Please dont move to Texas.

I lived in two different counties during my 34 yrs. in KA - Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties. During the Silicon Valley boom, many building campuses were constructed and it was required that a certain % of the land had to be grass, turf, lawn. Some campuses were so massive and had so much grass - requiring water - the water demand for all of that grass was such that the irrigation systems ran 24 hrs./day because there was only so much water volume and pressure available.
I thought that requirement to be strange...even back then.

Nothing to add, other than Optimum No Rinse is my favorite car wash product and is perfect for those of you that have to deal with rationing. One gallon of water for your entire car, and you can wash it anywhere (like your garage).

Agricultural use is pretty huge, you are only going to get so much benefit addressing the residential side of it.

Should be planting more trees, less grass. I water my trees and garden, my lawn looks like West Texas, dry and brown.

If those Sierra Club numbers are correct and percapita residential use is 25% higher in CA than in the rest of the country, I think at least part of the answer is obvious.

I was boggled when I learned that many public water customers in CA didn't have meters - and utilities have decades long schedules to install them, if the local government will allow it.

SAWS (San Antonio water system) is a rather militant utility, but they have achieved impressive results. They use a stage system based on the volume of water in the aquifer. With each stage comes more restrictions and higher rates per consumption level. They also post the highest users of water in the paper as a shaming tactic. It seems to work as the city has grown exponentially, but water use has stayed fairly flat. At some point water pipelines may become necessary, but the restrict, price and shame approach is a viable mid-term solution.

Btw, it's rained here almost very day over the past two weeks and things are green and lush.

Read the farmers almanac, Drought cycles run every 7-10 years, If government was in charge of Sahara desert there would be a sand shortage in 5 years.

The only short term fix is to limit use for agriculture, as that uses by far the most water. Residential irrigation account for less than 3% of total water use. Produce prices will go up nationwide, but that's the way it goes.

Either spend the billions on desalinization plants, which Californians won't want to do because higher taxes would be needed to pay for them, or scores of people who live there need to move back to where they came from. California has been loved to death for over a hundred years and the tipping point was passed decades ago.

In reality, there is no solution that people would rally behind other than fantasy solutions. Fantasy in that the solution would happen quickly and at no cost to individuals. (See: Magical thinking.) Otherwise, California politics is far too Balkanized (has been for decades) for any real solution to occur.

Unless the skies suddenly open and stay open, turning the place into Seattle-south, which doesn't seem likely, seems like the only avenue that's open is to carefully govern how existing water supplies are used. Even as some wells (outside Bakersfield, for instance) are sucking nothing but air, even though many reservoirs are at 30-percent capacity and some are at far less than that, there really aren't many restrictions in place now, at least not in most of the state.

A water czar might want to enact strict limits on water use for all customers and institute large fines for exceeding those limits. He'd probably want to institute immediate limits on how much water well-users could pump, rather than putting this off until 2018, or whatever the newly enacted law specifies. He'd probably want to outlaw flood irrigation - that's still in use in some places, just saw it outside Modesto a couple of weekends ago. He'd probably require that all irrigation districts, especially those in the San Joaquin Valley, institute drip-only irrigation, except for crops where it isn't practical. He probably would want to put a moratorium on rice production. He'd probably want to require that all new construction implement gray-water recovery, no exceptions. Draconian, for sure, and the agricultural interests would howl.

I've lived here for a very long time and I've never seen the hillsides so dry or the trees so stressed. We're in for a very rough ride, I think - but what do I know?

FWIW, here are a couple of the sites that seem worth scanning, if you're interested in what the prospects look like:

http://www.plantmaps.com/interactive-california-drought-monitor-map.php

http://www.climate.gov/news-features/department/8443/all

www.weatherwest.com

Nuclear power plants, desalination plants.

Those Sierra Club numbers are probably not very accurate, and definitely very deceiving. For example. Most people in SF County don't have a yard at all, close to 100% of the water is household use rather than used to water a vegetable garden or yard. Sacramento County is primarily single family homes and has a lot of people not on meters, so the per capita use they post is a WAG at best, and we are watering trees and yards. The reason that there are meters here at all is because folks in Southern California did not think it was "fair" that the water they got from Northern California was metered, and the people up here did not have meters. Mono County looks like it has a lot of water use, but there are probably not even 15,000 people living there, and it is high desert, so they sort of use a lot of water. Also a WAG on amount of water used, as I believe most are on well water.

http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/r_211ehchapter2r.pdf

A lot of information is here.

It's not the Sierra Club's fault. There are simply too many people vying for too little resources and the resources are becoming more scarce. Add to that the inability for the people involved to see this fact clearly and deal with it rationally and you have a painful road ahead.

Any solution involves some kind of sacrifice, whether through higher taxes (desalinization plants) and/or behavioral changes within the population (no more green grass and daily car washing). We Americans think we do sacrifice well but we don't--not anymore anyway. (We really have gone soft since WWII.) We point our fingers and make demands, the main demand being that the means to achieve the solution have no effect on us personally. "FIX IT!" is the main demand and then some hapless--and helpless--politician and/or group of bureaucrats tries to fix it and finds that it cannot be fixed without pain and suffering occurring. People then demand "NOT ME!" and the politicians and bureaucrats dither and wring their hands because their constituents demand a magical, painless solution that doesn't exist.

I guess praying for the deluge is all we can do. An actual, reality-based solution is very likely to be far beyond the ability of the population to achieve.

Back when I had my first business - commercial landscape design, installation, and maintenance - and a drought hit KA, obviously with less water usage, less plant growth, there was less work. I just loaded up my 55 gal. sprayer (two-wheeled trailer) and did what other similar companies did, hired-out to spray dead lawns with green agricultural dye.
Clients loved it.
I thought it looked like hell...but I deposited the checks anyway.

You don't fix a drought. It occurs naturally. What you do is prepare for them, because they are a regular feature here.

The water infrastructure in CA, depending on who you read, was built for around 20 million residents. I think we are now 38 million in population.

If you simply return to building dams, aqueducts and spreading grounds the problem would be solved.

Instead, the environmental wackos here actually want to tear down dams. They block every attempt to fix the problem, and the leftist legislature goes right a long with them.

And as for nukes, the plans and foundation were set for a nuke de=sal in Fountain Valley in the 60, but of course the left prevented it from ever getting any further than that.

Agriculture uses 80% to 90% (depending on how measured) of available water in California. 10 percent of California’s water goes to almond farming.

Agriculture provides <5% of California economic output.

I see some potential actions right there.

(And I think most of you are missing the point, by focusing on residential lawns etc.)

Rice production will be affected.
Production
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1411253131.gif
"About a third of all California medium grain rice (calrose) is exported to Japan. Then a large quantity is exported to Turkey and Jordan. Calrose is ideal for the domestic industrial markets (rice crispies and beer), but in recent years has been high in price due to pressures from demand in Japan."

Quadruple taxes and homeowners insurance to new people that move into places that are at the limit of sustainability. The same for high risk places like on the shoreline or in the mountains middle of nowhere where forest fires are a natural occurrence.

Use the extra money to develop technology or build pipelines.

It makes no sense to let people build in the most ludicrous places and then waste money or resources to bail them out when they shouldn't be there in the first place. CA is way over-populated for the resources available. Think of it like fire codes limit the allowable number of people in a building based on safety...

You want to build that beautiful mountain chalet in the middle of a forest? No problem. If forest fire hits, let nature take its course and don't ask the public to pay to put it out.

Fact: One of the reasons we are having so many uncontrollable forest fires is because do-gooder environmentalist have tried to "fix" nature by not allowing smaller natural fires to burn out kindling (and the Hollywood star's home in that area). It seems like a good idea until there is so much there that when fire does hit, it goes up like a tinder box.

This solution is actually a PARF discussion but here is what happened...
Back about 15 yrs ago, two politicians, one a republican and one a democrat got into
a huge debate over the Auburn Dam.
It was the answer to what is going on in California today.

It would have provided Hydro Electric (spinning reserve) power to California during peak power consumption.
The dam was a "God Send."
Massive retention pond for the Sierra snow melt and rain.
This thing could have given the farmers in central calif. all the water they would ever need for crop production and everyone could have a swimming pool in there back yard.

What happened? Matsui.

That dam was a brilliant solution to the "worst case" for water shortages in the ca's future.