Drought and California are peas and carrots. It's a cyclical thing that happens here. However, the drought patterns over the past 20 years have been a bit more extreme than the historical record. We've been managing a mega-drought that's the first in 1,200 years. So well done there, humans and Nature. As with many places in the West, humans populated up areas where water is not always a guaranteed thing.
One very wet winter isn't determinative, but I'll take the relief nonetheless. We'll just have to see how the next few years go to see if we're out of this cycle for a bit or if this year was an anomaly. We're in for a wet weekend, then rain all next week to varying degrees. My real complaint is this has been one fuck of a cold winter. The hills around Napa were covered in snow this past week.
Of course, dry season will come with all this brush growing during the rains.
Who likes grass fires?!
Hopefully forest fires won't be as bad. Despite how it seems in the media, 2022 was actually a quieter year for them as far as we measure these things. Part of it is Governor Newsom and others went ham on fire suppression efforts via prescribed burning, other preventative measures, and investments in Cal Fire. We're starting to see dividends from all that.
I just hope water authorities use what we're building up this winter well and tell greedy corporate farmers in the valley to fuck off when they try to get their mitts on it all. One of the lesser discussed problems of the mega-drought is how aquifers have been drained. Excess water is a lot slower to reach them, so those are going to need years to recover no matter what one winter brings.
I'd like to stop reading stories about families in the Central Valley who cannot flush their toilets.
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