It’s counterintuitive: Los Angeles, a city that receives an annual average of 14 inches of rain, likely won’t face any water restrictions this summer — or for the next few summers. But some residents of Mendocino County — which gets nearly three times as much rain and sits near the headwaters of the Russian River — are prohibited from using more than 55 gallons of water per day. That’s enough to fill a bathtub and flush a toilet five times — in other words, not very much. In the fourth story in CalMatters’ series “Lessons Learned? Drought Then and Now,” Rachel Becker explores why there’s such a sharp divide between the surplus of water in Southern California and the deficit in Northern California.
- Glenn McCourty, a Mendocino County supervisor: “We’ve been lulled into the idea maybe that we have lots and lots of water. And we do have lots and lots of water. The problem is that we don’t store lots and lots of water.”
- Deven Upadhyay, chief operating officer of Southern California’s Metropolitan Water District: “If we just continue to get dry year after dry year after dry year, there’s going to come a time where we’re going to be … asking for mandatory reductions. But that’s not where we are right now.”
Meanwhile, the state is wrapping up construction on a $10 million emergency rock barrier in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to prevent ocean salt water from contaminating the fresh water that ultimately reaches 27 million people and millions of acres of farmland, the Bay Area News Group reports.
