And it will continue until we begin creating more of it as the usage keeps going up.
California water storage down 9 million acre feet
Oct 2, 2007 10:33 AM
California statewide water storage is more than 9 million acre-feet (MAF) less than it was a year ago, according to the Department of Water Resources (DWR).
That sounds a bit ominous; however, the 2006-2007 season was very wet. This season has been one of the driest.
Nevertheless, statewide water storage was at 20.4 million acre-feet at the end of August, which is about 84 percent of the average for that date.
Last year, storage was at 29.2 MAF at the end of August.
Lake Oroville, the State Water Project’s principal storage reservoir, has 1,568,221 million acre-feet in storage, or 70 percent of average for the date. Lake Oroville, 70 miles north of Sacramento, has a capacity of 3.5 million acre-feet.
Lake Shasta, principal storage reservoir for the federal Central Valley Project, today has 1,879,144 acre-feet of water in storage, or 67 percent of average for the date. Lake Shasta, north of Redding, has a capacity of 4.5 million acre-feet.
An acre-foot is 325,851 gallons.
Those are not particularly encouraging figures. With normal or above normal winter snow and rain, those reservoirs could be recharged.
However, as the state begins its 2007-2008 water year, growers and cities are concerned about a possible “judicial drought” in the wake of a court ruling last month, which could severely limit pumping water through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to save Delta smelt.
All of those major reservoirs are north of the Delta and water from them for use by 25 million people and 3 million acres of farmland south of the Delta must be moved down-state by two banks of large pumps on the south end of the Delta.
