May 3, 2021
California has been unable to provide adequate water to its population and its agricultural community for three decades.
Before presenting the general facts of the water availability and its use by the state, it is useful to first present a picture of the present crisis.
The state’s two major water projects, the California State Water Project and the Bureau of Reclamation’s Central Valley Project, have for three decades, been unable to supply the local water district contractors, both in urban and agricultural areas, with the water they annually request.
Over the last 30 years, California’s water demand has increased as irrigated agricultural lands, population, and environmental considerations have grown. However, California’s water supplies and developed surface storage have remained relatively constant during those 30 years. This disparity has created a gap between available supplies and water demands in most years.
Droughts are caused by nature. The question is, will we humans prepare for droughts before they create a crisis? The present drought was foreseen more than 50 years ago, and the leaders of California and of the nation knew then that the water infrastructure that would be required for the decades ahead had to begin to be constructed now. We did not do that, and now we are in, once again, a California water crisis and the broader Western States water crisis, because we did not build what those great leaders planned to build during the 1960s. Instead, we have built near zero water supply infrastructure, and especially we did not build the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), and we shut down President Kennedy’s project to build nuclear-powered desalination plants.
This report will present both the “facts” of the state’s water supply and the current deficit of that supply’s ability to meet the minimum requirements required by the population and agriculture.
This is not a comprehensive report, but a general picture that can be of use to us as we address the current Western states megadrought, the question of reindustrializing the nation, and creating the new productive platform for the future.
