AMU Emergency Management Public Safety

California Comes Very Close to Meeting Water Conservation Goals

Conservation measures yield 96 percent of original goal

Back in 2012, signs of a prolonged drought appeared in California, and, by December 2014, three quarters of the state was suffering from extreme drought conditions.

A drastic drought called for drastic measures, and the California government has been working on various conservation measures to help protect the state from these extreme conditions.

This week, the California state government [link url=”http://drought.ca.gov/topstory/top-story-57.html” title=”announced”] that the statewide cumulative water savings from June 2015 to February 2016 came extremely close — within 4 percent — to meeting Governor Jerry Brown’s 25 percent water conservation mandate.

Conservation measures are working

California has a cumulative 23.9 percent water savings between June 2015 and February 2016, or 96 percent of Brown’s mandate. In other words, the state’s conservation methods are working.

The total volume of savings amounted to about 1.19 million acre-feet of water in those nine months, which is enough water to supply roughly 15 percent of the state population (5.9 million people) for one year.

Drought is not over

March rainstorms and snowstorms brought much-needed moisture to many parts of the state. One of the state’s northernmost reservoirs, Lake Shasta, currently sits at approximately [link url=”http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphsMain.action” title=”90 percent of capacity”].

But, despite the recent rain and the success of recent conservation measures, experts caution that the drought is still far from over.

“We are in better shape than last year, but are still below average in most of California. We need to keep up our efforts to conserve the water we’ve gotten.” — State Water Resources Control Board Chair [link url=”http://drought.ca.gov/topstory/top-story-57.html” title=”Felicia Marcus”]

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