Drivers get stuck in standing water on Interstate 101 in San Francisco on January 4.
Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images
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Drivers get stuck in standing water on Interstate 101 in San Francisco on January 4.
Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images
A bomb cyclone hit California this week, knocking out power, downing trees, and dumping huge amounts of water.
Some California residents are watching this precious H20 get washed away and wonder, why can’t we save water for times when we desperately need it?
The state faces drought, but it’s not as simple as pouring out a big bucket, says UC Santa Cruz hydrogeologist and professor Andrew Fisher.
Professor Fisher spoke to NPR about the challenges facing the state, but also the opportunities that are already being worked on.
This interview has been light edited for length and clarity.
Interview highlights
On how much water can be stored for later and where
Some of it can be captured for later, but the short answer is it falls so quickly that we don’t have the ability to take that water and put it away fast enough to a place where we can store it for later. The primary forms of storage for water in California are the snowpack, which typically accumulates every year, and then reservoirs behind dams, and then groundwater aquifers.
And the challenge is that when we get a lot of rain like this, it’s not forming a snowpack in lower areas. And the reservoirs tend to fill up pretty quickly. Then we have the aquifers, and they have space, but it is difficult to get the water where it needs to be so that it can infiltrate the ground. And even then, it’s hard to get in fast enough.
About the different challenges with rainwater harvesting
Because water falls at a very fast rate and creates a hazard, we tend to treat rainwater as a nuisance and try to remove it from the landscape as quickly as possible.
So, when we have the option to hold that water back a little bit and let it go into the ground, that’s a tremendous opportunity. However, sometimes that water is not suitable for drinking. That’s an additional bottleneck because you can’t deal with how fast the water is falling or how fast it’s coming out. And, of course, the level of treatment you need can vary from place to place, creating quite a logistical challenge to treat that water.
The Golden Gate Bridge is seen through a mix of rain and splashing beach water in Sausalito on January 5.
Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images
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The Golden Gate Bridge is seen through a mix of rain and splashing beach water in Sausalito on January 5.
Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images
On where the rainwater flows when it is not being captured
He is going to a variety of places. Most of it will end up in the ocean. Some of it is being diverted and we are collecting some of this rainwater and directing it to infiltration basins where it can go into the ground.
There are other people around the state and across the Western United States who run similar projects. So people are trying to collect as much as we can from this rainwater when we have this opportunity. It turns out, a lot of water is falling, a lot of water is coming out, so a large part of it ends up going to the ocean.
On the current storm with more rain to come
I have a student group that is out right now, samples from some of our systems. And we came out here between the storms, because it’s an opportunity when it’s good to go and collect water samples and see what the water quality looks like. I’ll just note that we need to get more water into the ground. We simply have no choice.
