clock.
Buffalo had been under blizzard warnings, but by Sunday afternoon it was under a winter storm warning until 4 a.m. Monday.
There could be 8 to 16 additional inches of snow in the region, which includes Buffalo, Batavia, Orchard Park and Springville, according to the National Weather Service.
The most snow was expected for the "southtowns" and southwest Erie County.
Officials pleaded with New Yorkers to stay home so crews can clear roads.
State Police Superintendent Steven Nigrelli said roadways were “peppered” with abandoned vehicles.
“Stay home."
"Be a good neighbor,” he said in a nod to Buffalo’s nickname as the “city of good neighbors.”
Most of the U.S. has been hammered by a major winter storm with dangerously low temperatures.
Last month areas south of Buffalo, like Orchard Park, got around 7 feet of snow.
But Poloncarz said the situations do not compare.
He said he has been in contact with the Biden administration to initiate a disaster declaration.
“This is a major disaster."
"It’s as simple as that,” he said.
“We’ve had other storms, the storms just four weeks ago that dumped 7 feet of snow on the southtowns," he said using the regional term for cities in the southern part of Erie County.
"They do not match up to this.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/16-de ... d332480910
"16 dead after Buffalo area hit by ‘devastating’ snowstorm, governor says"
Story by Phil Helsel and Dennis Romero
26 DECEMBER 2022
Sixteen people have died after a freezing blizzard with high winds struck the Buffalo, New York, area in a storm that the state’s governor has described as “devastating.”
The dead have been found outside or in cars, and reports of even more deaths were being checked out Sunday night, Buffalo police said in a statement.
"Authorities have additional 911 calls regarding dead bodies that police are also working diligently to get to confirm and recover," the department said.
"BPD also is working very hard to complete welfare checks in an effort to reduce potential deaths."
The department 's storm-related death toll grew to 10 from six earlier Sunday.
Police recovered a total of four bodies and have confirmed there are at least six others, the department said.
Outside the city, in Erie County, an additional six weather-reported deaths have been reported.
The national figure for deaths related to the extreme holiday weather over the weekend was 46 by late Sunday, according to an NBC News tally.
Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said at a news conference some of the dead were found after impassable roads delayed emergency responses.
The county's deaths, reported in Amherst and Cheektowaga, also included a person who was inside a structure, he said.
Others appeared to succumb to cardiac-related events while clearing snow, Poloncarz said.
Diving temperatures can constrict arteries and boost blood pressure, adding to the danger of manually clearing snow.
Gov. Kathy Hochul said at the same news conference that she has surveyed some of the damage: “It is devastating."
"It is going to a war zone."
"The vehicles along the sides of the roads are shocking.”
Buffalo was under a driving ban, and Mayor Byron W. Brown said police were asking people with snowmobiles to assist in search and recovery efforts.
Hochul said the scale of the storm will be worse than that of the famous blizzard of 1977 in its intensity and ferocity of the winds.
That storm was blamed in 29 deaths, according to the Northeast Regional Climate Center.
State police were involved in over 500 rescues, Hochul said, including helping the elderly get to hospitals and delivering a baby.
New York State Police Acting Superintendent Steven A. Nigrelli confirmed two incidents of looting in the Buffalo area.
"They are still under investigation as we speak," he said during Sunday evening's news conference with the governor.
"Those are isolated incidents."
"It’s not reflective of the great community."
More than 13,000 customers in the state were without power early Monday, according to grid tracker PowerOutage.us.
Poloncarz said power might not be fully restored until Tuesday.
"Substations froze."
"They were snowed under."
"We had a report that one substation had an 18-foot drift onto it," he said.
"And when they got in the substation was frozen."
"They still don’t even know to the extent the damage that occurred in the substation."
Much of Buffalo is impassable, Poloncarz said.
He urged people from areas where conditions had improved not to travel to Buffalo to rescue family and friends.
Officials have rescued “hundreds and hundreds” of people, some of them with snowplows, as they were the only vehicles able to reach people stranded in cars, Hochul said.
“This will go down in history as the most devastating storm in Buffalo’s long, storied history of having battled many battles, many major storms,” she said Sunday.
By around 10 a.m., about 43 inches of snow — or more than 3½ feet — had fallen at Buffalo’s airport over the previous 48 hours, according to the National Weather Service.
There was a period of hours when officials could not send out emergency service crews or Department of Public Works crews, Poloncarz said.
It is believed to be the first time that Buffalo's Fire Department was unable to respond to calls, he said.
“It was bad is the best way to put it,” Poloncarz said.
“It was as bad as anyone has ever seen it.”
Utility company National Grid had said that because of the “unprecedented severity” of the storm, some crews could not reach the areas where they were needed.
The company had said Sunday that restoration work was being conducted around the clock.
Buffalo had been under blizzard warnings, but by Sunday afternoon it was under a winter storm warning until 4 a.m. Monday.
There could be 8 to 16 additional inches of snow in the region, which includes Buffalo, Batavia, Orchard Park and Springville, according to the National Weather Service.
The most snow was expected for the "southtowns" and southwest Erie County.
Officials pleaded with New Yorkers to stay home so crews can clear roads.
State Police Superintendent Steven Nigrelli said roadways were “peppered” with abandoned vehicles.
“Stay home."
"Be a good neighbor,” he said in a nod to Buffalo’s nickname as the “city of good neighbors.”
Most of the U.S. has been hammered by a major winter storm with dangerously low temperatures.
Last month areas south of Buffalo, like Orchard Park, got around 7 feet of snow.
But Poloncarz said the situations do not compare.
He said he has been in contact with the Biden administration to initiate a disaster declaration.
“This is a major disaster."
"It’s as simple as that,” he said.
“We’ve had other storms, the storms just four weeks ago that dumped 7 feet of snow on the southtowns," he said using the regional term for cities in the southern part of Erie County.
"They do not match up to this.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/16-de ... d332480910
Re: ON THE TIMES WE ARE NOW IN
REUTERS
"Storms inundate California, provoking mudslides, evacuations"
By Jorge Garcia
January 10, 2023
LA CONCHITA, Calif., Jan 10 (Reuters) - The latest Pacific storm unleashed torrential downpours and damaging winds in California on Tuesday, knocking out power and turning city streets into rivers as mudslides cut off highways and entire communities faced evacuation orders.
More than 33 million Californians were threatened by severe weather throughout the day as "heavy to excessive" rainfall was expected across the state, especially in southern California, as winds gusts were clocked at more than 40 miles (64 km) an hour in many places, the National Weather Service (NWS) said.
The high winds wreaked havoc on the power grid, knocking out electricity to 180,000 homes and businesses as of midday Tuesday, according to data from Poweroutage.us.
"This storm was different from the standpoint that it was here much longer."
"It was more intense because of the prior storm, the ground was much more saturated, which led to a lot more flooding and a lot more rescues because of the ground saturation," said Barry Parker, division chief of the Ventura County Fire Department.
Experts say the growing frequency and intensity of such storms, interspersed with extreme heat and dry spells, are symptoms of climate change.
Though the rain and snow will help replenish reservoirs and aquifers, a mere two weeks of precipitation will not solve two decades of drought.
Meanwhile, terrain denuded by past wildfires has created an increased risk of flash floods and mudslides.
The torrential rains, along with heavy snow in mountain areas, follow yet another "atmospheric river" of dense moisture funneled into California from the tropical Pacific, powered by sprawling low-pressure systems churning offshore.
With the soil already saturated, much of the damage has been concentrated around the city of Santa Barbara, about 100 miles (160 km) northwest of Los Angeles, where the steep foothills slope toward the Pacific Ocean.
Several remote spots have reported more than a foot (30 cm) of rain including the San Marcos Pass in the Santa Ynez Mountains above Santa Barbara, where more than 17 inches (43 cm) have fallen, according to the NWS.
In the Rancho Oso area of the Santa Ynez Mountains, mud and debris across the roadway isolated about 400 people and 70 horses, the Santa Barbara County Fire Department said on Twitter, posting a photo of a vehicle stuck in the mud.
Rescue teams were on the way, spokesperson Scott Safechuck said.
Near the coast, the California Highway Patrol closed U.S. 101, the main highway connecting northern and southern California, with no estimated time on reopening.
"Please stay home and do not drive today if at all possible," the highway patrol advised on Twitter, posting pictures of mudslides and fallen rock that blocked the highway.
Many communities were flooded including Goleta, where a man rode his paddleboard through the streets.
On Monday, officials ordered the evacuation of some 25,000 people, including the entire affluent enclave of Montecito near Santa Barbara, due to heightened flood and mudslide risks.
The 4,000 people of Planada, a community in Central California, started their Tuesday morning with an order to evacuate their homes by the county sheriff's office.
The Montecito evacuation zone was among 17 California regions where authorities worry the ongoing torrential downpours could unleash lethal cascades of mud, boulders and other debris in the hillsides.
Further south in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Chatsworth, two vehicles fell into a sinkhole that opened beneath a road.
Floodwaters invaded the train station in downtown Los Angeles, submerging a pedestrian walkway.
At least a dozen fatalities have been attributed to several back-to-back storms that have lashed California since Dec. 26.
Reporting by Brendan O'Brien in Chicago and Daniel Trotta in Carlsbad, Calif.; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Josie Kao
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/more-h ... 023-01-10/
"Storms inundate California, provoking mudslides, evacuations"
By Jorge Garcia
January 10, 2023
LA CONCHITA, Calif., Jan 10 (Reuters) - The latest Pacific storm unleashed torrential downpours and damaging winds in California on Tuesday, knocking out power and turning city streets into rivers as mudslides cut off highways and entire communities faced evacuation orders.
More than 33 million Californians were threatened by severe weather throughout the day as "heavy to excessive" rainfall was expected across the state, especially in southern California, as winds gusts were clocked at more than 40 miles (64 km) an hour in many places, the National Weather Service (NWS) said.
The high winds wreaked havoc on the power grid, knocking out electricity to 180,000 homes and businesses as of midday Tuesday, according to data from Poweroutage.us.
"This storm was different from the standpoint that it was here much longer."
"It was more intense because of the prior storm, the ground was much more saturated, which led to a lot more flooding and a lot more rescues because of the ground saturation," said Barry Parker, division chief of the Ventura County Fire Department.
Experts say the growing frequency and intensity of such storms, interspersed with extreme heat and dry spells, are symptoms of climate change.
Though the rain and snow will help replenish reservoirs and aquifers, a mere two weeks of precipitation will not solve two decades of drought.
Meanwhile, terrain denuded by past wildfires has created an increased risk of flash floods and mudslides.
The torrential rains, along with heavy snow in mountain areas, follow yet another "atmospheric river" of dense moisture funneled into California from the tropical Pacific, powered by sprawling low-pressure systems churning offshore.
With the soil already saturated, much of the damage has been concentrated around the city of Santa Barbara, about 100 miles (160 km) northwest of Los Angeles, where the steep foothills slope toward the Pacific Ocean.
Several remote spots have reported more than a foot (30 cm) of rain including the San Marcos Pass in the Santa Ynez Mountains above Santa Barbara, where more than 17 inches (43 cm) have fallen, according to the NWS.
In the Rancho Oso area of the Santa Ynez Mountains, mud and debris across the roadway isolated about 400 people and 70 horses, the Santa Barbara County Fire Department said on Twitter, posting a photo of a vehicle stuck in the mud.
Rescue teams were on the way, spokesperson Scott Safechuck said.
Near the coast, the California Highway Patrol closed U.S. 101, the main highway connecting northern and southern California, with no estimated time on reopening.
"Please stay home and do not drive today if at all possible," the highway patrol advised on Twitter, posting pictures of mudslides and fallen rock that blocked the highway.
Many communities were flooded including Goleta, where a man rode his paddleboard through the streets.
On Monday, officials ordered the evacuation of some 25,000 people, including the entire affluent enclave of Montecito near Santa Barbara, due to heightened flood and mudslide risks.
The 4,000 people of Planada, a community in Central California, started their Tuesday morning with an order to evacuate their homes by the county sheriff's office.
The Montecito evacuation zone was among 17 California regions where authorities worry the ongoing torrential downpours could unleash lethal cascades of mud, boulders and other debris in the hillsides.
Further south in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Chatsworth, two vehicles fell into a sinkhole that opened beneath a road.
Floodwaters invaded the train station in downtown Los Angeles, submerging a pedestrian walkway.
At least a dozen fatalities have been attributed to several back-to-back storms that have lashed California since Dec. 26.
Reporting by Brendan O'Brien in Chicago and Daniel Trotta in Carlsbad, Calif.; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Josie Kao
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/more-h ... 023-01-10/
Re: ON THE TIMES WE ARE NOW IN
THE EAST BAY TIMES
"Rainfall for the record books - Past 3 weeks the wettest in S.F. since 1862; Oakland already has reached yearly average rain total"
By Paul Rogers
progers@bayareanewsgroup.com
18 January 2023
How wet has it been recently in Northern California?
New rainfall totals show that no person alive has experienced a three-week period in the Bay Area as wet as these past 21 days.
The last time it happened, Abraham Lincoln was president.
From Dec. 26 to Jan. 15, 17 inches of rain fell in downtown San Francisco.
That’s the second-wettest three-week period at any time in San Francisco’s recorded history since daily records began in 1849 during the Gold Rush.
And it’s more than five times the city’s historical average of 3.1 inches over the same time.
The only three-week period that was wetter in San Francisco — often used as the benchmark for Bay Area weather because it has the oldest records — came during the Civil War when a drowning 23.01 inches fell from Jan. 5 to 25, 1862, during a landmark winter that became known as “The Great Flood of 1862.”
“The rainfall numbers over the past three weeks just kept adding up."
"They became a blur,” said Jan Null, a meteorologist with Golden Gate Weather Services in Half Moon Bay, who compiled the totals.
“We had a strong jet stream that was bringing in storms, one after another."
"It was hard along the way to separate the individual storms.”
https://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/ ... bb6&pnum=2#
"Rainfall for the record books - Past 3 weeks the wettest in S.F. since 1862; Oakland already has reached yearly average rain total"
By Paul Rogers
progers@bayareanewsgroup.com
18 January 2023
How wet has it been recently in Northern California?
New rainfall totals show that no person alive has experienced a three-week period in the Bay Area as wet as these past 21 days.
The last time it happened, Abraham Lincoln was president.
From Dec. 26 to Jan. 15, 17 inches of rain fell in downtown San Francisco.
That’s the second-wettest three-week period at any time in San Francisco’s recorded history since daily records began in 1849 during the Gold Rush.
And it’s more than five times the city’s historical average of 3.1 inches over the same time.
The only three-week period that was wetter in San Francisco — often used as the benchmark for Bay Area weather because it has the oldest records — came during the Civil War when a drowning 23.01 inches fell from Jan. 5 to 25, 1862, during a landmark winter that became known as “The Great Flood of 1862.”
“The rainfall numbers over the past three weeks just kept adding up."
"They became a blur,” said Jan Null, a meteorologist with Golden Gate Weather Services in Half Moon Bay, who compiled the totals.
“We had a strong jet stream that was bringing in storms, one after another."
"It was hard along the way to separate the individual storms.”
https://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/ ... bb6&pnum=2#