"Let's all get wet"

Mark Morford asks some good questions. There is much to be done. Let's get going...

It's pouring rain and water's gushing everywhere. You call this a drought?

As I write these words, rain is hammering my apartment building and rivers of fresh water -- hundreds or perhaps thousands of gallons per minute -- are gushing down the streets and the sidewalks, filling rain gutters, overwhelming the storm drains and rinsing the City relatively clean, and you think, ahh yes, rain, bring it on, so healthy, so good, so desperately needed.

Maybe you also think: Surely all that water is going somewhere helpful, yes? Surely at least some of those drains feed into some grand network of reservoirs and tanks that, in turn, replenish the supply and nourish the community and come back through our taps and get recycled for irrigation, and it's all glorious and helpful, right?

Wrong.

Truth is, the vast majority of that glorious water is merely flushed away by a system of conduits and drainage pipes and sent straight out into the bay, all in an effort to avoid urban flooding because, well, we are simply not equipped to handle too much of it at once.

Meanwhile, I read the same dire stories as you. Despite the rain, despite weeks of snow and storms and pounding amounts of water crashing down on the region for hours on end, we are still in very serious drought conditions. Long-starved state reservoirs aren't even half full. The governor declared a state of emergency. The Colorado River is long overtaxed, lakes are drying up, the besieged Sacramento-San Joaquin river delta is being siphoned off at a record pace. We do not, they say, have nearly enough water. And it's getting worse.

It seems to prompt one ridiculously obvious, but still increasingly urgent question: How can this be? How is it that tens of thousands of gallons of fresh water are pouring through the city streets right now, but we are only able to capture and use but a fraction? Why do we not have better systems in place? Why is this not more imperative?....