Federal officials announced on Wednesday that it won’t deliver any water to farmers in the Central Valley as California enters the third year of severe drought.
The decision will be “devastating to the agricultural economy and to those people that rely on it,” according to Ernest Conant, regional director for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
Water agencies contract with the federal government annually for certain amounts of water. California's farmers began with a 5 percent allocation from the federal government but ended at 0 percent as the drought intensified, according to Adam Beam in his reporting for the Associated Press. Water for other purposes will remain at 25 percent.
California receives 75 percent of its rain and snow in the watersheds north of Sacramento. However, 80 percent of California’s water demand comes from the southern region of the state.
At the heart of California’s water system is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. It is also the export pool of the State Water Project to pump water to millions of people in the San Francisco Bay Area, San Joaquin Valley, Central Coast, and Southern California. Most of the water for both systems comes from rain and snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
According to state law, both systems are required to have enough water to maintain water quality throughout the San Joaquin-Sacramento River Delta.
Water from the Sierra Nevada mountains flows into the state’s rivers, which then fill a series of major reservoirs throughout the state. Typically, the reservoirs get depleted during the dry summer months before being replenished by winter storms.
According to an inter-agency team that provides updates on the state’s drought conditions, January 2022 was extremely dry following substantial rain and snowfall in December. With very little precipitation on the horizon, the statewide Sierra snowpack has gone from 160 percent of average at the beginning of January to 73 percent in mid-February.
December, January, and February are typically California’s three wettest months. The northern Sierra mountains have had just 1.7 inches (4.3 centimeters) of rain over those two months, which is the lowest record set since 2013, according to Kristin White, Central Valley operations manager for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
As of Feb. 22, the state’s voluntary household dry well reporting system received reports of nine dry wells in the past 30 days.
