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David McNew/Getty Images A field near Bakersfield, Calif., in 2008, part of a three-year drought. Wetter weather has arrived. |
SAN FRANCISCO — Sure, fine, California may have its problems right now. There is the budget, yes, what with that pesky $26.5 billion deficit, and the legislative stalemate with its, you know, stalemate-ness. Unemployment is still high, and so is anxiety, about everything from housing prices to radioactive clouds drifting over from Japan.
But California has at least one thing going for it at the moment: Mother Nature. This winter, the state, which had been stuck in a prolonged drought, was positively walloped by Pacific storms, bringing more than 50 feet of snow to some ski spots in the Sierra Nevada and even a flurry or two to San Francisco.
And so it is that on Wednesday, Gov. Jerry Brown is expected to lift a 2009 emergency drought proclamation issued by his predecessor, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, symbolically ending the state’s worst dry spell since the late 1980s and early ’90s.
The announcement comes less than a week after the California Department of Water Resources found that the snowpack level was at about 159 percent of normal, its highest since 1995. That figure stands in stark contrast to the arid days of 2007, when the state had about 39 percent of its average snowpack. Thus began a three-year drought that cost farmers hundreds of millions of dollars as irrigation water became scarce and exacerbated the already soaring unemployment rate in many agricultural areas.
The farm-heavy Central Valley bore the brunt of this pain, leading to Mr. Schwarzenegger’s proclamation, which allowed state agencies to enact a variety of emergency plans and urged cities to help conserve water. Although this was the second straight year of wetter weather, state officials were hesitant to lift the proclamation until now.
Still, as with everything in the Brown administration — so far marked by a tough-love approach — even happy news comes with a caveat.
“While this season’s surplus of rain and strong snowpack has clearly ended the dry spell for now,” Mr. Brown said in a statement, “it is critical that Californians continue to conserve water.”
Bummer
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