By NPR Staff / Source: NPR

Last week, Governor Jerry Brown made water conservation mandatory in the drought-stricken state of California. “As Californians, we have to pull together and save water in every way we can,” he said.

But if the four-year drought continues, conservation alone — at least what’s required by the governor’s plan — won’t fix the problem.

Across California, communities are examining all options to avoid running out of water. Some, like the coastal city of Santa Barbara, are looking to the past for inspiration.

This may be the most severe drought in recorded history in California, but it’s not the longest. The last big drought started in the late 1980s and lasted seven years.

Sheila Lodge was Santa Barbara’s mayor back then. “You don’t know with a drought if you’re in one until a few years have gone by and, ‘Oh! You know, this is really serious!’ ” she tells NPR’s Arun Rath.

To cope with the drought, Santa Barbara’s city council banned watering lawns and hired water police to enforce restrictions. Some residents painted their brown lawns green.

“In the meanwhile,” Lodge recalls, “we had to do something to find other water supplies.”

City officials considered and rejected various options, including trucking water down from Canada — it was too expensive. One proposal envisioned dragging an iceberg all the way down the coast from Alaska. “Somehow,” Lodge says, “nobody was ever able to tell us how they would get the melting water from the iceberg into the water system.”

In the end, they decided to build a desalination facility to turn seawater into drinking water. But just as the $35 million desalination plant was nearing completion in 1991, heavy rains known as the “March Miracle” made it unnecessary.

“We had over 30 inches of rain in one month,” says Lodge, “and 30 inches is twice as much as we get in a whole year, normally. And we were on our way to being safe.”

By the time the city’s Charles E. Meyer Desalination Facility was ready to come online in 1992, the drought was over. The facility ran for six weeks, just to make sure it worked. Then it was shut down. The city mostly forgot about it.

Until now.

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