Michael Ramirez for March 20, 2023

There hasn’t been a major reservoir built since 1990, because the prime sites for building dams & creating reservoirs were done. This spring was a rare event. Ramirez would be the first one complaining about spending a bunch of money on a reservoir that only gets filled once or twice a decade.

Here’s a radical idea, what if we stop ruining the environment and messing with the climate so that we won’t get these extreme weather patterns ? Is that too “woke” for you Ramirez ?

Right! Build more reservoirs when over the last 20 years we couldn’t fill up the ones we had. Everyone should have a reservoir! They should put one in everybody’s back yard! Maybe all those farmers that tapped the aquifer so much that salt water leached in should have done it!

Or, maybe people shouldn’t live in the dessert. Sam Kinnison had it right.

Will somebody please tell aristo that water runs downhill.

1400 reservoirs. Most were close to empty because even though people believe that reservoirs create water somehow, normal people know rain is necessary. Also for a shot of reality, CA is pumping water underground and flooding fields to allow ground water to be replenished. But because you can’t see these underground reservoirs, they don’t exist to most people!!

Wow. Tropes and tales wrapped into meaninglessness

The problem in ca is that the water usage is the same whether it is a wet winter or dry. Too many green lawns in ca, especially in socal. CA should look like Phoenix and Tucson with no lawns or landscaping if there is not enough water to go around. Look at the difference between la and bishop. la sucks water out of every stream in the bishop area through the pipe installed many years ago. Bishop used to be a great agricultural area. Now a wasteland. Now go blame agriculture for using so much water. Would you rather eat grass or vegetables?

Well.. in the long term all water will return to the ocean.

IF 95% of California’s rainfall is flowing into the ocean, WHY isn’t it flowing into reservoirs first? Priorities are screwed up in California. Surely, welfare for the citizens of the state should be first priority. Right?

Well this is what I found, California needs 38 Billion Gallons a day. Its ability to hold water is 43 million Acre-foot that equals 325,851 gallons. That will equal just over 14 Trillion gallons. That means when drought returns, California will be back in the same situation in one year and three days.

Wow, California is ran by Jackassess.

be better building it near Phoenix AZ, use to be part of the inland sea

The real jack@sses are those who refuse to acknowledge the reality of global climate change. They keep suggesting we put a bandaid on a cancer.

If another reservoir was proposed, Ramirez would render a beautiful toon mocking the folly. After all, California already has 1500 near empty.

Sorry Ramirez is right on this one, more reservoirs mean more storage more storage means we have more water when it gets dry.

CA. probably needs more reservoirs. However, this is a very unusually wet winter for the state. The same people who are complaining that there aren’t enough reservoirs for runoff later will be complaining about the expense that the usually empty reservoirs cost to build.

Bottom line, people just like to complain.

I hate it when people echo moronic talking points. Hey Ramirez, nearly ALL the water on the planet Earth flows into the oceans. The water that doesn’t flow into the ocean is locked up in glaciers, flows into basins that have no outlet to the seas (ie, the Dead Sea, the Great Salt Lake, the Caspian Sea) or into aquifers.

Reservoirs are complicated. They are very expensive( small reservoir in the Sierras is costing $10 billion). You can’t just plop one down any where. In seismically active California, a failing dam could kill tens of thousands and cause billions in property damage. AND, we actually have a lot of them. They hold a huge amount of water, but if it doesn’t rain, they don’t fill up.

As usual, great art, really dumb point.

Since when is rainwater harvesting or even, reagan forbid, “water conservation” in the California republican’s vocabulary? Seems so called “conservatives” aren’t actually conservative about anything but social issues.

We need more celestial beavers to dam up those (expletive) atmospheric rivers!

I did more or less the same calculation about a month ago. The historical average rainfall over the state of California is 22.9 inches, or 1.91 feet.

Area of Callifornia = 163,696 square miles

No of acres in a square mile 640.

Area of California in acres 104,765,440 acres

Volume of average California rainfall 199,297,381 acre feet.

1 acre-feet equals 325,851 gallons

So the total average number of gallons of rainfall per year is 65,146,537,135,848 gallons.

In his comment above, Jack7528 says that California can store 14 trillion gallons. That’s 20% of the total average rainfall in California.

That’s 20% of the rainfall in a year. Now, the reservoirs do not need to be refilled from zero every year, but that doesn’t mean that the excess is wasted. Much gets used. So Ramirez 95% is bogus.

Jack’s number also says that storage capacity is 43 million acre feet.

The rain is not evenly distributed. If you want to increase storage capcity you either have to create artificial reservoirs in flat land or build more dams in the mountains. And you have to ship the water from where it fell to earth to the reservoirs. Which is very expensive.

We’re not talking a few more dams here. We are talking lots of canals and reservoirs to even double capacity.

Cover the existing canals (solar panels would be dandy) to reduce evaporation. Same for reservoirs. No, I am not talking complete coverage of either canals or reservoirs. But the canals could use the energy to run the pumps, and dams generally have electrical connections to the grid.

Sigh,I’ve posted this numerous times. My dad was on the local water board back in the 60’s forward. He told me that California at that time had plans to secure water storage well into the 2000’s. Then the liberal, ecowhack, Democrats came into power and demolished all of that. I remember the last of the water transfer and storage initiatives the “Feather River Project “ that ran through our area. None such exists anymore.