As El Niño looms, agencies get ready

Possible wet winter has water officials looking to capture more rain via technology, creativity

It was a perfect storm of, well, pretty perfect storms.

There was a lot of rain and snow during California's just completed “water year,” from Oct. 1, 2022, to Sept. 30 — nearly double the historical average in the southern half of the state. But all of that rain didn't fall too fast, and snowpack-melting temperatures didn't spike too high, making it possible for most areas to avoid major flooding.

The agencies that capture and store stormwater also have become better at finding ways to keep more of that precipitation in Southern California rather than letting it all run out to the ocean.

Recent projects by the Chino Basin Watermaster, for example, which manages the aquifer that sits under much of the northwestern Inland Empire, allow the agency to capture an additional 4,000 acre-feet of stormwater. (Each acre-foot is enough to serve two households for a year.) And given how much rain fell, Justin Nakano, who serves as the agency's manager of technical resources, said the Chino Basin was able to hold onto 20,000 acre-feet this year — 21/2 times more than last water year.

That's helping to replenish reservoirs and groundwater basins that had been depleted by persistent drought, with lakes and rivers also looking much better than at this time last fall.

It'll take many more perfect storms to make up for past deficits, though, water experts caution.

“Just one rain year does not get us out of a drought,” said Kelly Gardner, assistant executive officer for the Main San Gabriel Basin Watermaster.

Forecasters are cautiously optimistic that the El Niño season shaping up offshore might mean another wet winter ahead.

That's actually putting pressure on water agencies to ready systems that, in some cases,

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