Essential California: Gov.
Jerry Brown made official Friday: The long California drought is over.
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Water woes continue for drought-stricken East Porterville despite Gov.
But that doesn’t change much for some areas like the drought-stricken community of East Porterville.
Many people in East Porterville had no choice but to flush toilets with buckets and use bottled water to eat and drink.
Even now, heavy rainfall doesn’t mean there’s running water.
CSET says they’re one of many groups trying to connect a remaining 500 homes to the city’s water system.
Earlier Friday, the State Water Resources Control Board approved $35 million to help East Porterville residents with dry and contaminated wells.
It comes the same day Brown says California’s Emergency Drought is officially over.
Counties all across the state no longer face water restrictions expect for Fresno, Kings, Tulare and Tuolumne.
"In this drought, we learned how much we can save outdoors," Felicia Marcus with the California State Water Board said.
"People learned how much less they really need."

California governor declares historic drought over — for now.
Thirsty California lawns faded to brown from a lack of water in four extraordinarily dry years have revived to bright green in neighborhoods across the state.
Dry riverbeds of sand and tumbleweeds that snake their way through farmers’ fields now charge with water swelling up their banks.
The turnaround has been stark.
California uses more water each year than nature makes available, and one wet winter won’t change the long-term outlook, environmentalists cautioned.
Brown declared the emergency in 2014, and officials later ordered mandatory conservation for the first time in state history.
Even now, the governor has kept the drought emergency in place for four counties, most of them at the state’s farming heartland, where emergency drinking water projects will continue to help address diminished groundwater supplies.
In the inland region of Southern California east of Los Angeles, streams and groundwater basins are still at historically low levels, and rainfall has been below average for nearly two decades.
Water conservation will become a way of life in the state, said Felicia Marcus, chairwoman of the State Water Resources Control Board, who led conservation planning.
Even Brown was circumspect in his dramatic announcement: "This drought emergency is over, but the next drought could be around the corner."

Keeping those four counties under a drought declaration ensures money continues to flow for emergency drinking water projects to help water-short communities address dry or contaminated wells, the governor’s order said.
The governor’s order said most of the conditions that prompted his drought declarations of 2014 and 2015 have diminished.
Indeed, another storm was moving through California as the governor issued his order.
“Conservation must become a way of life.” Within the four counties, most communities and farmers are not affected by the continued drought declaration, but small communities where wells have gone dry or there is no access to clean water are included, said water board officials.
For example, Gomberg said, “It allows us to continue the emergency measures, such as for bottled water or emergency hookups in East Porterville.” The State Water Resources Control Board announced Friday that it has approved up to $35 million in grants and loan forgiveness to connect East Porterville residents dealing with dry and contaminated wells to clean and reliable drinking water from the city of Porterville’s public water system.
Cities with ample water supplies will continue to live by state rules as other communities in California’s 54 other counties, state water officials said.
Being better stewards of our natural supplies is critical to securing a sustainable water future for California’s people, economy, and environment.” But a spokeswoman for Westlands Water District, the largest agriculture water district in the nation, said farmers had little choice but to pump water from the ground.
The district supplies water to farmers in Fresno and Kings counties as part of the Central Valley Project, a joint agreement between the federal government and the state.
In the last three years, the district’s farmers have received little to no water from the Central Valley Project.
“Water that typically has gone to the region has stayed in the delta for the protection of fish species.” Holman said the continued drought emergency won’t have an impact on Westlands farmers this year.

With drought easing, will Fresno get to turn on its sprinklers as often as Clovis?.
But at the end of this month, Fresno will change its water-use restrictions that limit customers to outdoor watering on only one day a week to something else – something yet undecided.
In Clovis, where some residents are separated from their Fresno neighbors by a city limit that runs down the middle of a street, the winter/spring change in rules happened on April 1, going from one-day-a-week watering to three days.
Conservation has always been an important part of our strategy; that’s not going to change.span Mark Standriff, city of Fresno spokesman In both Fresno and Clovis, twice-a-week watering was the result of state-mandated water conservation goals before those rules were eased last year if cities could show they had an ample supply.
“When we did two days a week, that’s when we were required to reduce water use by 36 percent,” said Lisa Koehn, assistant public utilities director for the city of Clovis.
Jerry Brown would declare an end to the California drought.
“Conservation has always been an important part of our strategy; that’s not going to change,” Standriff said.
Both Fresno and Clovis are counting on using their allocations of surface water from lakes in the Sierra to help them reduce their reliance on pumped groundwater.
Fresno has a surface water treatment plant in northeast Fresno that produces about 24 million gallons per day.
Winter schedule Rest of the year Fresno Dec. 1 – April 30: One day per week May 1 – Nov. 30: Two days per week* Clovis Nov. 1 – March 31: One day per week April 1 – Oct. 31: Three days per week *Pending possible changes Sources: City of Fresno; City of Clovis

Governor declares drought over but permanent conservation rules to come.
After one of the wettest winters on record, Gov.
The governor’s executive order maintains the drought emergency for sites still desperate for deliveries of drinking water, including Fresno, Tulare, Kings and Tuolumne counties.
This long-term framework for water conservation includes everything from minimizing pipe leaks, to requiring water suppliers to develop drought contingency plans, to submitting monthly data, to meeting permanent conservation targets.
“This drought emergency is over, but the next drought could be around the corner,” Brown said in a statement.
“It’s a wake-up call that we can’t hit the snooze button on.” The governor’s new order directs the state water board to lift conservation targets on water use for California’s 400 urban water agencies so those suppliers no longer have to show they have enough inventory to last through three straight years of drought.
However, urban suppliers will have to continue reporting water-use data as the state rolls out permanent and the customized water budgets, which will likely include separate indoor and outdoor targets.
“We are reviewing the governor’s long-term water-use framework released today,” said Mark Muir, board chair of the San Diego County Water Authority.
Since the governor declared the drought emergency in June 2015, residents and businesses have saved a total of more than 846 billion gallons of water.
Daily per capita use is now down to 133 gallons.

According to the Food and Agricultural Organization, rice is the world’s third-largest crop after wheat and maize. It’s the staple food in large regions of the world, and with increasing demand and the perceived perils of a changing climate, the vulnerability of rice production to droughts is a growing concern. The RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science (CSRS) is developing new transgenic strains of rice incorporating a gene from the weed thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana) to make them more drought-resistant. The CSRS scientists say that plants are able to adapt to drought by generating chemicals called osmoprotectants that include various forms of sugar. By increasing the concentration of the protectants in cells, they retain water better – much in the same way, to make a crude analogy, a damp salt cake dries out more slowly than a dish of water. Sick of Ads? More than 700 New Atlas Plus subscribers read our newsletter and website without ads….

Gov.
Jerry Brown Lifts Drought Emergency For Most Of California.
It has been quite a while since Californians have seen such green.
Riding the coattails of an unseasonably wet season, some valleys have become riots of color, deserts have been blanketed with blooms so suffusive they earn the word "super" — and the state’s officials have taken notice.
Gov.
Jerry Brown signed an executive order Friday lifting California’s drought emergency in all but four counties.
That emergency had been in place since 2014; now, only Fresno, Kings, Tulare and Tuolumne counties remain under the emergency’s much-diminished umbrella.
"This drought emergency is over, but the next drought could be around the corner," Brown said in a statement.
Despite the end of the emergency, California will maintain several water restrictions of the past two years.
The consequences of millions of dead trees and the diminished groundwater basins will continue to challenge areas of the state for years."

Gov Brown lifts California drought emergency, except in some Valley Counties.
The drought strained native fish that migrate up rivers, killed millions of trees, and forced farmers in the nation’s leading agricultural state to rely heavily on groundwater, with some tearing out orchards.
Brown declared the drought emergency in 2014, and officials later ordered mandatory conservation for the first time in state history.
Regulators last year relaxed the rules after a rainfall was close to normal.
But monster storms this winter erased nearly all signs of drought, blanketing the Sierra Nevada with deep snow, California’s key water source, and boosting reservoirs.
The governor lifted the drought emergency in all California counties except Fresno, Kings, Tulare and Tuolumne, where emergency drinking water projects will continue to help address diminished groundwater supplies.
Water conservation will become a way of life in the nation’s most populous state, said Felicia Marcus, chairwoman of the State Water Resources Control Board, who led conservation planning.
Cities and water districts throughout the state will be required to continue reporting their water use each month, said the governor order, which also bans wasteful practices, such as hosing off sidewalks and running sprinklers when it rains.
Atkins said she still receives calls from people whose wells are running dry and need a tank and bottled water.
"In no way is it over," she said of the drought.

Somalia drought forces thousands to leave home seeking food and water.
Humanitarian organizations fear this year’s drought could lead to something even worse.
The rainy season has begun in Somalia, but with scant rain.
The United Nations has warned that 20 million people face starvation in Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia and northeastern Nigeria from the drought, including 6.2 million people in Somalia alone, which amounts to more than half of its population.
In addition, “displaced people have gathered in camps with poor sanitation and in shanties, which makes things worse,” said Dahir.
This year, UNICEF has recorded more than 35,400 cases of malnutrition and 18,400 cases of cholera among children in Somalia, a jump from the same point last year.
Aid groups are working to provide food and water in drought areas, and have reached 1.9 million people so far, said Dahir.
“The priorities are huge.
We need to improve access to food and water, treatment of malnourished children,” he said.
“The figures are going up every day.”