Starting in early July, Sonoma Valley residents who pay a water bill will be subject to mandatory conservation measures.
The Sonoma City Council was expected to approve water conservation measures at its meeting Wednesday night, such as requiring residents to irrigate at night and use a broom – not a hose – to clean driveways. The Valley of the Moon Water District’s board is expected to adopt similar measures at its July 3 meeting.
“We should be able to make the 15 percent cut without rationing,” said Krishna Kumar, the water district’s general manager.
Sonoma County Water Agency officials ordered the 15-percent reduction last week, saying that water in Lake Mendocino, which helps supply water to 750,000 people, could drop even lower than during the infamous 1976 drought, which marked the lowest level since the reservoir was constructed in 1958. Both the city of Sonoma and the Valley of the Moon Water District buy the bulk of their water from the Sonoma County Water Agency. It’s piped here via the Sonoma Aqueduct, an underground pipeline that runs close to Highway 12 and ends at Fifth Street West and Verano Avenue.
Not an exceptionally dry year
Although it has been a dry year statewide, it hasn’t been exceptionally dry.
According to the National Weather Service observers, Santa Rosa at the end of May had 68 percent of average precipitation for the “water year,” which runs from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30.
A Sonoma County Water Agency official said the main reason that Lake Mendocino could dip so low is because it’s getting 33 percent less water from the Eel River basin via a tunnel bored through a mountain.
“That’s the main crux, right there,” said Brad Sherwood, spokesman for the Sonoma County Water Agency.
The 200-mile-long Eel River starts in the mountains of Mendocino County, runs northwest and empties into the Pacific Ocean at Ferndale, just south of Eureka.
But a portion of the Eel’s flow is diverted into the Russian River basin via a 1.5-mile-long pipeline that, in the early 1900s, was bored through Snow Mountain some 25 miles northeast of Ukiah.
The pipeline diverts Eel River water through a Pacific Gas and Electric Co. hydroelectric plant. From there the Eel River water flows into the East Branch of the Russian River and then into Lake Mendocino, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reservoir that stores Sonoma County Water Agency water.
Sonoma County’s use of Eel River water has been controversial.
David Keller, of Friends of the Eel River, disputed the idea that consumers’ water supply would run short if transfers of water from the Eel River stopped. In a 2006 essay arguing that the Eel River water should stay put to keep the Eel cold enough for salmonids, Keller wrote that “The idea that Sonoma County needs Eel River water (has) persisted as a 60-year-old urban legend.”
