Opinion

The Strangest Drought Ever / What kind of water crisis is this?

I experienced the Bay Area droughts of the 1970s. I vaguely recall taking navy showers and reciting, "If it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown flush it down." And I remember the dry times of the late 1980s when I was always in short sleeves and didn't own an umbrella for years.

Now those droughts made sense. But this year, rain is pouring down, storm after storm is moving in, yet at the same time we are constantly reminded we face a water shortage that was recently teetering on "the worst drought in state history." Meanwhile, many of us are patching the roof, trying to keep a deluge from leaking into the kitchen.

In the past few weeks, we've entered a new kind of pattern as predictable as a rainstorm in January. (I mean a January in Portland since January in the Bay Area is more like January in Phoenix these days.) Every time we have rain, there will be some flooding, a few trees will fall and then, as we're clearing the muck from our submerged yards, the water experts proceed to inform that the drenching was very nice, but no no no, we are not out of the drought woods yet!

Sometimes their unwavering repetition can sound like a cranky parent. Recently I was driving up I-80 to go sledding in the 15-feet of snowpack -- that apparently has been only marginally helpful -- and about every five minutes the kids are whining, "Are we there yet?"

And I reply, "No." And five minutes later they ask again and I say, "No." And five minutes later we do it all over again and at some point I realized I sounded a lot like the guy in the paper telling me not to water my sidewalk.

And, it's not going to end. Just this week, we heard from the experts who had trudged up to some remote Sierra cabin to measure snowpack. And apparently, to speak scientifically, there are piles of the stuff! Rainfall has nearly caught up to normal too. But quit thinking you can stop worrying. The reservoirs are still half empty and March could be a disaster and let's not even get started about how bad January was.

Quite often these warnings are accompanied by vague threats of mandatory rationing for urban water users, which make everyone shudder and worry they're going to be sitting in the shower, shivering and sponging themselves off. And this can be a little confusing when gale force winds are almost knocking your doors down.

So maybe the state should just take us out of our misery and put all of California on mandatory rationing. The suspense is too much. Go on, make us save the gray water in the tub to put on the plants which are already drowning in the downpour. At least we won't have to worry about having to, gasp, save water.

But the state doesn't work that way. Even when the governor declared a water crisis last week, he wouldn't order mandatory rationing for water districts. Apparently the state prefers to suggest, hoping individual districts take the mandatory step. So we end up walking around in this strange limbo of being soaked, but being constantly reminded of the water-less horrors we may face.

What will surprise thousands of urban dwellers is they may already be living with the dreaded mandatory rationing without even knowing it. I have been for months and had no idea until a week ago.

I've been showering when I want, washing dishes the same old way and then one day I called East Bay MUD to ask why we didn't have rationing if this shortage is so horrible. And the very polite EBMUD person informed me we had in fact had 20 percent mandatory ratioining since last August.

Well, that was embarrassing. So, yes, I felt like an idiot, but here is why I and many others had no idea forced reductions were in place: Even while there is mandatory 20 percent rationing, some of us don't have to reduce one drop!

This really is a strange water crisis.

As I was told, if you use under 100 gallons a day, you don't have to cut usage at all during mandatory rationing. And, we, a house with four people in it, use 70 gallons a day total. Who knew? We actually got a reward for being good water users. A whole dollar! (Which is hardly a big incentive to save but neither is the meagre two dollars youÕre fined if you exceed your allotment by 748 gallons!) So if your district begins mandatory rationing, it very well may not affect you, and if you do have to ration, there are plenty of tips out there to make it pretty easy.

Not that any of this is going to cure our current state of being the wettest dry state in history, but we should've known this would be a bizarre water crisis from the get go. After all, one of the most accurate predictions of how this season's weather would play out didn't came from any weather expert. It came from a guy who usually writes about camping. And how'd he know? The birds and the onion skins told him. Go figure.