‘Just a drop in the bucket’

Despite the recent series of downpours that soaked Newport-Mesa and the rest of Southern California, the region is still in a drought, and Orange County residents who rely on imported water and groundwater should still do their best to conserve, officials said.

“I know people think this is a lot of rain, but it’s really just a drop in the bucket,” said Amanda Gavin, a spokeswoman for the Mesa Consolidated Water District, which serves 113,000 customers in Costa Mesa and parts of Newport Beach.

“It may have helped us a little,” she added, “but it hasn’t solved the problem.”

The average rainfall for the region is only 12 inches a year, which Northern California can get in a matter of a months. Orange County occasionally receives a little more rain than the average — in 2005, 18 inches fell — but that’s rare.

For the most part, rainfall comes in at 12 inches or less, according to water records between 1953 and 2009 provided by the Orange Coast Watershed and Environmental Center.

The problem is that the levels in the groundwater basin — which supplies nearly half of Orange County residents with their water — have seen better days.

Making matters even more dire is the fact that South County relies on imported water from either the Colorado River or the Delta in Northern California.

And the water from the Delta has been indefinitely cut off from Southern California to protect the Delta smelt, an endangered species, the result of a federal court order in December 2008.

“Times are tough. We’ve been living off reserves for over a year,” said Darcy Burke, director of public affairs for the Municipal Water District of Orange County, whose business is to buy water and import it to the county.

And it doesn’t look like the order will be lifted any time soon, water experts said.

Although several inches of rain fell in the past few days, the past three years have been very dry, Gavin said.

“We’re in natural drought and a regulatory drought as well,” Gavin said.

And when it does rain, capturing the water before it heads down the storm drains and into the ocean isn’t exactly easy.

The good news is Costa Mesa’s Colored Treatment Water Facility, which removes the color of the murky water retrieved from the deep aquifers, Gavin said. It went online in 2001.

“When the water comes out it looks like a weak tea and smells like sulfur, but we change all that,” she said. “When we’re through with it, it looks great, and it’s ready to drink.”