With Major Reservoir Nearly Empty, California Struggles For Solution

Lake Cachuma, a reservoir built to hold Santa Barbara County’s drinking water, is experiencing some problems during California’s historic drought. This past summer, the reservoir reached an all-time low at 7 percent capacity, leaving a thick beige watermark that circles the hills.

The Washington Post reported that the lake will continue to fall, which means that it will put nearly a half-million county residents in a very difficult situation. As early as the beginning of next year, “the depth is expected to be too low to distribute water.”

The 3,000-acre reservoir supplies half of what the Santa Ynez Valley needs to recharge an underground aquifer that almost every household, business, and farm uses in order to facilitate pumping water.

The reservoir was created by the construction of Bradbury Dam in 1953. At full capacity, Lake Cachuma has a surface area of 5 square miles, but has not reached that since July 2011.

Duane Stroup, deputy area manager for the south-central region of the federal Bureau of Reclamation, told the Post that there will be “no water available next year from the reservoir.”

“I don’t know what will happen if we get the same amount of [precipitation] we got this winter. The wells will go dry, and they will fail. There are people in agriculture that will be required to fallow crops,” Bruce Wales, general manager of the Santa Ynez River Water Conservation District, told the Post.

Law Street Media reported that if California does not receive the same amount of precipitation as it did in the previous year, then the wells will go dry. The only hope is a winter with lots of snow and rain.

The Washington Post reported that some cities are attempting to find other water sources to sustain them. In Santa Barbara, there is talk of whether to stop the outdoor use of water and plans to desalinate ocean water in order to make it drinkable.

The cities of Solvang and Buellton are developing plans to locate alternative water sources. The community of Montecito is trying to acquire what it can from the state and private vendors.

Late last year, California passed a new set of laws that would, for the first time, require the state to account for its groundwater resources and measure how much water is being used. This new approach is being taken as California and other states continue to face drastic water shortages.

According to ProPublica, the state’s natural resource agency runs a shadow program that allows many of its aquifers to be pumped full of toxic waste.

The program has the consent of the federal government and now California is taking steps to expand it. Regulators are contemplating if they should legalize pollution that is already taking place at various other sites, “based on arguments that the water that will be lost was too dirty to drink or too difficult to access at an affordable price.”

To read more about the ongoing drought visit Water Online’s Water Scarcity Solutions Center.