Can’t live if there’s no water left

Have you ever wondered how long you could live without water? I wondered that. So I Googled it and found an answer from http://livescience.com.

They suggested the rule of three: three minutes to live without air, three hours to live without shelter in a harsh environment such as a blizzard, and three days to live without water, although some people have survived eight or 10 days.

I Googled that Wednesday after reading that Gov. Jerry Brown had ordered state officials to reduce water use in California’s towns and cities by 25 percent. The reduction would be mandatory. The state of California has been in a drought for three years or longer.

Also Wednesday, the Sierra Nevada snowpack was only 5 percent of the historical average. California usually gets about a third of its annual water from its snowpack.

But Gov. Brown didn’t order any mandatory water-use reductions for agricultural water users. He only required them to report more water-use information.

The governor’s news release explained that the farmers had endured most of the drought hardships. Hundreds of thousands of farm acres lie fallow because of the drought. Farmers can’t get enough irrigation water from government water projects. Thousands of farmworkers have been laid off.

But many farmers are pumping water from underground basins. Nature may never be able to fully replace that water.

Here in the North County, we’re familiar with that problem. The Paso Robles groundwater basin has been overpumped for years. But overpumping in the San Joaquin Valley is a bigger problem, as a Los Angeles Times story in Monday’s Tribune reported. The article said the Central Valley aquifer, beneath the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys, has been overpumped for many years. That aquifer now contains 20 million acre-feet less water than it did just 10 years ago. An acre-foot is 1 acre of water, 1 foot deep.

Overpumping groundwater also causes the overlying land to subside or sink. When too much water is pumped from the ground, the ground shrinks or compacts. Not far from Chowchilla, Earth’s surface is sinking about 1 foot per year.

A hydrologist said the ground was sinking because farmers were overpumping water from the groundwater basin to irrigate almond and pistachio orchards. It wasn’t sinking because of the drought.

The article also said that some of the water in the Central Valley aquifer seeped in 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. I wonder whether refilling the underground aquifer will now take another 10,000 or 20,000 years.

Will our grandchildren and their grandchildren have enough to drink in the meantime?

This story was originally published April 3, 2015 at 5:29 AM with the headline "Can’t live if there’s no water left."