The Metropolitan Water District, the agency that supplies the bulk of the water for Southern California, is considering water rationing by summer unless statewide drought conditions radically improve, the agency announced Monday.
Metropolitan’s Water Planning and Stewardship Committee considered varying scenarios Monday and concluded it may recommend to its governing board allocating a limited supply per member agency. If the full board approves the allocation plan at its April meeting, rationing would begin July 1, according to Metropolitan.
Such a move would mark the second time water rationing was imposed by MWD in six years.
“Southland consumers have responded to the water conservation challenge this past year. We all, however, need to be prepared to take water saving to another level this summer if water-supply conditions don’t improve,” said MWD General Manager Jeffrey Kightlinger in a statement.
Cutbacks could amount to 5 percent, 10 percent or more from last year’s deliveries, Metropolitan reported.
“They’re saying, ‘This is all the water we will give you,’ ” said Adan Ortega, a former MWD administrator and a water consultant for smaller water districts.
An allocation plan is different than simply meeting the water demands of its member agencies, as MWD normally does, he said. The new approach could trigger more restrictive conservation measures for customers of retail water districts and cities throughout Southern California.
“Cities would be required to go to mandatory conservation,” said Shane Chapman, general manager of the Upper San Gabriel Valley Municipal Water District, which buys water from MWD for nearly 1 million residents.
Chapman says his agency and others may have to live with a lot less water. For Upper District, that means less water to replenish shrinking groundwater basins.
The committee entertained numerous scenarios, depending on whether the next several weeks bring rain and more importantly, snowfall to the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Snowpack levels are at 23 percent of average for this time of year, MWD reported in a committee report.
A pineapple express storm inundated Northern California and the Pacific Northwest over the weekend, but the warm storm only dropped snow in very high elevations, experts said. Melting snow feeds rivers and reservoirs in Northern California, the source of water for the State Water Project. The state Department of Water Resources allowed just 5 percent of the SWP in 2014 but may increase that amount.
However, the region may be slipping into a fourth straight year of drought, Kightlinger said. If rain and snow are below average by the end of winter, the MWD will have to dip deeper into reserves both in the ground and in reservoirs. Reservoir levels stand at 1.2 million acre-feet, less than half of what MWD held in reserve in 2012, the agency reported.
“This is a serious situation,” Kightlinger said.