Comment by jedberg
3 days ago
The norcal/socal divide caused by the river is funny to me. I grew up in LA, then moved to the Bay Area for college. In LA we never really talked about where our water comes from. But we were always 'in a drought' and always taught to conserve water.
My wife grew up in the Bay Area, and was told the same.
But her family is from Sacramento. Up until about 15 years ago, everyone in Sacramento paid the same for water (based on square footage of your home). There were no water meters. So they didn't conserve. They ran the sprinklers in 100 degree heat for hours, they washed sidewalks with water instead sweeping, and all the other things.
But when the meters came, her Uncle blamed SoCal for "stealing his water". He complained every month when the bill came about how he has to pay more now because of SoCal.
Owens valley, where LA "steals" water from, is on the eastern side of the Sierras.
NorCal, including Sacramento, is on the western side of the Sierras.
So unless they planned on pumping the water over/under the mountain range that surrounds it in every direction except for towards LA, that water was never available for any NorCal city to use.
The California Aqueduct delivers water from the western Sierras through the Central Valley and to Los Angeles. This is likely what NorCal refers to when they say SoCal is 'stealing our water'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Aqueduct
Would be interesting to see the relative amounts of use by LA and by agriculture in the Central Valley though.
SoCal does, yes; about half the water going through the SWP from NorCal, or ~75% if you include Bakersfield/Kern as part of SoCal (though most would consider it Central Valley).
But SoCal isn't only LA. LA itself gets a bit less than half of their water from MWP, which manages the water from the SWP and the Colorado. About the same amount it gets from the the eastern Sierras. These are supposed to drop to ~10% of LA's water supply as recapture/recycling projects complete.
Or computed the other way around, LA only has rights to ~20% of the water managed by MWD. Of course water supply, distribution, and rights are all blended and traded around all the time, but generally speaking it's not "LA" using up that water from NorCal, the consumption is significantly more from the cities and farms that came after.
This infographic basically explains it:
https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/
tl;dr: Urban water use is tiny. In NorCal, the vast majority of the water flows unimpeded to the sea. In the Central Valley, most water is used for agriculture. Agricultural water use in any one of the 3 major basins in the Central Valley is more than all urban areas in California combined. Unsurprisingly, urban use is the primary one in the SF and LA areas, but the absolute totals are very small compared to total CA water supplies.
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Owens valley is basically dried up from the water that LA takes. It's interesting as you drive in the towns in the Valley and you see all the LA Department of Water and Power offices over 200 miles from Los Angeles. The courts had to force the LA DWP to quit taking too much water from the streams that feed Mono Lake as it was in danger of drying out.
Yep, Owens valley is basically an environmental disaster created by LA. So in the grand scheme of things, buying water from NorCal is better than stealing from the Owens valley through antiquated water rights.
But really, California (and really the entire Western US) needs a water rights governance overhaul. Right now the focus is all on urban water use, which is practically negligible compared to the agricultural water rights usage.
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It isn’t dried up, they maintain a certain water level in the various lakes.
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they are saying that LA takes water from sources which would otherwise drain into the sacramento and san joaquin river delta. The video from this post mentions the California State Water Project which takes water from the Feather River (Oroville Dam) and distributes it along the Western edge of the central valley South to Bakersfield where it is then pumped over the mountains both towards Los Angeles and further East to San Bernardino and Riverside. It provides way more water to SoCal than the two Los Angeles-specific aqueducts from the Owens Valley on the Eastern side of the Sierras.
The CWP is designed for robustness, on top of delivery. Those aqueducts you're pointing to that feed into the municipal portion of the Inland Empire are frequently empty because the IE has it's own (mostly) self-sufficient water store (the San Bernardino Mountains). They exist in case there is a point in which those regions need water fed in. You can literally just drive down to them at pretty much any time through the year and see that they're dry.
Additionally, if you're focused on the 6% (out of 11% total) water allocation that goes towards supporting the infrastructure of 22million people over the 50% that goes into non-optimal agriculture (almonds, for instance) in-between the two...then you're missing the forest for the trees, my friend.
LA also gets water from the state water project which does come from northern california: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e5/Ca...
Old men yelling at the sky don't often seek rationality or nuance in their cries.
Yes, Norcal spent decades wagging fingers at SoCal about this. There were books like Cadillac Desert.
Meanwhile, San Francisco drinks clean glacier water that a valley in Yosemite was destroyed to provide this and they refuse to repurpose a downstream damn that has enough capacity to do it.
Physician, heal thyself.
Can you clarify what you mean by: “they refuse to repurpose a downstream dam”
California has insufficient water storage to meet demand, it’s not like we have huge dams lying around that we leave empty when there is water available to fill them.
You might be referring to Don Pedro dam - but we are already filling that up (modulo what we need to keep empty for flood control). SF has some contractual right they could possibly exercise to water in Don Pedro but that doesn’t magically result in California’s water supply being held constant if we stop storing water in the Hetch Hetchy. If SF gets the Don Pedro water, that means someone else that was going to get it is deprived.
Now, you could argue that the state can get by with lower storage because ag needs to consume less or more groundwater recharge or whatever, but that’s a different question.
There is and have been entire plans that address this, including in the last real attempt that almost went anywhere. You add things like groundwater recharge. I have groundwater recharge in the basin I live in. But today, in 2026, reductions elsewhere already exceed the capacity of Hetch Hetchy by an order of magnitude.
California has rewilded the Trinity River, resurrected Mono Lake, and has protected a lot of its special places. Voters have voted to tax themselves for state parks. I know that the environment, especially aside from climate issues, just aren't sexy right now. But it still matters to me. I remember the Southern California skies in the 1970s. It's not perfect now, but the improvement despite the increase in people and cars is something to celebrate too.
The only people who oppose this are the rate payers in the place that externalized the cost of the Hetch Hetchy on the world.
Some of the environmental word today might just shout slogans and prattle on with pseudoscientific babble, but there have been a lot of serious people in these efforts, just like with the other cases I mentioned.
Crystal Springs isnt anywhere near Yosemite if that is what you are referencing. That being said it supposedly was gorgeous and almost as amazing before being filled with water
Not Crystal Springs. Hetch Hetchy, the damning of which legendarily caused John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, to die of a broken heart.
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They are referring to Hetch Hetchy.
I grew up in Sacramento and I remember when my parents were had a flat rate water bill. Those were the good ol' days!
It frustrates me how everyone moralizes water use rather than accepting that free markets allow for people who are simply willing to pay for it. For example, if you live in Sacrmanto and don't have a pool, you're just doing it all wrong (in my opinion, of course).
I watched my friend's family farm in Modesto flood their fields to irrigate them. No meter, just a valve off the canal and they pay a flat rate. So it offends me that my shower head is legally required to restrict it's flow. Or that neighbors decide that a pile of rock in the front yard is "better for the environment" as it radiates heat on a 105°F day...