12 ms·
Nearly all of California's reservoir's are above their historical averages
- OldGuyInTheClub 3y agoIt's been a wild couple of winters but this is the good side.
- gumby 3y agoThe state has been releasing water in order to leave room for this winter’s snowfall. We still have a lot of risk: the snowpack is part of our reservoir system, but warm summers have been melting the snow faster than usual. So it’s good the state wants to build additional reservoir capacity.
- asdff 3y agoThe snowpack was also at historic levels last year
- KennyBlanken 3y agoThere's also ground compaction. People don't understand that when the underground water table drops, the ground compacts and you never get that capacity back, ever.
- elzbardico 3y agoIt is not like that. While ground compaction can happen in some circumstances, it takes quite some time to happen and its likelihood depends a lot on the type of soil.
- gumby 3y agoI think the GP was talking about underground aquifers not soil.
- robsh 3y agoHe’s referring to subsidence. The buoyant weight of soil is less than the dry weight, so it does compact when the groundwater is drawn down lower than ever before (as it has been for decades, getting lower and lower). It’s an irreversible process. The California Aqueduct is currently dealing with problems relating to subsidence - what used to be a smooth downhill grade is now slumping in the middle. The capacity of the canal is reduced and without intervention it would eventually be unable to flow uphill.
- flanked-evergl 3y ago> So it’s good the state wants to build additional reservoir capacity. How likely is this to happen? As far as I understand it, the US, and specifically California, has mostly regulated away it's ability to build any additional infrastructure. This may be overstated, hard to know as someone not living there.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 3y agoThey are about to build the Sites reservoir, 1.5 million acre-feet of offstream storage.
- flanked-evergl 3y agoThanks for sharing, though the specifics somewhat confirms my understanding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sites_Reservoir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sites_Reservoir > The project was certified by Governor Gavin Newsom in November 2023 under SB 149, a new law that provides certified projects streamlining benefits regarding legal challenges filed under the California Environmental Quality Act.[10][11] Construction is scheduled to begin in 2024 with final design expected to be done in 2025 and be completed in 2030. If it was not for discretionary exemptions to regulations, it would likely not have been possible. It's also quite dystopian to have regulations that can be overwritten by executive discretion. This is a recipe for corruption.
- gumby 3y agoLaw-permitted discretionary exemptions are reasonable in extremis which I think California’s water situation is, a couple of good years notwithstanding. People can find any number of ways to be corrupt as well all know. Since you’re not in the US: California’s woes are vastly overstated. There are indeed real problems, but the government here is remarkably clean — shockingly so by the standards of East Coast States (original colonies) and in general California has a good track record of dealing with many major issues. We can all list unresolved longstanding problems we hate (my list is pretty much prisons, schools, housing NIMBYs and prop 13) but as a general rule they do ok. Also this is non partisan. Geographically CA is mostly “MAGA red” but corruption etc is pretty thinly and uniformly spread around.
- darth_avocado 3y agoWe should be building more reservoirs. Back to back wet winters are not the norm. Need a lot of buffer for the next time it doesn't rain as much for 5+ years.
- aidenn0 3y agoWhere I live, the population has grown since the 1970s, but the reservoir capacity has gone down (sedimentation). Doesn't seem politically feasible to build a reservoir anymore.
- hakdbha 3y ago[dead]
- AlbertCory 3y agoAlternatively, just add to the gigantic "reservoir" underground, i.e. the water table.
- blindriver 3y agoSan Jose is trying to 10x the size of the reservoirs but an Indian tribe is claiming that land is “sacred”. I guess it’s like the Navajo Indians claiming the moon as sacred and asking NASA to not land on it.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> like the Navajo Indians claiming the moon as sacred and asking NASA to not land on it They objected to "human remains [being] placed on the moon" [1]. (Still WTF stuff.) [1] https://www.axios.com/2024/01/05/navajo-nation-human-remains-moon-sacred https://www.axios.com/2024/01/05/navajo-nation-human-remains...
- jl6 3y agoPresumably the moon was already in a desecrated state due to the presence of Gene Shoemaker's ashes sent there in 1999.
- Animats 3y agoThe California Water Project was intended to have enough capacity for three years of drought. It was when we started having 4-6 years of low rain that it got bad. I don't know if they still have it, but at one time the California Department of Water Resources' control center had a sign "California Drought Control Center" on one side, and "California Flood Control Center" on the other. The sign was turned over every few years as appropriate.
- givemeethekeys 3y agoSo much rain flowed straight into the sea that I will have no sympathy for anyone who complains about the drought when the next one hits. California should have built more reservoirs to accommodate for longer droughts if 4-6 year is the new normal.
- palmfacehn 3y agoI'm not sure that the existing reservoirs are being managed optimally. As I recall, perhaps incorrectly, there are mandatory outflows for maintaining endangered smelt populations.
- Animats 3y agoManaging the Sacramento river delta is tough. It will become too salty and ruin agricultural land if too little fresh water is let through.[1] [1] https://www.watereducation.org/aquapedia/sacramento-san-joaquin-delta-and-salinity https://www.watereducation.org/aquapedia/sacramento-san-joaq...
- dredmorbius 3y agoNot just ag land, but the California Water Project and Aqueduct, which feeds both Los Angeles and SoCal agriculture. One of the major themes of Mark Reisner's book A Dangerous Place, which explores the scenario of a major Hayward Fault earthquake (that's the fault running along the San Francisco Bay's eastern shoreline) would be massive levee failures in the California Delta, and the knock-on consequences of massive salt-water intrusion on not only the Delta but farming and southern California as well. <https://archive.org/details/dangerousplaceca00reis/page/176/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/dangerousplaceca00reis/page/176/...>
- markhahn 3y agoOk but shame about the apostrophe
- khazhoux 3y agoSadly, its just how people do it these days. Schools aren't teaching kids how to put an apostrophe in it's correct place.
- mwcremer 3y agoI see what you did there.
- CalRobert 3y agoThe reservoirs' apostrophes are the ones that always get me.
- bloodyplonker22 3y agoI really believe this is a Gen Z thing. 10-15 years ago, this was not nearly as prevalent.
- truculent 3y agoIs a Gen Z really writing this headline?
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoIt was called a "greengrocers' apostrophe" back in the day. It's been a fairly common incorrect usage for a very long time.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- andyjohnson0 3y agoSite appears to have been hugged to death by people checking if that apostrophe is in the page title too
- cjensen 3y agoEngaging Data has a nice data display for this. It more clearly shows the capacities of the individual reservoirs [1]. They also have displays for the current snowpack [2] and rainfall [3]. After a very slow start, this year's precipitation is finally up to the median. If you want to understand why California has so much trouble with water, pay special attention to the rainfall totals web page. It shows how many years got N inches of rainfall. Best year was more than 200% of median rainfall, and worst was 40% of median. And it is historically common to have many sub-median years in a row. [1] https://engaging-data.com/ca-reservoir-dashboard/ https://engaging-data.com/ca-reservoir-dashboard/ [2] https://engaging-data.com/california-snowpack-levels/ https://engaging-data.com/california-snowpack-levels/ [3] https://engaging-data.com/california-precipitation-levels/ https://engaging-data.com/california-precipitation-levels/
- KennyBlanken 3y agoThis hides one major component, however: ground compaction. When you draw down the water table, the ground compacts, and the capacity is never regained, which means you now have far less capacity in the aquifer for a particular area. It will only get worse in overdeveloped areas or areas that overdraw their water for agriculture and industry.
- yawgmoth 3y agoDo we have measurement of that? How worse does it get on overdraw?
- dylan604 3y agothere have been articles/posts with showing just how much the ground has compacted or sunk. "overpumping caused land in the state's San Joaquin Valley to sink almost 3 feet (85 centimeters) during a recent drought from 2007 to 2010." [0] "USGS Scientists Explain How Aquifer Compaction is Measured" [1] [0] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/overpumping-reduces-californias-groundwater-storage https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/overpumping-reduces-california... [1] https://www.usgs.gov/centers/california-water-science-center/usgs-scientists-explain-how-aquifer-compaction-measured https://www.usgs.gov/centers/california-water-science-center...
- dvh 3y agoI find this chart more readable: https://engaging-data.com/pages/scripts/reservoirs/resmekko.html https://engaging-data.com/pages/scripts/reservoirs/resmekko....
- permalac 3y agoThis visualisation is super useful. Thanks.
- michaelteter 3y agoThat's the joy of increased weather volatility. You might start to think that the wild good years will float you through the wild bad years, but you're more likely to be wrong.
- refurb 3y agoCalifornia has always had weather volatility. Some years the reservoirs are empty by June, other years there is so much water most of it is released into the sea because the reservoirs can only retain a small part of it.
- aurareturn 3y agoDoes California reverse the increase in water bills now that it’s no longer in a drought? Or is the increase permanent?
- ceejayoz 3y agoDroughts will come again; there's absolutely no reason not to continue to encourage water conservation.
- Clubber 3y ago>Droughts will come again; there's absolutely no reason not to continue to encourage water conservation. California could encourage water conservation with tax breaks, no?
- brokensegue 3y agoThey are mathematically equivalent
- Clubber 3y agoNot necessarily. They could add a surcharge over a threshold amount rather than just charging everyone more, even people who conserve water. $1 / gallon for the first 100 gallons $2 / gallon for every gallon over 100 When they just make water more expensive, they are also punishing the people who conserve water. Really it sounds like just a tax grab.
- aurareturn 3y agoWhy don't we raise it to an astronomical level so we can conserve even more? /s
- ceejayoz 3y agoWe should absolutely do that to the agricultural concerns raising alfalfa in the desert to mostly ship to China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia.
- epgui 3y agoWhy the apostrophe?
- dboreham 3y agoCan we have the English fixed in the title (which doesn't appear on TFA)?
- chrisweekly 3y agoMods: extraneous apostrophe in title ("reservoir's")
- cduzz 3y agoIs it cold enough that some of this water can be preserved in the mountains using ice stupas? https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2023/07/07/ice-stupas-have-become-a-popular-water-management-tool-in-the-himalayas-but-can-they-work-in-chile/ https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2023/07/07/ice-stupas-have...
- jaredhallen 3y agoInteresting concept, I haven't seen that before. Whether it would work here (I live in the Sierras) though, my guess would be probably not for two reasons. One is temperature, as you mention. Our higher mountain lakes do freeze over, but I'd expect you need colder temperatures than what we see on average for something like that. Running water typically doesn't freeze here, even during the coldest part of the Winter. The second reason is scale. Only a portion of the water that falls on the Sierras lands up high, and much of that is captured in snowpack , which is a pretty key piece of the water storage puzzle already.
- cduzz 3y agoThese things melt more slowly than a snow pack, making them useful for preserving water over a full growing season. I suspect there are ways to enhance the effect of letting water freeze in a column in layers. Do people make artificial snow up there? If so they can probably leverage similar techniques to make these things.
- bell-cot 3y ago...excepting the by-far largest one - the water table - which is still in absolutely dire shape.
- BurningFrog 3y agoThe main problem with California water is that the state hasn't built new reservoirs for the last several decades, while the population has doubled. This is part of the general trend where California decided building things was bad, invented CEQA, and now here we are.
- hindsightbias 3y agoThey stopped building because there are no low-hanging locations left, other than Sites. Where, exactly, do you want these reservoirs built that will cost less than a nuke?
- zeroonetwothree 3y agoIs a nuke particularly expensive or something? Google tells me they are less than a billion dollars each.
- BrentOzar 3y ago> Is a nuke particularly expensive or something? Google tells me they are less than a billion dollars each. Yeah but that's from Shein, and you don't wanna buy your nukes from a company that uses child labor and unsustainable materials.
- Phiwise_ 3y agoThe population of CA, meaning the number of people who need water for drinking and growing food, has doubled in the past decades. Meanwhile, the state budget has ballooned to six times what it was circa 1985. Choosing to starve because you just picked the last fruit off the low-hanging branch is plainly irrational, especially since reservoirs are an aquaculture investment, not a burn pit to shovel money into. The smart business decision is to build wherever gives the best balance between comparative cost and usefulness, regardless of absolute cost, and then make whatever the cost is back through selling the rescued water. If the ruling class is generally right that the state is still a desirable abd growing place to live outside of the regular desperation for more water then this is about as close to a guaranteed return as these things get.
- riffic 3y agodeath valley has an ephemeral lake
- simpletone 3y agoWhich every sane scientist and individual predicted a few years ago. But were shouted down by climate change zealots as blasphemy. I remember climate change lunatics used to post pictures of 'bare' mt rainier. Now, not so much...