How wet is your winter? Water and drought in Sonoma County

Bob Dylan was spot-on when he sang, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." He was also spot-on when he sang, "A hard rain's gonna fall," though hard rains don’t fall as often as they once did in the hills and valleys of Sonoma County where drought has become the new normal. Huge weather events— once referred to as “Pineapple Expresses” and now usually described as “Atmospheric Rivers”—have been around for a while, but they seem to take place more frequently now than in the past. The data isn’t conclusive. Still, an atmospheric river can occur during a year of intense drought. Not long ago, the Russian River flooded during a season of below average precipitation. Welcome to the wacky world of weather.

Local patterns

Weather patterns thousands of miles away, in the south and the central Pacific Ocean, known as La Nina, which has water on the cool side, and El Nino, with water on the warmer side, also seem to influence patterns of Sonoma rainfall. Still, direct cause-and-effect relationships have not been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt, or so experts believe. What is apparent, folks at the Sonoma County Water agency, aka Sonoma Water, insist is that weather events that take place in distant parts of the globe, impact local weather events. It’s all connected. Sub-Saharan Africa has been harder hit than other places and has give rise to climate change refugees eager to find sanctuary in Europe. Northern Californians have fled smoke and fire, but they had not yet fled drought.

Mr. Dylan, ought to rewrite the lyrics to his classic, “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” The new version would go, "You don't need a weatherman to know we're in the midst of global warming, climate change and weather extremes." Yes, there are those who deny climate change, but anyone who has lived in Sonoma County over the past four decades, as I have, paid attention and kept records of precipitation and temperatures will tell you that there's less rainfall now than there once was.

Local concerns

Also, summer days are hotter than ever and hot days occur more often now than in the past. That, too, is the new normal. Not surprisingly there are gloom and doom people in our midst. One of them is legendary environmentalist, teacher and founder of Green String Farm, Bob Cannard, who thinks that Sonoma County will look like the Sahara Desert. But that won’t be, he predicts, for another hundred years.

Green String Farm on the outskirts of Petaluma doesn’t have reliable wells and the water that Cannard stores in reservoirs usually runs out before the end of summer. He’s worried he won't be able to grow organic vegetables much longer at Green String.

I’ve had far better luck with the well on my own property in West County that Bob Foote dug in 1972. It’s 88-feet deep and it still supplies eight-gallons a minute. Like Cannard, I’m a worrier. I had a fit when one neighbor ripped out the apple trees in the orchard next to my parcel. I had another fit when yet another neighbor cut down the redwoods on the acreage right above me that had helped to sustain the watershed. I understand that property comes with rights and privileges, but isn’t there also the responsibility to the earth itself and to the community?

In a county that's still largely agricultural, and where all water is local—the town of Sonoma differs from Cotati and both differ from Santa Rosa—the subject of the weather is more than one of innocent curiosity. For longtime vineyard manager, Phil Coturri, who also makes his own wines —under the Sixteen 600 label with his two sons and right-hand men Max and Sam—knowing weather patterns is as essential as knowing how much money he has in the bank.

In fact, heat and rain can be the difference between profit and loss. When it's too hot grapes fry on the vine. No wonder Sonoma County grape growers and winemakers have been thinking of moving vineyards to the Sonoma coast and to Oregon and the State of Washington. Some have already bought land along the Pacific. That move can buy time, but there's no guarantee that the Sonoma Coast and the Pacific Northwest will be suitable for Pinot Noir and Cabernet Sauvignon. The weather conundrum, if you can call it that, is global.

As Lisa Michelli, the President and CEO at Pepperwood Preserve, says, "God is playing dice with rain." She adds, “It’s essential to take care of the land because if you do that, you also take care of water.” Well-cared for land absorbs and stores water under the surface, Michelli explains. “Ground water,” as it’s called, is as good as savings. At Pepperwood’s 3,200-acres, which sit in the hills above Santa Rosa—and that’s on the traditional homeland of the Wappo—Michelli and the crew monitor and measure temperatures and rainfall. “There’s no substitute for going into the world, looking, seeing and observing, and not relying on computer models,” Michelli says. She believes in vineyards because they’re “recharge areas” where water goes into the ground and doesn’t run-off and flow to the ocean. She also insists, “Everyone has to take responsibility for the well-being of the aquifer.”

Whether you believe in God or the Goddess, pray or don't pray, chances are you know something is happening here, don't you, Mister Jones, to borrow the name of the nowhere man and the lyrics in Bob Dylan’s, “The Ballad of the Thin Man.” Perhaps you don’t know for sure what's causing the extreme weather patterns here and all around the globe. Is it us, humans, or something else?

Statewide concerns

Scholars and journalists who write about water, drought, rainfall and the weather—like Mark Arax the author of Chasing the Dream and Marc Reisner, the author of Cadillac Desert— write about Owens Valley and the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, which flow into the Delta. In their books, Arax and Reisner hunker down in the Central Valley, where ag is a multibillion-dollar a year industry. They also zoom in on the big cities of the south that suck up millions and millions of acre-feet of water, as it’s usually measured. L.A. is a monster that ought not to be where it's located, far away for a real river.

The Russian hardly seems like one, especially when compared with the Mississippi and the Hudson. Still, it’s our only one. We'd better love it. The body of brackish water that flows through Petaluma isn’t a river, but rather a polluted slough. Lake Mendocino and Lake Sonoma are small when compared with big lakes like Orville and Shasta where water = power. Roman Polanski told much of the Golden State's sorry water story in his feature Chinatown. Yes, the film fictionalizes and exaggerates, but many viewers and students of water in California today still regard it as the quintessential cinematic treatment on the subject.

Local efforts

Sonoma County isn't a microcosm of the whole state—there's little to no snow melt here and no water from the Delta as there is elsewhere—but in Sonoma as in California, water tends to move, with pumps and pipes, from North to South and from West to East. Some of our water comes from the Eel River and its vast watershed, which begins in Lake County. In wet winters the Eel helps to fill Lake Pillsbury. That water comes our way.

In 2015, at the tail end of the last major drought in our county, a local reporter asked Grant Davis, the head of Sonoma Water—which operates under the jurisdiction of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors— to explain how he would like the agency and its work to be remembered in 2020. “I hope that we can all look back with pride at our achievements during this drought,” he said. “That we restored habitat for fish, saved endangered species, provided good water to the community, maintained calm, showed real professionalism and met the challenges that we’ve faced.”

Dear reader, you can assign a grade of your own to Sonoma Water based on your own experience. You might consider that while salmon and steelhead haven’t returned to the Russian River in the numbers fisher folk hoped for, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recognized the Sonoma-Marin Saving Water Partnership with a 2021 “Water Sense Sustained Excellence Award.” Kudos.

Davis’s father, a civil war buff, named his son after Ulysses S. Grant, the Union general and the 18th president of the U.S., who took to heart Mark Twain’s adage that “Whiskey is for drinking—water is for fighting.” Sometimes, a sense of humor is what’s called for, as is calm. Though the current drought is dire, it’s essential that we don’t panic and flip.

Barry Dugan and Paul Piazza, two consummate professionals, both work with Grant Davis at Sonoma Water—which buys and sells H2O to towns and cities. They talk the talk and walk the walk so they’re role models for almost every person who lives wherever The Gazette is read. “We all need to do as much as possible to save water inside and outside homes and businesses,” Dugan says. “That means fixing leaks sooner rather than later, doing full loads of laundry and dishes, taking short showers and removing lawns.”

Piazza says that people tend to forget about drought when there’s a big rain, as there was in October 2021. “There’s no silver bullet,” Piazza says. “It’s a lot of little things, like using a bucket in the kitchen sink when washing dishes by hand, and reusing water to irrigate plants, for example, plus upgrading to really efficient toilets and catching rainwater and storing it.”

Like Dugan, Piazza doesn’t place his faith in long range weather forecasts. “I trust what reports predict for the next seven days, not the next 14,” Piazza says. He and Dugan both keep a sharp eye on the dangerously low water levels in Lake Sonoma and Lake Mendocino and argue that water conservation ought to be second nature. Still, there is no substitute for real rain.

“’Slow it, spread it, sink it and store it,’ is a mantra I get behind,” Grant Davis says. While you conserve water you might play the Eurythmics' hit, “Here comes the rain, again.” Annie Lennox sings the lyrics as though her whole world and her very livelihood depend on them. Hey, water is life. There’s no getting around it.