Commentary: One rainy season doesn't mean California's drought problems are over
Drought? What drought?
The big fear in the world of water management is that this big gulp of wet weather will lead some Californians to think that the drought is dead. Politicians from President Donald Trump to Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe, who displayed a snowball on the Senate floor to "disprove" global warming, willfully try to conflate climate change with weather. But one rainy season is not California's last-reel rescue from drought.
In a few weeks, the state's Department of Water Resources will be sending out its new water-saving messages, and Niki Woodard, who is No. 2 in the department's public affairs office, sizes up how her department can navigate around that waterlogged state of mind.
Q: It has been raining like crazy. It has been snowing like crazy. How on earth do you tell people there's still a drought and they still need to save water?
A: That's a good question, and we get that question a lot here at the Department of Water Resources. While our snowpack right now is about 140 percent of average for this time, that's our reservoir. And we want to preserve as much water
