Calif's second-largest storage reservoir at 30 yr. low

http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/index.php?smp=&lang=eng


California's second-largest storage reservoir will end this year with the lowest amount of water in more than 30 years, Department of Water Resources Director Lester Snow said Monday. Snow spoke at a congressional hearing on California's drought in Fresno, where farmers, climate change experts and area politicians testified about the financial impacts wrought by the water shortage. State officials are already preparing for another year of drought in 2009, prompted by low storage levels, court-ordered cutbacks, increasing demand for water and forecasts of another dry winter, Snow told the House Subcommittee on Water and Power. Next year "could be the worst drought in California history," Snow said. Lake Shasta, the state's largest reservoir, is currently at just 48 percent capacity, department officials said. The next-largest reservoir, Lake Oroville — which sits at the top of the vast system of state pumps and canals that send mountain river supplies to Southern California — is at 40 percent capacity now and will drop to about 20 percent by the end of December, he said. Numerous farmers told the legislators that another year of tight water supplies could spell economic disaster for the fertile San Joaquin Valley. The unemployment rate in Mendota, an agricultural town about 35 miles west of Fresno, is already 23 percent, said Mayor Robert Silva. "We have organized two food give aways, and people began lining up two hours before the give away," Silva said. "This is the biggest problem we've ever faced in the city of Mendota." The subcommittee plans to use the testimony to inform the federal government's response to the water shortage, said its chair Rep. Grace Napolitano, D-Calif. Representatives from environmental and fishermen's organizations, as well as Native American tribes, were not called to testify.
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big trouble

The drought is here, and if the pattern holds to the historic cycle, it will either break this winter or be with us another two years. Given the long streak between droughts this time, I'd put my money on two years.

Nothing is going to get us more water.