The Big (Dry) North Coast Story

photo: Norcal Fishing News

At least according to the Eureka Times-Standard, the continuing Big Story on the North Coast is water.  Last month (when we actually got an unusual day or so of steady rain, which pushed us above the average for a usually dry month) there were a steady stream of headlines about rain: No Rain Expected, Rain To End, It May Never Rain Again, etc.  This followed weeks of headlines about El Nino, which everyone has stopped talking about. (The latest: it will be weak, if it happens at all this winter. So no help for the West Coast.)

Last week marked the end of the official 2014 "water year," according to the California Department of Water Resources, keeper of the stats.  The water year goes from September to September. The state got less than 60% of the averaged precip., making it a very dry year.  Melissa Simon in the Times-Standard (Oct. 2) quotes a local National Weather Service meteorologist to the effect that Humboldt County got between 30% and 60%, making it the fifth driest on record.  Which is actually of some comfort, in the climate crisis era of annual record-breaking.

Winter is our rainy season, and we've had three comparatively dry ones in a row.  Where it shows is in the levels of rivers and streams, which affects fish (especially salmon) as well as drinking water supplies in more isolated and small places.  Streams and rivers are additionally depleted by pot growers increasingly tapping into them directly for their prodigious water use.

But very locally, the solid month of rain we got last winter filled the reservoir, so we are good for home water for another year or two, especially if people conserve some.

The story in the next column of the paper was about a federal court ruling that a special release of reservoir water to help salmon in the Klamath River was legal, although the judge wasn't promising this would extend to another such release without a better legal basis.  The water would have gone to farmers well south of here.  So with the large scale agriculture elsewhere, our smaller crops and dairy farms here but also the marijuana industry mostly to our immediate south, and the rivers and fisheries, especially in tribal areas to our north, water is going to continue to be The Big Story for awhile, maybe a long while.