Remember rain? Neither do I. The long, terrible, seemingly never ending drought in California has continued into its 5th year – but, based on water usage in the Coachella Valley in August, pretty much everyone has either forgotten about it or, perhaps more likely, just said, “fuck it.”
While the statistics reported in the Desert Sun still show that people are using less water than a few years ago, usage was way up from the month prior:
Customers of the Coachella Valley Water District, the area’s biggest water supplier, used 15 percent less water this August compared to the same month in 2013 – a big change from July, when customers cut back 28.6 percent. State regulators have been using 2013 as the baseline year to gauge conservation performance, and the latest monthly percentage fell far from the district’s cumulative average of 24.7 percent since June 2015.
The same trend took place with The Desert Water Agency, Indio, and the Mission Springs Water District. The only place where water conservation actually improved was Coachella – and even there it was only a slight increase.
So why isn’t everyone doing their best to save water anymore? Well, it could be the morons telling people there is no drought or, as one water expert believes, there is just not a good understanding about how limited our water supply is.
“I think unfortunately some of the water numbers that you’re seeing are evidence that people have kind of gone back to business as usual – or business without a real sense of the limited supply of water we have to work with,” Jay Ziegler, director of policy for The Nature Conservancy in California, told the Desert Sun. “I think we all have to realize that water is a finite and diminishing resource in California. We’re now in year five of one of the driest periods in our history, and we don’t know that this is going to end anytime soon.”
As of today, 84 percent of California, remains in a drought – with 43 percent of the state being listed as being in an “extreme” and “exceptional” drought.
