California has been hit hard by a drought and now regulators are telling San Francisco that the city has to stop taking some of the river water routinely drawn from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir.
Hetch Hetchy, the name of a valley in California which was once inhabited by Native Americans, is a reservoir and water system which lies in the northwestern part of Yosemite National Park.
The cutback, which was ordered by California’s State Water Resources Control Board, doesn’t apply to water already stored in the reservoir system, SF Gate reported.
The system presently holds enough water to last through another two years of drought, according to reports, however, a senior water cycle scientist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has said that the state only has a year’s worth of water left.
The Hetch Hetchy reservoir, located roughly 160 miles from SF, provides water to roughly 2.5 million people across the San Francisco Bay Area. As for San Francisco, the city alone draws 85 percent of its water from the reservoir with residents averaging 45 gallons a day.
Steven Ritchie with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, an individual tasked with water management, was quoted by Fox News as having said that they’re “going to look very closely at what the state water board does to determine the appropriate course of action.”
We’re very protective of our water rights (…) We’re going to look very closely at what the state water board does to determine the appropriate course of action.
What measures do you think the state of California should implement in order to deal with the drought?
