The punishing drought that has swept California is now threatening the state’s drinking water supply.
With no sign of rain, 17 rural communities providing water to 40,000 people are in danger of running out of water within 60 to 120 days.
California’s State Water Project, the main municipal water distribution system, announced on Friday last week that it did not have enough water to supplement the dwindling supplies of local agencies that provide water to an additional 25 million people. It is first time the project has turned off its spigot in its 54-year history.
California officials said they were moving to put emergency plans in place. In the worst scenario, they said drinking water would have to be brought by truck into parched communities and additional wells would have to be drilled to draw on groundwater. The deteriorating situation would likely mean imposing mandatory water-conservation measures on homeowners and businesses, who have already been asked to voluntarily reduce their water use by 20 percent.
“Every day this drought goes on we are going to have to tighten the screws on what people are doing” said California Governor Jerry Brown, who was governor during the last major drought here, in 1976 and 1977.
This latest development has underscored the urgency of a drought that has already produced parched fields, starving livestock and pockets of smog.
“We are on track for having the worst drought in 500 years,” said B. Lynn Ingram, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.
Already the drought, technically in its third year, is forcing big shifts in behavior. Farmers in Nevada said they had given up on planting, while ranchers in Northern California and New Mexico said they were being forced to sell cattle as fields that should be 1.2m high in grass are a blanket of brown and stunted stalks.
Fishing and camping in much of California has been outlawed to protect endangered salmon and to guard against fires. Many people said they had begun to cut back drastically on taking showers, washing their car and watering their lawns.
Rain and snow showers brought relief in parts of the state at week’s end — people emerging from a movie theater in West Hollywood on Thursday evening broke into applause upon seeing rain splattering the sidewalk — but they were nowhere near enough to make up for record-long dry stretches, officials said.
“I have experienced a really long career in this area, and my ‘worry meter’ has never been this high,” said Tim Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies, a statewide coalition.
“We are talking historical drought conditions, no supplies of water in many parts of the state. My industry’s job is to try to make sure that these kind of things never happen. And they are happening,” he said.
US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said in an interview that his agency’s ability to help farmers absorb the shock had been undercut by the long deadlock in the US Congress over extending the farm bill, which finally seemed to be resolved last week.
Vilsack called the drought in California a “deep concern,” and a warning sign of trouble ahead for much of the western US.
“That’s why it’s important for us to take climate change seriously,” he said.
“If we don’t do the research, if we don’t have the financial assistance, if we don’t have the conservation resources, there’s very little we can do to help these farmers,” Vilsack said.
Without rain to scrub the air, pollution in the Los Angeles basin, which has declined during the past decade, has returned to dangerous levels, as evident from the brown-tinged air. Homeowners have been instructed to stop burning wood in their fireplaces. In the San Joaquin Valley, federal limits for particulate matter were breached for most of December last year and last month. Schools used flags to signal when children should play indoors.
With each parched sunrise, a sense of alarm is rising amid signs that this is a drought that comes along only every few centuries.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema