With No End In Sight, California’s Drought Endangers Public Health

[ProSense]

With No End In Sight, California’s Drought Endangers Public Health

By Jeff Spross

California’s drought isn’t just threatening the state’s drinking water, officials told Reuters Tuesday. It’s threatening residents’ health...millions of Californians rely on wells and other underground sources for their drinking water. As levels decrease, contaminants in the water become more concentrated, as there’s less water to dilute them...California identified 183 communities relying on contaminated drinking water, and sent help to 22 of them to bring their supplies and infrastructure into compliance with environmental guidelines. The remaining communities are still in the process of updating their systems.

Jerry Brown, the state’s governor, declared a state of emergency last month thanks to the drought. And public health officials said they were targeting 10 communities for immediate relief — by bringing in freshwater supplies by vehicle and laying new piping — as they were in danger of running out of freshwater within 60 days.

In addition to water contamination, drought conditions also turn creeks and ponds into stagnant pools, allowing more mosquitoes to breed and threaten local populations with disease. The dry and dusty conditions also exacerbate asthma and lung problems.

President Obama announced almost $200 million in aid for California several days ago. And last week, he called on Congress to create a $1 billion climate resilience fund to aid California and other states...Obama and White House officials have also explicitly linked the drought to the climate change that results from man-made global warming. Higher temperatures generally mean faster evaporation and drier conditions in dry areas. Rainfall patterns also shift, leading to longer dry spells interspersed with heavier deluges — wetter areas get wetter and drier areas get drier, which is especially dangerous for California’s southeast. Those changes also mean that when precipitation does come, there’s less time for it to add to snowpack and soak into the ground, which means reduced freshwater supplies.

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http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/02/19/3306401/california-drought-health/

[seveneyes]

1. California drought: Past dry periods have lasted more than 200 years, scientists say

http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_24993601/california-drought-past-dry-periods-have-lasted-more

California's current drought is being billed as the driest period in the state's recorded rainfall history. But scientists who study the West's long-term climate patterns say the state has been parched for much longer stretches before that 163-year historical period began.

And they worry that the "megadroughts" typical of California's earlier history could come again.

Through studies of tree rings, sediment and other natural evidence, researchers have documented multiple droughts in California that lasted 10 or 20 years in a row during the past 1,000 years -- compared to the mere three-year duration of the current dry spell. The two most severe megadroughts make the Dust Bowl of the 1930s look tame: a 240-year-long drought that started in 850 and, 50 years after the conclusion of that one, another that stretched at least 180 years.
<snip>

If Obama and White House officials have explicitly linked this drought to the climate change that results from man-made global warming, what were the previous droughts caused by?

[ProSense]

2. I don't

"If Obama and White House officials have explicitly linked this drought to the climate change that results from man-made global warming, what were the previous droughts caused by? "

...understand the implications of article you posted, but I don't think the cause makes a difference when it comes to solutions. It also reminds me too much of people citing really cold or hot days in the past in attempts to reject the effects of climate change. IOW, it's still a drought.

From the article:

""We continue to run California as if the longest drought we are ever going to encounter is about seven years," said Scott Stine, a professor of geography and environmental studies at Cal State East Bay. "We're living in a dream world."

<...>

"Some small towns in the Central Valley would really suffer. They would basically go away," said Jay Lund, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Davis.

<...>

Farmers with senior water rights would make a huge profit, he noted, selling water at sky-high prices to cities. Food costs would rise, but there wouldn't be shortages, Lund said, because Californians already buy lots of food from other states and countries and would buy even more from them.

Fallback plans

In urban areas, most cities would eventually see water rationing at 50 percent of current levels. Golf courses would shut down. Cities would pass laws banning watering or installing lawns, which use half of most homes' water. Across the state, rivers and streams would dry up, wiping out salmon runs. Cities would race to build new water supply projects, similar to the $50 million wastewater recycling plant that the Santa Clara Valley Water District is now constructing in Alviso.

It's a potential disaster that needs to be address.

From a 1994 NYT article quoting the scientist cited in the article above:

<...>

How far ahead that reckoning might lie is, of course, uncertain. But one ominous sign may be that the earth's climate as a whole is now warming up, whether from natural causes or because of heat-trapping atmospheric gases emitted by industrial society. Any significant global warming would probably cause changes in atmospheric circulation and precipitation patterns, and the new findings suggest that "during much of medieval time the planetary ocean-atmosphere system operated in a mode unlike that of modern time," Dr. Stine wrote in Nature.

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/19/science/severe-ancient-droughts-a-warning-to-california.html

[Xithras]

3. I read a bit on another major drought induced health hazard last week.

The sewage treatment plants for the countless cities and towns in the Central Valley, which is home to millions of people, primarily dump into Valley rivers where they run into the San Francisco Bay. This water is normally heavily diluted by the water already flowing down the rivers, and the sewage ratio is nearly imperceptible by the time it reaches the Bay/Delta.

Barring heavy rainfall, it is widely expected that most Valley rivers will dry to a trickle by late summer, but those sewage plants will still be dumping vast amounts of treated wastewater into the riverbeds. By the time it reaches the Delta and SF Bay, more than half of the water flowing down those rivers may be treated wastewater. This will not only greatly increase the concentration of pollutants in the San Francisco Bay, but will cause a massive increase in the percentage of wastewater being picked up near Tracy for the California aqueduct, which is sent south to provide drinking water to Los Angeles. That water has always been treated before being sent out to homes (it has to be, as it contains agricultural runoff in addition to municipal wastewater), but there's some question as to how well the treatment processes will work if the percentage of wastewater gets too high.