California’s drought touches everyone, but water restrictions play out unevenly across communities

Raúl Monterroso of San Fernando knows that he can do little to help the struggling garden patio in front of his house. After all, he takes the new water restrictions seriously.

“Here, everything is dry. We have the entire irrigation system closed. My poor wife is crying over her plants,” said the Guatemala native, who stopped watering the grass on June 1 when instructions to cut outdoor watering to once a week were issued.

Further restrictions went into effect Sept. 6, when a 15-day ban through Sept. 20 was mandated by an emergency repair that shut down the 36-mile Upper Feeder pipeline that brings water from the Colorado River to Southern California.

The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California said that more than 4 million people are being affected by the shutdown across the region, including Beverly Hills and Malibu, Burbank and Glendale, Long Beach, the city of Inglewood and a large swath of the South Bay, and areas stretching as far east as Pomona.

Also under the ban is the city of San Fernando, at the northern edge of L.A.’s San Fernando Valley, 92% of whose 24,000 residents are Latino.

“The reality is that when they give you the alert, you have to be aware. The measures must be followed. There is no other option,” Monterroso said.

In Long Beach, an hour’s drive south of San Fernando, businesswoman Sandy Cajas said that urgent measures are needed to maintain a steady flow of water and to find new sources.

“We are experiencing the worst drought in decades,” she said. “What is going to happen here is that we are going to have to recycle the water due to the scarcity that exists.”

That’s one item, among many, on the state capital’s agenda. Last month, a 16-page document released by Gov. Gavin Newsom, “California’s Water Supply Strategy — Adapting to a Hotter, Drier Future,” indicated that California’s water supply will shrink 10% by 2040.

Among other measures, the plan, backed by billions of dollars in investment, calls for recycling more wastewater and desalinating seawater and salty groundwater, as well as speeding up infrastructure development and pushing conservation, in hopes of providing enough water for more than 8.4 million homes by 2040.

According to Newsom, this “aggressive plan” will guarantee that future generations “continue to call California home in this hotter, drier climate.”

“The best science tells us that we need to act now to adapt to California’s water future. Climate change means drought won’t just stick around for two years at a time like it historically has — extreme weather is the new normal here in the American West and California will adapt to this new reality,” Newsom said in an Aug. 11 statement.

Yet the drought is playing out unevenly across different communities and among different households. Since June 1, about 6 million residents in Los Angeles, Ventura and San Bernardino counties have had to limit outdoor water use to once a week. But not everyone is complying.

Every day since 2003, Álex Guzmán has driven a truck for work from the San Fernando Valley to Beverly Hills. The Mexican immigrant labors for a landscaping company. His task is to maintain the trees and lawns of the mansions. But, above all, to water lots and lots of plants.

Hearing that additional restrictions on water use have been implemented, Guzmán just smiles.

“We have never stopped working in Beverly Hills, we have never stopped watering mansion gardens because of the restrictions,” he said.

“We are working normally. The bosses have not told us anything about lowering the use of water,” Guzmán added.

As reported by The Times, celebrities such as Sylvester Stallone, Dwyane Wade, Kevin Hart, and Kim and Kourtney Kardashian are among the more than 2,000 customers who have received “notices of exceedance” for surpassing 150% of their monthly water budgets at least four times since the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District declared a drought emergency in late 2021.

That disparity in following restrictions shows up in many public spaces, said Patty López, a former assemblywoman for District 39, pointing for example to the contrast between the independent city of San Fernando and Sylmar, which is part of the city of Los Angeles.

“If you look at the Veterans Memorial Community Regional Park in Sylmar it is completely green, but in the parks in our area the grass is dead,” said López, a San Fernando resident, lamenting that there is no clear, consistent application of policies, or rigorous follow-up and enforcement, throughout the region.

Under current conditions, if the use of water is not controlled, worse consequences won’t be long in coming.

Samuel Sandoval Solís, professor of water resources management at UC Davis, said that California has 30% of its water stored in dams, meaning that, because of the drought’s effects, 70% of its capacity is gone. Water level in the subsoil has dropped 25 feet since 2016.

“Everything is looking very bad,” said the academic, who has been researching, monitoring and teaching on the subject of water for 20 years.

According to a UC Berkeley study, as temperatures in California rose between 1960 and 1980, rainfall also diminished, based on climatological records and analyzing the cores of trees.

Given the current scarcities of water, and recent extreme heatwaves across the Golden State, even downpours in the upcoming rainy season wouldn’t be enough to compensate, Sandoval Solís said.

“It’s not enough to make it to the next year,” he said.

Sandoval Solís said that if Californians don’t do more to conserve water, the authorities will have to implement restrictions such as those imposed during a previous drought phase between 2014 and 2016. In some municipalities, those restrictions limited the amount of gallons per person to between 12 and 15 daily.

According to the California Department of Water Resources, the “current statewide median indoor residential water use is 48 gallons per capita per day, and that a quarter of California households already use less than 42 gallons per capita per day.” The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency website states that each American uses an average of 82 gallons per day at home, including consumption.

“We need to raise awareness that we must all enter this equally,” Sandoval Solís said, “regardless of whether you live in a luxury house or in an apartment, we all have to reduce water consumption.”