The Wall Street Journal reports, ''the Golden State suffers through a three-year drought, residents of semiarid Southern California are mostly being asked to voluntarily conserve water. In typically wetter Northern California, residents are faced with mandatory rationing.
In the battle for water supplies in the state, where the south has traditionally been characterized as an endlessly thirsty drain on water from the north, this turnabout is the result of years of preparation and billions of dollars of infrastructure improvements".
"Out of necessity, we've really tried to almost drought-proof our region," said Rich Atwater, executive director of the Southern California Water Committee, a nonprofit water education group in Los Angeles. Southern California agencies have invested $12 billion in water-supply improvements since a 1987-91 drought triggered widespread rationing and galvanized the region into coming up with a better safety cushion, officials say.
Reservoirs in the south around Los Angeles are brimming, groundwater basins remain comfortably stocked and recycling and conservation programs have freed up abundant reserves. The region's water supplies are in such good shape that, so far, most local water districts are merely asking residents to conserve.
Much of Northern California, by contrast, is in a state of emergency: eight mostly rural communities face possible drinking-water shortages; rationing has been imposed in some Sacramento-area communities that depend on Folsom Lake, which has shriveled to just 33% of its capacity as of March 2.
While the state is still in a drought emergency, some relief has arrived. The first significant statewide storms in months drenched California last week, following storms that made a small dent in the northern part of the state in mid-February. Also, the north will soon get help from emergency legislation announced Feb. 19 by Gov. Jerry Brown and top Democratic legislators, which is aimed at accelerating funding of local and regional projects to increase water supplies. That bill passed the Legislature Feb. 27 and was signed by the governor March 1.
Until those projects can bear fruit, the drought offers a lesson in resource preparedness. Southern California has invested billions of dollars in recent years to expand its infrastructure to hold, transfer and recycle water while increasing conservation. Spending on water projects in much of the north, meanwhile, has been far more sporadic and less ambitious, officials say.
Also, unlike in the more populous south, which is generally served by large regional water agencies, many water agencies in the north are smaller and less able to spread the costs of large projects, said Jeanine Jones, deputy drought manager for the California Department of Water Resources.
Lack of local storage for water imported from Northern California and the Colorado River was a major issue, said Jeffrey Kightlinger, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which supplies water to 19 million residents. In 1991, the agency had access to about 300,000 acre-feet in storage of the 2.5 million it provided that year. An acre-foot is roughly enough water for a family of five for one year. Today, it has expanded that capacity to about 5 million.
One major project, built outside Hemet, a retirement community 90 miles east of Los Angeles, was the construction of Diamond Valley Lake in 1999. At a cost of $2.1 billion, the reservoir in two valleys now holds nearly a million acre-feet of water, much of it pumped from distant state aqueducts via a $1.2 billion pipeline called the Inland Feeder. Like most other regional infrastructure costs, these were largely passed on to water customers as higher fees.
