5-yr Drought, Then Overwhelmingly Wet Winter: Why Californians Want Climate Change Solutions

At Yuba Community College in Marysville, they’re holding a can drive to offset the extra money that students spent to follow evacuation orders. Money that students unexpectedly had to spend on gas, and potentially on hotels.

It’s been a wet winter for California. 180,000 people evacuated Butte County due to the Oroville Dam crisis, 50 California counties were in a state of emergency after February storms, and infrastructure damage could cost more than $1 billion to fix.

For families and California residents this meant (or present tense for those in areas that are still flooded) disrupted schedules for children, parents, everyone.

Unexpected extreme precipitation — meaning tons of rain, more water than we know what to do with, more rain than we’ve gotten in recorded history since 1895 — closed businesses and hurt the bottom line for hardworking families.

We saw an example of this in Lake County where flooding caused a motorized boating ban, which was implemented to try and protect already submerged homes from further wave damage. The boating ban had a ripple effect, causing local business owners to lose profits from fishing tourism.

All this after five years of being told to conserve water.

Drought has been particularly hard on agricultural workers who depend on consistent water to irrigate crops and the winter sports industry which profits from having a decent natural snow season. Just to name a couple.

Homeowners are also feeling the effects of drought by focusing their conservation efforts after Gov. Brown’s executive order to conserve 20% more water by 2020. They said goodbye to their front lawns and stopped washing their cars. At restaurants our servers weren’t allowed to pour us water until we asked, and on more than one occasion my friends and I would stop the waitperson from refilling our glasses or make it a point to finish every last drop before leaving the restaurant.

Extreme drought and precipitation are impacting our everyday lives, and they are caused by climate change. Warmer temperatures cause more extreme precipitation, droughts, changes in ocean chemistry, many more “precipitating” effects (pun intended) which are secondarily caused by climate change, and even more that are still being discovered.

California residents in particular are significantly impacted by the effects of climate change, and state government is playing catch up to address the health and safety issues that this winter has brought to light.

State agencies are trying to address our aging dams and infrastructure to avoid more scenarios like the Oroville Dam crisis. Local governments are holding open discussions to find solutions for flooding. We’re preparing for the next drought by exploring new groundwater recharge options. Each action is put into the climate change perspective because it’s the only way to accurately cite the urgency that we need to make these changes.

But California is made up of a diverse people, and not everyone is so explicit in identifying these issues as climate-related. Whether we identify them as climate change impacts or not, California residents are looking for solutions to our water problems because we are evacuating, conserving, and changing our habits because of them.

Each of us feel the effects of climate change at our homes, at our dinner tables, in our work.

Many of our friends and neighbors like to talk about climate change as if it is distant and concerning, but only to our grandkids, or people who live on the coast, or for the poor polar bears. This isn’t true. It is current. It is local.

I recently got to know some home-grown rural Californians, people that I don’t usually get to talk to in San Francisco or Los Angeles or even Sacramento. Regardless of politics or climate change stance, all of these Californians are directly impacted by the Oroville Dam crisis, flooding, levee, and water scarcity issues.

Californians near and far seem to agree that the drought/flood dichotomy needs attention. We want our government, water management, and business practices to address issues with water scarcity and abundance.

Whether we say “climate solutions,” frankly, doesn’t matter as long as we work together to address our common concerns.

Because Climate wants to tell personal stories about how climate change is affecting the lives of Californians.

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