What a Waste: Time Is Now to Accelerate New Water Storage
The recent storms that tore a destructive path across California also dumped an estimated 24 trillion gallons of water, enough to cover the entire state in up to eight inches of water. And more is on the way in what could turn out to be a year of record precipitation. Unfortunately, almost all of it is washing into the sea. That’s good news for rivers, streams and habitat, but it’s a missed opportunity for collecting some of it to address human demand and increase our resilience to droughts that are coming more frequently and with more intensity.
Bay Area Council CEO Jim Wunderman addressed this missed opportunity in a letter that ran in several large newspapers this week calling for California to accelerate work on projects approved by voters in 2014 to expand the state’s water storage capacity by 900 billion gallons. None of the seven projects included in Prop. 1 have broken ground.
