We’re revising the city’s centuries-old water rights to give us flexibility in how we use and store water. We are replacing outdated equipment at the Graham Hill water treatment plant. We are replacing the pipelines, intake structures and valves at Loch Lomond to ensure we will be able to fill and release water as efficiently as possible. For example, shoring up and replacing crucial pipelines in areas that are prone to landslides, like the pipeline from the reservoir to the treatment plant that broke in a landslide during the El Niño storms of 2017. So far, we’ve invested about $200 million during the past five years in new infrastructure and in modernizing old infrastructure to improve its resiliency to the kind of extreme weather events that are becoming routine. The fundamentals of that work include learning how climate change will continue to affect water supply and production, modernizing the city’s water system to respond to those impacts, studying the most feasible ways to add water to our supply, and creating city policy to support the path to water security. This is why the City of Santa Cruz Water Department has spent the past several years working to secure the future of the community’s water supply. Given that Santa Cruz’s economy is tourism-based, rationing water for commercial uses could have economic consequences comparable to those of the pandemic. That might be easier for an accountant, but not so much for a restaurant, brewery or hotel. To borrow from an old Oldsmobile commercial, “it won’t be your father’s water shortage.”įuture water rationing will allot only half as much water to families as water rationing of the past, and future rationing will include businesses. One of the reasons weather memory whiplash worries me is because memories of past impacts of water shortages won’t be comparable to future impacts from unreliable water supply. It takes only a few back-to-back dry years to put us in real jeopardy of running out of water. When full, Loch Lomond holds only about one year’s worth of water supply, and in the past decade it’s filled only four times. Take Santa Cruz, for example - though Loch Lomond Reservoir is now full and spilling, we are not, by any means, out of the woods regarding the long-term reliability of Santa Cruz’s water supply. Drought is a challenge not just from a water-supply perspective, but because it increases the threat of wildfire in our watersheds. Santa Cruz has experienced dry periods for decades, but the increase in and duration of droughts has jumped significantly during the past 15 years. Particularly for communities like Santa Cruz, where 100% of our water supply comes from local rainfall. Meteorologists refer to this phenomenon as “ weather whiplash,” where conditions go from one extreme to another, and California is the poster child for it.Īs someone responsible for providing 98,000 people with a safe, clean, reliable water supply, I can tell you that both extremes are challenging for operating water systems. If you’ve been watching the news the past few weeks, you know California has gone from “extreme” and “exceptional” drought to historic floods. Guidelines here.ĭuring the recent series of storms and atmospheric rivers, a neighbor who knows what my day job is mentioned, “California seems to be either parched or drowning.”Īs director of the City of Santa Cruz Water Department, that statement hit home. Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers.
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