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Western Water Wake-up Call

This article in the Sunday Seattle Times goes through the analysis of what more rain and less snow does to the SPU watershed and Seattle’s water and power infrastructure. It states the obvious – more rain and less snow requires an increase in water storage to maintain the same water supply (because you lose the water stored in the snowpack).

All of the Western USA is facing similar problems, and yet the new reservoirs and groundwater storage are not being built fast enough. From Los Angeles to Seattle, there will be consequences for this failure. Namely, there will be years of water rationing. There will be cuts to water use in the agricultural areas, that may or may not successfully be enforced. And, there very well could be a failure, where a large municipality runs out of water.

Los Angeles in particular needs to wake-up and begin building reservoir capacity and increase the pace for developing recycling abilities! The snow pack in the Sierra will decrease over time, and the need to find ways to capture the rains and the earlier snowmelt that does occur will increase. . .