Water, water everywhere

Just as federal officials were laying out alternative scenarios last week for steep water supply cuts from the Colorado River due to the drying Southwest, California officials were warning that this year’s historic Sierra snowpack could flood much of the state later this year.

So do we have too much water or not enough? The only honest answer, as head-spinning as it may be, is that we have both problems at the same time. Lake Mead, and farther up the Colorado River, Lake Powell—Southern California’s two big out-of-state water supplies—remain dangerously low and will not fill again, despite a wet Rocky Mountain winter.

Meanwhile, reservoirs in California are full. But much of that precious water will have to be released to make room for melting snow. How much room depends on weather conditions over the next several months. The state has one of its largest snowpacks in recorded history—234 percent of average, measured by water volume, and in some parts of the Sierra more than 300 percent—but much of it could instantly turn to floodwater if we get one of those monstrous heat waves we’ve experienced in recent years. Or it could evaporate right off the mountainsides, leaving us nothing. Or, with luck, it could melt steadily over the summer.

The last two decades have brought climate patterns quite different from those around which the western United States was engineered in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

There can be enough water to go around if we treat it as the valuable and sometimes dangerous thing that it is. We can weather the wet-and-dry, boomand-bust cycle that nature throws at us if we give up our nostalgia for the more predictable California of the past and embrace the state as it is now and as it will become.