(With expanded coverage of all the Western States)
by Patrick Ruckert
www.californiadroughtupdate.org/20230323-California-Water-and-Infrastructure-Report.pdf
A Note to Readers
Flooding, not drought, is now the challenge that water managers, the state and local governments and thousands of citizens face this winter. And with a record snowpack that will begin melting in the coming weeks, flooding is expected to continue its destructive rampage for at least several more months to come.
Some are having a difficult time believing that the drought has not ended, but the U.S. Drought Monitor says otherwise. One-third of the state remains in Moderate and Severe drought, though Extreme and Exceptional drought categories have been zeroed out. That with a record snowpack in the Sierras and extensive flooding throughout the state.
Most likely, the drought will return soon. Though reservoirs have generally reached or exceeded what is average for this date, the aquifers where groundwater is pumped for 40% of the state’s consumption (and up to 60% during drought years) remain severely depleted. More efforts this year to channel the flood waters to areas where they can help refill them have been welcomed, but, as the article below documents, “Opinion: Why California will still have a water shortage no matter how much it rains this year,” by Jay Famiglietti, restoring the aquifers continues to fall far short of the water withdrawn from pumping.
This week we will focus on the flooding. Tens of thousands have been flooded out and evacuated from their homes. For weeks tens of thousands have been without electricity for a day or a week. Several levees have failed, flooding entire small towns. And the damage to agriculture is massive, with flooded fields and debris up to five feet deep is now sitting in orchards. The storm this week included winds up to 73 mph at the Oakland airport and a small tornado in southern California.
Rainfall records in local areas have been broken, though those records vary, with some that go back a century and others maybe about 50 years.
Later in the Spring the snowpack will begin to melt, and it is expected that further flooding will occur.
Still nothing compares to the massive precipitation and flooding during the last megaflood of the winter of 1861-62, in which the entire Central Valley was under at least ten feet of water for several months and Sacramento was under 20 feet of water.
To emphasize once again, the characteristic climate of California over the past 2,000 years has been alternating megadroughts and megafloods, like the one of 1861-62. Some of the droughts lasted 20, 30 or more years.
Some have labeled the 23 years of this century as a megadrought, periodically interrupted by a few wet years. So far this century we have had droughts during these periods: 2000-2003, 2007-2009, 2012 to 2016, and 2019-2022. That is drought 15 of the 22 years to date. Each drought this century has been more intense and dry than any in the recorded past, with the 2019-2022 drought being the driest on record.
And, of course the megadrought on the Colorado River, in its 23 year, is the worst on record.
I include here, once again, my review of the book that poses the possibility that we have, perhaps now, returned to that more characteristic climate of the past 2000 years:
Are We Controlled by the Whims of Nature, or Will We Create Our Future?
Causing alarm in farm communities throughout the West, Wall Street speculators and Hedge Funds are buying up farm land to grab the water rights. Under my title, “Get Out the Pitch Forks and Torches: The Vampires of Wall Street Have Arrived on the Farms and Ranches of the West,” you will find this article: “Wall Street is thirsty for its next big investment opportunity: The West’s vanishing water.”
Finally, as opposed to the pessimism and cynicism that predominates among the environmentalists and others from the globalists of the World Economic Forum, as President Trump threw in their faces in 2020, the Feature this week is, “The View from the Other Side of the Crisis,” by my colleague Mike Carr.
