The little town of Huron, California (Fresno County, population 7,000) is on the brink of running out of water. Its plight to illustrates a broader point about “running out of water”.

First, its story courtesy of the Central Valley News, which reports that Huron could run out of water by July:

Huron, a rural farming community, receives its water from a direct contract with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

Just like farmers around the state, dealing with little water for their crops, the 7,000 people of Huron are facing a similar water crisis….

Last year, Huron received 50 percent of its water allocation bringing it through November, according to Betsy Lichti, district engineer with the Fresno Division of Drinking Water of the State Water Resources Control Board.

This year, Castro said, the outlook is far worse.

In following drought and the resulting water shortfalls, it’s important to be carefully attentive to who, specifically, is at risk of running short of or out of water, and why. The city of Huron, and its comparison to other California municipal and farm water users, illustrates what I think is an important shortcoming of UC Irvine/JPL scientist Jay Famiglietti’s LA Times analysis of California’s water problems. To say California “has about one year of water stored,” (as the revised headline points out), and Jay’s suggested policy response (“immediate mandatory water rationing … across all of the state’s water sectors”) treats “California water” as one giant bucket and suggests a “one giant bucket” solution.

But the Huron story, and a look at other places that aren’t running out, suggests that we’ve really got a thousand smaller buckets in various stages of “running out” (or not). Water management happens at the scale of those thousand buckets. The new Public Policy Institute of California drought report makes this point nicely:

Thanks to substantial investments following the 1987–92 drought—and despite the addition of more than 8 million new residents since that time—most large urban areas have experienced only modest water shortages so far. Drought resilience improvements included new surface and underground storage, new interconnections that enable supply sharing with neighboring agencies, expanded use of recycled wastewater and stormwater, and water purchases. In addition, low-flow plumbing fixtures and appliances and changing behavior have reduced per-capita water use in most urban areas. In contrast, several large communities and numerous small, rural communities relying on a single source (often groundwater) experienced severe shortages. Some required emergency aid from the state.

Huron, dependent on the San Luis Project bucket to deliver its water, didn’t diversify its supply. Now the San Luis bucket is empty, and it’s screwed. Farmers who depend on the San Luis bucket have a bit more flexibility. They can fallow a field if there’s no water to irrigate it. You can’t fallow a city.

There are some water policy moves that have to happen at the scale of the state of California as a whole (the PPIC report suggests a number of good ones), but the hard work of responding to drought has to happen one bucket at a time.

Jeff Michael published some new data today suggesting California agricultural has been more resilient and less damaged by the current drought than I expected. “[T]here is virtually no difference in farm employment between 2014 and 2013 in the 3 counties that are thought to be most devastated by the drought,” Michael wrote. But perhaps I should not be so surprised.

For my book research, I’ve taken a dive into some research published in the 1960s and early ’70s by the late Bob Young, who started his career with a splash as a young ag economist at the University of Arizona by arguing that central Arizona did not need a huge infusion of Colorado River water. This violated an almost religious tenet in Arizona, his suggestions were ignored*, the Central Arizona Project was built, and we are now where we are. Young’s argument was that CAP would basically provide surplus supplies to an agricultural economy that did not need the water.

In a 1969 paper Young wrote with a colleague named William E. Martin (I hope this link works), he argued from pre-CAP data that, in the face of increasing water scarcity, Central Arizona ag was nevertheless growing. Why? Farmers, being self-interested actors, adapted. They made their irrigation systems more efficient, shifted their cropping patterns, and the like. “Irrigated farming,” they wrote at the time, “emerges as a rather robust corpse.”

That seems to be what is happening in California. Here’s Michael:

As I said, there is more data to sift through, but it is important to recognize that this drought is coming in the midst of a strong expansion period of Valley agriculture.  The total number of acres irrigated and harvested has been growing every year for most of the past decade, even in the face of scarce surface water.  Thus, in the absence of drought, I suspect 2014 employment would have been even higher.  The drought is causing significant fallowing of relatively low value, and non-labor intensive field crops, while new acreage is coming into production by tapping groundwater.  Thus, there are farmers laying people off, I don’t think the farmers in news reports are lying.  But clearly, there are others that were hiring.  In other words, the baseline for agriculture activity is rising, as I discussed last spring in this post.

A “robust corpse” in California as well? There are all kinds of questions about long term sustainability, but in the short term the collapse is not yet underway despite extraordinary drought.

* There’s a widely told story, repeated in Cadillac Desert, that Young was hounded out of Arizona as a result. Young ended up at Colorado State having an illustrious career as an ag and water economist, and died several years ago, so I can’t ask him, but I found a colleague whom Young told several years before his death that the hounding story was untrue – that far from being hounded out, U of A offered him a tenured position, but that CSU made him a better offer. More to come on that.

Reading Alex Breitler’s story yesterday about Stockton, for the first time in history, restricting the days of the week residents can water their lawns, I was reminded of this bit of business from Las Vegas:

In 1950, the municipality began restricting lawn watering. During the next two years the city employed the alternate day method, allowing homeowners with lots facing north and east to water their grass on even-numbered days of the month and the rest on odd.

That’s from Eugene P. Moehring’s Resort City in the Sunbelt, Las Vegas, 1930-2000. I’ve been unable to figure out how to confirm whether that’s the first example of odd-even watering. If anyone knows some bright grad student who’s done “The History of Municipal Water Conservation Policy” for their thesis, let me know.