August 16, 2016
By Matt Stevens
Staff members of the State Water Resources Control Board announced that 343 of the state’s 411 water districts reported having enough water to meet their customers’ demands -- even if the next three years are unusually dry.
To blunt the impact of drought, the state required water providers to reduce their consumption compared to 2013 levels. Each provider was assigned a so-called conservation standard, which was expressed as a percentage. As of Tuesday, the vast majority of those standards have been officially set at 0%....
Mountain snowpacks (click here) are frozen reservoirs, their spring melt supplying as much as 75 percent of the West’s water. Decades of measurements, taken by hand or automatic sensors, show dramatic decline. Readings are taken yearly on April 1, when snowpack water content has historically peaked.
The California Water Crisis began with a chronic short fall in snow pack. This is an article form National Geographic explaining the importance of snow to a person's water reservoir. That is right. The people in California came to realize how very personal the water crisis was. It began with poor snow pack. That is what every environmentalist and conservationist has always tried to have the people of the USA realize; it is not about tree hugging (although I find nothing wrong with tree hugging), it is about water, survival and realizing how close a person is to snow pack they have never seen in their lives.
Snowpack is a legal term. It is simple and nearly self explanatory. Don't look at environmentalists and conservationists as if they failed their service to the American people; they did their job; the real people responsible for this crisis are the politicians and lobbyists for the petroleum industry and election monies.
