|
Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot | There are several factors not taken into account.
For one, CA is a huge state. I'm much closer to Canada than I am to Los Angeles. I'm also closer to Salt Lake City than to most of the population of CA, and I'm closer most of Wyoming that I am to the other end of California. So, what you hear on the news about "California" doesn't necessarily apply to the whole state. Sort of like it raining in Indiana and being dry in Minnesota, how can that be? Isn't the East all the same?
Flooding in southern CA is usually in areas where, believe it or not, it is so dry and rain occurs so infrequently, it isn't cost effective to build massive storage reservoirs to hold it. So on those odd occasions when it does rain, much of runs out to sea while they are at the same time pumping water 3,000' uphill to get to the same place. There is a lot of ground water banking and other storage systems in place, but we are talking about rivers that are dry 11.9 months of the year, but might flood 100,000 cfs "if" it rains a bunch some year. It just isn't cost effective to try and contain those floods.
Precipitation isn't just precipitation either. The whole CA system, and much of the West, is built upon using the snowpack in the mountains as the largest reservoir. It is much easier to meter out a river when the peak flows are not just during a rain, but during a snowmelt that lasts into July. That snowpack is what we really need, and what we are so severely lacking. As big as the reservoirs in CA are, they are really only to supplement the rivers after the snow is done melting late summer. IMO, this is by far and away the biggest factor. Most of CA is very dependent upon the snow in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
The agricultural areas and the urban area have different sources, and different needs for water as well. A lot of the urban areas get water out of the Colorado system, from Wyoming, Utah and Colorado as much or more than California.
Edited by Ben D, N CA 2/28/2014 23:46
| |
|
California - drought or flood?
