ShareThisNorthern California water managers are growing increasingly uneasy with each winter day marked more by sunshine than rainfall.
"It's shaping up to be about as challenging a year as water managers in California have ever had," said Jeff Sutton, general manager of the Tehama-Colusa Canal Authority.
The challenge will be trying to water crops, maintain cities and keep wetlands wet given short water supplies in the Central Valley Project (CVP), he said. The Tehama-Colusa Canal supplies 150,000 agricultural acres south of Red Bluff.
This dry winter is starting to stack up with two of the driest on record in the north state, federal officials told water users Friday. Bureau of Reclamation officials compared this year with 1992 and 1977 at the Mid-Pacific Water Users Conference in Reno.
Typically, the bureau's regional manager caps the annual conference with a preliminary look at water allocations for the CVP.
Not this year.
"He didn't talk about anything about allocations today, just inflow and status," said Brian Person, manager of the Bureau's Northern California Area Office.
Person, who oversees the management of Lake Shasta, was among the many from the north state who manage water at the conference.
Winter has been mostly dry so far and the lake needs rain to rise, Person said.
"Inflows to Shasta thus far this water year are actually slightly below inflows from 1977," he said.
That year, the lake hit a record low of 230 feet below it high waterline.
Sapped of storage after a drought started in early 2007, Lake Shasta is only 31 percent full. The CVP's four other reservoirs aren't faring well either.
New Melones Lake east of Stockton is 48 percent full, Trinity Lake near Weaverville is at 40 percent, Folsom Lake near Sacramento is at 22 percent and San Luis Reservoir near Los Banos is 30 percent, according to the bureau. Overall, the CVP's storage is at 35 percent of capacity.
David Coxey, general manager of the Bella Vista Water District, said if weather conditions don't change drastically, it could be a year of short water supply throughout the CVP.
One of the country's largest water projects, the CVP runs from the Cascades near Redding to fertile plains along the Kern River near Bakersfield.
Bureau officials said they'll be announcing allocations in the middle of February.
Coxey said the outlook is bad for the CVP and he wished the bureau could have given a supply preview Friday.
"Frankly, I would rather have the grim news now than a month from now," said Coxey, whose district has 6,000 customers, including Shasta College and Foothill High School.
Relying on its own computer models, Westlands Water District on the far end of the CVP from Redding already has issued a warning to its growers.
The district is the nation's largest, serving 600,000 acres in western Fresno and Kings counties. It had an emergency conference call Monday, during which district managers said their CVP supply this year could be zero, said district spokeswoman Sarah Woolf.
"We thought it was important for our growers to know what exactly we are anticipating," she said.
(Contact Dylan Darling of the Redding Record Searchlight in California at ddarling(at)redding.com.)
This is the same Bureau of
This is the same Bureau of Reclamation that dumped the 3 largest reservoirs based on the Feb Water report last year, then refused to change thier 'policy' when it became clear that the season had turn dry after the fact.
All this comes on the heels of Mr. Chu's suggestion that Agriculture in California needs to be shut down. Apparently, the Governor is going to do just that, even though the skies have opened up and it's been raining for 2 weeks.
Did anyone mention to Mr. Schwarzenegger that this state is what keeps our eggs from being in the single basket of the midwest?