Scientists say the current drought in the West is the region’s driest 22-year stretch in more than 1,200 years
CLIMATEWIRE | When Maria Regalado Garcia tried to wash the dishes in her California home one recent morning, only a trickle of water emerged from the kitchen faucet. Other taps in her Tooleville house in rural Tulare County ran similarly dry.
Nearly three-quarters of California is in either extreme or exceptional drought, considered worse than severe, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. It’s so bad that scientists say the ongoing drought in the western United States marks the region’s driest 22-year stretch in more than 1,200 years. “The turn-of-the-twenty-first-century drought would not be on a megadrought trajectory in terms of severity or duration without” human-caused climate change, the study said.
So far this year, the state has had more than 660 wells go dry. The majority of those are in the San Joaquin Valley, said Kelsey Hinton, spokesperson with Community Water Center, which has offices in Visalia, Sacramento and Watsonville. Perez added that she had to remove a 60 foot pine in her backyard because the dying tree posed a fire hazard. “For safety issues, we had to cut it down,” she said.
“That’s a game changer for the industry because before they could … pump as much water as they needed,” said David Magana, senior research analyst with Rabobank, a Dutch multinational banking and financial services company. A University of California, Merced, study said the drought compelled California farmers last year to fallow about 400,000 acres, he said. Bloomberg reported the amount of unused California farmland could double to 800,000 acres this year.
Adding to that problem is that the Colorado River — a lifeblood of water out West — is heading into crisis territory. Reservoirs on the Colorado River could fall so low that water exports to Western states could stop, warned California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot at a recent agricultural conference.
Lake Shasta, a federally-managed reservoir, yesterday was at 37 percent, compared to the historical average of 54 percent for this time of year.
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