CA has plenty of dry years but with some frequency has a wet winter with plenty of rain, this CA winter is a wet one. A website called Ars Technica runs an article entitled:
How California could save up its rain to ease future droughts
The article has a few fancy ideas but really doesn’t adequately emphasize the main one: build dams in canyons.
CA has loads of mountains. The Sierras of course are legendary, but I grew up in the shadow of Coast Range mountains and they are no joke either. Those mountains start just north of LA and run with a few breaks all the way up the coast to Oregon. They are quite large, and hundreds of potential reservoir sites are unused along the coast and in the Sierras.
It has been years, maybe decades since CA built a new reservoir. Resistance to building reservoirs is pushed by the Sierra Club and other environmentalist organizations.
An evil coalition of those wanting to preserve scrub-covered canyons in their current ‘pristine’ form and those who don’t want to spend money on infrastructure when it is more useful “buying votes” keeps CA from building the storage needed to stop wasting rainfall runoff into the Pacific.
Somehow we’ve moved from having a government that could and did solve problems to a place where anybody can block almost any government initiative they oppose, which means most of them. My mental image is of a giant wearing a straitjacket, of his own construction, voluntarily donned.
I have much nostalgia for the Gov. Pat Brown era when CA had a can-do government. It has become a beautiful place so hobbled by a can’t-do government its people are fleeing. The CA situation is bleeping pathetic.
