![]() ![]() ![]() How 600,000 residents from Windsor to San Rafael get water from the Russian River Lake Sonoma’s water supply pool - the biggest bucket below a top layer for flood storage - is full for the first time since 2019, with enough volume to provide at least three years of drinking water for 600,000 North Bay residents. There’s also snow in the Mayacamas Mountains and the Russian River flowing higher than it has in four years. “But to say that it’s over, I don’t think you’ll find someone credible who could say that.”Īfter heavy winter rains in late December and January that oddly triggered wide flood evacuation warnings in the midst of an official “drought emergency,” local streams and creeks are running strongly now, ponds and reservoirs are brimful and the landscape has brightened to a brilliant green. “It’s trending the right direction,” said Sonoma Water General Manager Grant Davis, whose agency provides wholesale water to contractors that supply more than 600,000 people in Sonoma and northern Marin counties. In the same way, the drought’s exit is a process, without a clear demarcation line or final pronouncement declaring the three-year drought over and done.Īnd despite lots of evidence to the contrary, local and state officials say we’re not there yet. It arrived over weeks and months when rain came in such paltry amounts the earth grew parched, and ponds and streams began to run dry.įarmers already were trucking water at great expense to ranches and dairies that normally had their own supplies, and public reservoirs had reached record seasonal lows weeks before the governor invited the press to meet him on an expanse of chalky, scored mud in Mendocino County. The drought didn’t start that unseasonably warm April day, its sunny glare reflecting off the desiccated mud bed, nor at any particular moment. It was there, almost two years ago, that Newsom stood where there should have been 40 feet of water and proclaimed a local drought emergency for Sonoma and Mendocino counties, sounding an early alarm that would be amplified and echoed as the western drought spread across the state and deepened over the ensuing months. Gavin Newsom was looking for a dramatic way to illustrate the region’s dire conditions in the early days of the state’s latest, historic drought, he found it in the dry, deeply cracked reservoir bed of Lake Mendocino. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |