California Gov. Jerry Brown is proposing a $1 billion emergency relief plan to deal with California’s water shortage caused by four years of drought conditions.
This comes just as new predictions about the state’s water supply are painting a dire picture. In an op-ed published in the LA Times last week, Jay Famiglietti, a senior water scientist at NASA, predicted the state is nearing the bottom of its water storage.
“We have a year of surface water. After that, we’ll rely more heavily on underground water,” Famiglietti told José Díaz-Balart on msnbc Thursday.
Famiglietti explained that, currently, about 80% of the water used by the state comes from the ground, meaning that once the surface water disappears, California will rely entirely on ground water to supply its 320 million residents–a problem because ground water is not easily replaceable.
Last November, voters in California approved the state legislature’s $7.5 million water bond measure for water and flood projects to try to tackle the state’s drought.
