Margaret Daley crossed the street last week in a heavy rainstorm the likes of which California has not seen in seven years-water, water everywhere. Malibu was flooding. The Sierra Nevada was buried under 84 inches of snow. Some kind of payback, perhaps, for a seemingly endless stretch of clear days known as a drought.
With rain dripping from the brim of her blue plastic rain hat, she was asked about water-not the kind that comes from the sky, but the kind that comes from pipes inside her house.
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She remembered life before water rationing. Her 150-gallon fish tank full to the brim. Ten-minute showers. Going to the bathroom at other people’s homes without wondering, she recalled, “Am I supposed to flush or not?”
She was snapped out of her reverie by a reminder of the words of a weather forecaster: It sure is raining, he said, but don’t get any ideas about actually using more water.
The rain is not necessarily falling in the right place (over the reservoirs), and it might not all seep into the groundwater (supplies there could take three to seven years to refill).
Most importantly, as Ron Hamilton, a National Weather Service meteorologist said later, “This rain cannot replenish in one year what has taken six to seven years to deplete.”
Properly chastized, she forgot the ten-minute shower-but still hoped for an extra flush now and then.
Every time it rains in California, and particularly this year, with the most spectacular rains since 1986, a little exercise takes place. People begin to hope it is the beginning of the end of the drought.
“It feels like it’s over,” said filmmaker Barbara Hamilton last week, as she raced to get her cup of coffee from a coffee shop to her home during an interlude between deluges.
Water experts exist to crush these hopes. Caution is their mantra. No water wizard wants to make the mistake San Francisco’s experts made when they declared the drought was over in 1987 and then were forced a year later to concede it wasn’t.
As if to compensate for their rush of premature optimism, “we have the strictest rationing of anywhere in the state,” said Bob Vasconcellos, a San Francisco water department manager.
Residents are limited to 75 percent of the amount of water they used in 1987; violators are fined up to 10 times the customary charge for water.
Don’t even bother asking if those restrictions might be lifted any time soon. “A few good rainstorms won’t do it,” Vasconcellos sniffed. In the meantime, everybody waits, eyes toward heaven.
Noting the rock slides, mud slides and flooded Los Angeles streets and highways last week, Hamilton said, “I think people are in wonderment about how we can have so much rain and still talk about a drought.”
Not necessarily trusting the government-issue weather watchers, some people have developed their own theories about when the drought might end. Steve Stankiewicz, who hasn’t grown vegetables in his garden for nine years because of water rationing, had an intuitive feel that rain will continue to fall in the state as part of what he views as a national political-economic-geographic renaissance.
“It looks promising,” he said. “Everything-the new administration, the rain, and the restaurants are doing better.” The rains began six weeks ago.
For now, Daley, a manager of a children’s clothing store experiencing a run on rubber boots, was particularly enjoying the negative ions she said the rain was releasing to help “ground ourselves a little bit better.” But she did not allow herself to even hope for a steady stream of negative ions flowing her way. The days of drought were sure to return, she said.
“It’s desert country,” she said. “It’s the nature of the beast.”