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The bottom line, water officials said, is that right now, everyone must start using less water. The public can expect higher water bills and fines if they don't, because the alternative is a real water shortage – one that is threatening tens of thousands of Valley jobs. "It's pretty scary," said Tim Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies, who has more than three decades in the water-supply business. "The public needs to tighten their belts. You have to rearrange all the molecules in your brain to think about using water differently." What worries the water gurus is not just a likelihood that 2009 may be a third dry year in a row, but what appears to be the state's dramatically reduced flexibility to respond.
Among the reasons:
• Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is in an ecological crisis. It's the funnel for most of California's precipitation, but its ability to move water from north to south is compromised by the need to keep Delta fish from going extinct.
• California has added 10 million people since the last big drought in 1991, substantially boosting demand on the available supply.
• Farmers have shifted hundreds of thousands of acres to permanent crops such as fruit, nuts and grapes, which cannot be fallowed in droughts like the row crops they replaced.
Thousands of acres of row crops already have been fallowed, and more will follow. "The situation is very grim for all farmers," said Sarah Woolf, spokeswoman for the San Joaquin Valley's giant Westlands Water District, which warned customers they may not get any water this year. "There simply will be drastic fallowing and, in all likelihood, significant impacts that result in some businesses not making it through."
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http://www.sacbee.com/378/story/1591007.html
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