California’s historic five-year drought is officially over, washed away with the relentlessly drenching rains, floods and snowstorms of this winter.
But just as tougher building codes and better emergency planning follow major earthquakes, the brutally dry years from 2012 to 2016 are already leaving a legacy, experts say, changing the way Californians use water for generations to come.
“There’s no question that we’ll be better prepared for the next drought because of the lessons learned in this one,” said Felicia Marcus, chairwoman of the State Water Resources Control Board in Sacramento. “This was the wake-up call of the century.”
The drought’s legacy includes landmark new laws aimed at limiting farmers from over-pumping groundwater; homeowners removing thousands of suburban lawns; voters approving billions in funding for new reservoirs; and vast expanses of forests dying off across the Sierra Nevada.
“Every drought has a lasting impact,” said Jeff Mount, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California Water Center in San Francisco. “That probably goes all the way back to the Depression.”
The era of massive dam building in California began after the 1929-34 drought. Urban water conservation started in earnest during the 1976-77 drought. And the state’s brutal 1987-92 drought prompted water departments in the Bay Area and Southern California to connect their networks of pipes together, to build huge groundwater storage banks and new local reservoirs, and to develop a statewide system of buying and selling water.
As a result of those changes, Californians were better prepared to handle the most recent drought, which saw the driest four-year period of any time back to 1895, when modern records began. Although some farm communities with limited groundwater suffered severely, California’s overall economy grew during the drought, up 10 percent to $2.2 trillion from 2012 to 2015.
“We lost a third of our water supply,” said Jay Lund, director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC-Davis. “And the impact to the agricultural economy was a 2-3 percent loss and the urban economy had almost no economic impact. To me that’s remarkable.”
The drought nevertheless left a lasting impact in at least five key ways:
1) Groundwater: After 100 years of allowing cities and farms to pump as much water as they wanted from the ground, without reporting it to the state or being limited, dozens of communities across California found themselves with precariously dropping water tables as the drought began. A study using NASA satellites in February found the ground in some areas between Merced and Bakersfield dropped as much as two feet as underground aquifers collapsed during the drought, cracking roads, water canals and pipelines.
In 2014, Gov. Jerry Brown signed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, requiring local government agencies in areas with severely overdrawn groundwater to draw up plans by 2020 to bring it into balance. They will then have 20 years to do that, which will mean taking some farmland out of production, buying water from other areas, building percolation ponds to recharge aquifers and other costly solutions.
“We had to do something,” said Paul Wenger, president of the California Farm Bureau Federation. “There’s no argument on that from me. But some areas are going to really suffer.”
2) Water wasting: Several high-profile rules put into place by the State Water Resources Control Board during the drought will continue forever. They include bans on watering lawns within 48 hours of rain, or washing cars without a shut-off nozzle on the hose, or cities watering grass on road medians using potable water. It’s also illegal now to run a fountain that doesn’t recycle water. And the state’s 410 largest cities, water districts and private water companies will have to continue to report every month to the state water board how much water they are using.
“It would be bad if the message from this wet year went out that the problem is over,” said Peter Gleick, co-founder of the Pacific Institute, an Oakland nonprofit that studies water issues. “We don’t have enough water to waste. That’s a hard one when you see floods and endless rain.”
3) Proposition 1: In November 2014, during some of the worst months of the drought, California voters approved a $7.5 billion water bond to fund new reservoirs, recycled water projects, desalination and stormwater capture efforts. It passed with 67 percent of the vote. By comparison, the last water bond, Proposition 84, a $5.4 billion measure in 2006, passed with just 54 percent.
Water agencies are lining up to submit detailed plans for the money, which could pay up to half the cost of new reservoirs, and is scheduled to be awarded next year. Long-stalled projects like Sites Reservoir in Colusa County may finally be funded, and existing dams could be built higher.
“We had so much water this year that we could have caught if we had the storage,” said Wenger. “I’m hoping we learned our lesson.”
4) Lawn removal and conservation: Urban Californians cut water use 22.5 percent between June 2015 and February 2017. Over that time, 2.6 million acre-feet of water was saved — enough to supply more than 13 million people for a year. Water agencies spent hundreds of millions of dollars during the drought giving rebates to people to install low-flush toilets, efficient washing machines, gray water systems and dishwashers. The Metropolitan Water District in Southern California spent $310 million alone in rebates for people to remove 160 million square feet of grass, which will save 21,000 acre feet of water every year.
Those lawns and water-wasting appliances aren’t coming back. Lawns use 50 percent of all urban water during summer months, and as cities wrote new local rules limiting lawns in new homes and businesses, neighbors looked askance at homeowners who had bright green turf. Already, big water agencies in Los Angeles, Oakland, San Jose and other areas are using less water now than they were in 1990, despite population growth. Almost nobody expects water use to return to pre-drought levels.
“I’m not an advocate that every blade of grass has to be taken out of California, but I think you’ll see a lot less lawn in the future,” said Tim Quinn, CEO of the Association of California Water Agencies.
5) Environmental harm: Dry creeks and rivers led 18 fish species to crash to near extinction. And the drought killed 102 million trees across the state, most in the Sierra. That could increase fire risk for years to come.
“If the climate continues to be as warm as it has been recently,” said Lund, “we could see very big changes in the mountains. We can’t really manage it. We aren’t going to put sprinkler systems in the forests.”
Overall, experts say, the drought left nearly all residents of California — a state where even in a normal year most cities get only 15 inches of rain a year, the same as Casablanca, Morocco — much more aware of their water.
“This was a prolonged, very deep drought, many believe the worst in the historic record,” said Quinn. “It was really dry, and now here we are with the wettest year ever. Welcome to California.”
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