"It's hard to get too worked up about the "water crises" in the PNW"
Not for me; I'm in the part of Calif. that is PNW, and I'm living it. My spring is gone, and the creek is about dry; should run thru mid-June. Hoping for some rain tonight, but the last 2 have fizzled. Wild grasses are heading up 2 months early.
"there are gigantic sources of fresh water free for the taking,"
Those gigantic sources come from the snow pack, which isn't there. The Olympic Peninsula, on Wa's drought list, is a rain forest.
Op-Ed California has about one year of water left. Will you ration now?
HGiven the historic low temperatures and snowfalls that pummeled the eastern U.S. this winter, it might be easy to overlook how devastating California's winter was as well.
As our “wet” season draws to a close, it is clear that the paltry rain and snowfall have done almost nothing to alleviate epic drought conditions. January was the driest in California since record-keeping began in 1895. Groundwater and snowpack levels are at all-time lows. We're not just up a creek without a paddle in California, we're losing the creek too.
Data from NASA satellites show that the total amount of water stored in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins — that is, all of the snow, river and reservoir water, water in soils and groundwater combined — was 34 million acre-feet below normal in 2014. That loss is nearly 1.5 times the capacity of Lake Mead, America's largest reservoir...
latimes.com |
