Did the recent record mid-July rains provide any meaningful relief from the four-year-old drought?
“Just a momentary blip,” says Public Works Director Charles Herbertson. “It was a blip to the extent people still irrigating their lawns did not irrigate them for a day or two.
“There was a little extra savings there when people turned off their sprinklers, assuming they did that.
“If people are not on a system that monitors the weather or the moisture in the soil, just on a timer and they forget, override or rain delay – mine is manual and has a rain delay button that skips the next watering for 24 hours – I am sure that happened in some cases. So there would be some savings from that.
“Otherwise,” said Mr. Herbertson, “not a whole lot. There just wasn’t enough rain to make a big difference.”
Good news lies ahead, he believes.
“When it comes to the drought, we are facing potentially a huge amount of rainfall this winter,” Mr. Herbertson said, evidently with more hope than confidence in his heart.
“This has been predicted before, and it has not happened. They are looking at conditions out in the desert, at what could be a very large amount of rain.”
The Public Works director said the question is, “How much of that rain actually is captured in such a way that it can be reused.
“If it just runs off into Ballona Creek and into the ocean, that is not helpful. You sometimes get more than you need at one time and you can’t really store it.”
However, Mr. Herbertson said, “if the rain translates into snow in the Sierras, then it does us a lot of good. Snow in the Sierras becomes stored water, which, as it melts, becomes our water supply. That is what we really need.”
