Good, Bad News on Water for San Diego : Drought: Bad news is that another year of drought looms. Good news is that the county is better prepared for it.

As they begin preparing for a possible sixth year of drought, San Diego County Water Authority officials said Thursday that they have both good and bad news about next year’s water outlook.

The bad news is that there is a 90% chance that the county will experience some type of water shortage in 1992, said Byron Buck, the authority’s director of water resources planning. This year’s rainy season is over. The amount of water stored in local reservoirs has peaked and is headed downward.

But the good news, Buck said, is that the county will enter the coming year much better prepared. Thanks to cool and sometimes rainy weather, which has made conservation easier, there are 15,000 more acre-feet in area reservoirs than expected--enough water to serve 30,000 households for a year.

“Both locally and in the statewide system, we’re in substantially better shape going into a sixth year of drought than we were going into the fifth,” Buck told the authority board at its monthly meeting. Later, he predicted: “I’d be surprised if we end up having to conserve more than 20%” in 1992.

Since April, when the water authority board, encouraged by the heavy March rainfall, scaled back its minimum conservation target and abandoned strict water-use prohibitions it was about to impose, the authority’s 23 member agencies have been asked to cut their water use 20% from fiscal year 1989-90.

So far, the county has responded enthusiastically. Overall from February through June, said authority spokesman Mark Stadler, deliveries were down 38% from the same period in 1989 (with population growth figured in). In July, water deliveries were down 41%.

“We’re going gangbusters,” Stadler said. “The weather has made it easier. But people are doing very well.”

Looking towards next year, Buck called it “pretty unlikely” that Southern California’s water wholesaler, the Metropolitan Water District, will have to impose a 50% cutback as it considered doing early this year. And that’s good news for San Diego County, which buys 95% of its water from MWD.

Also on Thursday, the authority board approved two preventive measures to ensure that what water the county has keeps flowing. The board approved a plan to construct permanent protections to the pipes that run under the San Luis Rey River. The price, staff engineers said, will range from $1- to $6-million.

In March, the authority spent $150,000 in emergency repairs when heavy rains threatened to expose--and possibly rupture--the underground pipes. One study has shown that sand and gravel mining around the river threaten the integrity of the pipelines, especially during floods.

The board then approved a project to extend Pipeline 4. When constructed, the extension will serve as an alternate route for water now flowing through trouble-plagued pipes leading to East County and the South Bay.

Last September, Pipeline 4 ruptured, leaving nearly 200,000 residents of the Otay and Padre Dam water districts with just three days’ supply of water. Then this May, 375,000 residents were temporarily cut off from their sole source of water when the authority repaired the deteriorating 17-year-old concrete pipes again.

The board also voted to authorize its general manager, Lester A. Snow, to sign a landmark water conservation pact designed to compel Californians to make real changes in the way they use water.

If widely adopted, the agreement, which includes a 16-point conservation program, could save at least 500,000 acre-feet each year--San Diego County alone estimates it could save about 70,000 acre-feet a year over 20 years. Many of the measures required by the pact are already in place here, Buck said.