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Heavy Rains Ease California Drought

Los Angeles Times Editorial Board:

Consider the Great Plains during the 1930s. Now, that was a drought everyone could understand. When the rain stopped in 1930, the soil dried up and blew away. Destitute farmers moved from Oklahoma and adjacent states to the San Joaquin Valley. In 1939, it finally rained again. The drought was broken, the soil recovered, the corn and wheat grew, the U.S. became the breadbasket of the world, and everything was back to normal.

Unfortunately, much of that narrative is myth, and in any case irrelevant to the terrain and hydrology of California in an era of heat waves, longer summers and urban living.

Drought was never the right word to apply to this state’s dry streaks. Californians need a term that describes not just how much water is coming in, but how much we use every day and how much we save for later. We need a word or phrase that suggests how long we can stand in the shower, whether farmers can keep growing pistachios and if the forests and cities will once again burn when summer comes.

Instead of drought, we should talk about going into water debt, and refer to wet periods as winning the water lottery.

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