LOS ANGELES (AP) – The giant water supplier in Southern California has taken the unprecedented step of requiring about 6 million people to reduce outdoor irrigation to one day a week as a prolonged drought hits the state after another dry winter.
The Southern California Water District Board on Tuesday declared a state of emergency in a water shortage and called on certain cities and water agencies it supplies to implement the June 1 cut and impose it or face huge fines.
“We do not currently have enough water supplies to meet normal demand. The water is not there, “said area spokeswoman Rebecca Kimic. “This is an unprecedented area. We’ve never done anything like this before. “
The restrictions of the Metropolitan Water District apply to areas of Los Angeles, Ventura and San Bernardino counties that rely primarily on state water supplied through the area, including parts of the city of Los Angeles. The affected areas are mostly urban.
The purpose of restricting the use of water for lawns, plants and things like cleaning cars is to save water now for indoor use later in the summer when water consumption increases, Adele Hagehalil, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District in Southern California, he said Wednesday.
The Metropolitan Water District uses water from the Colorado River and the State Water Project – an extensive storage and delivery system – to supply 26 public water agencies that provide water to 19 million people, or 40 percent of the state’s population.
But record dry conditions have strained the system, lowering reservoir levels, and the State Water Project – which draws its water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta – estimates it will be able to deliver only about 5% of its usual distribution, for a second another year.
January, February and March this year were the driest three months in the state’s history in terms of rainfall and snowfall, Kimic said.
The Sofia water region said that in 2020 and 2021 the water years had the least rainfall in history for two consecutive years. In addition, Lake Oroville, the main reservoir of the State Water Project, reached its lowest point last year since it was filled in the 1970s.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has asked people across the state to voluntarily reduce water consumption by 15 percent, but residents have so far been slow to achieve that goal.
Several water areas have introduced water protection measures. On Tuesday, the board of the Municipal District of Eastern Gulf in Northern California voted to reduce water consumption by 10% and limit daily use for about 1.4 million customers in Contra Costa and Alameda counties, including Oakland and Berkeley.
Households will be allowed to use 1,646 gallons (6,231 liters) per day – well above the average household consumption of about 200 gallons (757 liters) per day – and the agency expects only 1% to 2% of customers to exceed the limit. This was reported by the San Francisco Chronicle.
The six Metropolitan Water District customer agencies in the areas affected by the board’s operation on Tuesday must either enforce the one-day outdoor use restriction or find other ways to equivalently reduce water demand.
If local agencies fail to meet the reduction targets, they will be fined up to $ 2,000 per acre-foot of water, Metropolitan Water District Chief Executive Deven Upadjai said on Wednesday. One acre-foot is about 325,850 gallons (about 1.23 million liters).
For their part, local agencies will determine how they will impose watering restrictions on their clients. Upadhyay noted that an exception allows manual watering of trees to maintain “environmentally important tree canopies”.
The capital’s water area will monitor water use, and if the restrictions do not work, it may impose a total ban on outdoor watering in the affected areas as early as September.
Meanwhile, state lawmakers have taken the first step toward lowering the standard for how much water people use in their homes.
The current standard in California for indoor water use is 55 gallons (208 liters) per person per day. The rule does not apply directly to customers, which means that regulators do not cite individuals for using more water than allowed. Instead, the state requires water agencies to meet this standard for all their customers.
But the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly last week to lower the standard to 47 gallons (178 liters) per person per day starting in 2025 and 42 gallons (159 liters) per person per day from 2030.
The bill has not yet been adopted by the Assembly, which means that there are still several months after its adoption.
The western United States is in the midst of a severe drought just years after record rains and snowfalls filled the reservoirs to full capacity.
Scientists say this boom and bust cycle is due to climate change, which will be marked by longer and more severe droughts. A study earlier this year found that the Western United States is in the middle of a megadush, which is now the driest in at least 1,200 years.
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Associated Press writer John Anchak contributed to this report.
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