Drought spotlights region's patchwork water supply WATER SUPPLY

People water their lawn and flower beds, Wed. July 1, 2009, in Walnut Creek, Calif. People water their lawn and flower beds, Wed. July 1, 2009, in Walnut Creek, Calif. Photo: Lacy Atkins, The Chronicle Photo: Lacy Atkins, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 7 Caption Close Drought spotlights region's patchwork water supply 1 / 7 Back to Gallery

Ana Sarver jogs 5 miles along the Contra Costa Canal every day. But water from the 10-foot-wide channel, just a few steps from Sarver's front door in Pleasant Hill, doesn't flow through her taps.

Her water comes from the Mokelumne River basin - 100 miles away in the Sierra Nevada.

Confused?

Unlike Southern California, where one giant agency - the Metropolitan Water District - oversees the distribution of water from a few sources across 26 cities from San Diego to Santa Monica, the nine-county Bay Area landscape is a broad patchwork of local, state and federal water systems - with various jurisdictions controlling each.

Most times the hodgepodge works. But, as California moves into a third year of drought, disparities among the region's complex water systems are becoming more apparent. Residents of one city, for instance, are forbidden from washing their cars or watering gardens, while in the neighboring community, swimming pools and emerald lawns sparkle in the sun. Rates go up for some, not for others.

"It's funny - I pay a lot more attention to water now with the drought," said Sarver, 44.

Sarver's water originates in the Mokelumne basin on the Amador-Calaveras county border. From there, it cascades through a series of reservoirs, dams and canals operated by the East Bay Municipal Utility District to 1.3 million customers in Alameda and Contra Costa counties. The Contra Costa Canal sends water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to 550,000 customers in Antioch, Martinez and parts of Walnut Creek.

That's just the start.

Varied sources

Bay Area residents wash, irrigate and swim in water from varied, sometimes far-flung sources - from the mighty Sacramento River to tiny Vasona Reservoir in Los Gatos - with very different hydrological conditions and regulatory controls.

While that autonomy allowed many parts of the region to grow at their own speeds and create their own identities, it also limits how water can be used in times of need. In the Bay Area, for example, when parched Marin County needed water in 1977, a temporary pipeline had to be built over the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge to supply water from the East Bay.

In Southern California, by comparison, "you can move a molecule of water from any corner of Southern California to any other corner - it's very integrated physically," said Tim Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies. "The Bay Area evolved much more independently. Although they are realizing that they have many common concerns right now."

After three critically dry years and increasing alarm about the ecological impacts of pumping so much water out of rivers and underground aquifers, California water managers have one major worry: supply.

While Southern California relies mainly on two sources of water - the Colorado River and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta - the Bay Area draws from the delta, Russian River, Tuolumne River and Mokelumne River, as well as various reservoirs and wells.

Decent rain

Each watershed, in turn, has its own set of characteristics.

San Francisco's vaunted, yet controversial, Hetch Hetchy water system, for instance, pulls from the Tuolumne River watershed, which originates inside Yosemite National Park. In recent years, that area has benefited from a decent amount of rain, translating into just 10 percent voluntary water reductions in the city. Because the 167-mile-long system isn't physically tied to the delta, San Francisco has also escaped the water cutbacks forced by federal rulings designed to protect the endangered delta smelt and other species.

The same can't be said of Contra Costa Water District, Zone 7 Water Agency in Alameda County, or the Santa Clara Valley Water District, where 15 percent mandatory conservation is in place.

Contra Costa Water District is the largest municipal customer of the Central Valley Project, the huge network of federal pumps and canals built in the 1930s to deliver water from the delta to millions of acres within California's fertile interior. To cope with the federally mandated cuts, Contra Costa customers face penalty pricing for exceeding allotments.

"Water is taken for granted by everybody, until everyone is parched," says Jeff Weir, spokesman for the Contra Costa Water District.

Water pipeline

In recent years, planners have begun knitting the physical systems more closely together. In 2002, for instance, the East Bay Municipal Utility District and the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission created a 1.5-mile-long link between their pipelines in Hayward. Five years later, EBMUD completed a similar project with the Contra Costa Water District.

Experts say these are steps in the right direction for a state where urban, agricultural and environmental interests must begin to cooperate in order to stretch existing - or develop new - supplies.

"People don't pay a lot of attention because they turn on their taps and water comes out," said Jeff Kightlinger, general manager of Metropolitan. "But we can't dam more rivers, and we've picked a lot of the low-hanging fruit when it comes to conservation - low-flush toilets and short showers. Now comes the hard, expensive stuff like desalination, recycling and building something to fix the delta. People are going to see their prices going up - they're going to start paying a lot more attention."