There's no escape ...

Nicasio Reservoir in Marin County on Oct. 13.

Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

There's no escape. It matters not how much money you have. If global warming limits the amount of water available, throwing money at the problem is a total waste in the long term scheme of things.

Welcome to the future in Marin County, one where a $2 million house with an ocean view doesn’t necessarily come with a reliable water supply.

Water managers are taking extraordinary measures to keep faucets flowing should the state enter a third year of a punishing drought this winter. That this affluent redwood-studded ecotopia faces such a possibility, though, is a harbinger of a climate-constrained destiny that is fast arriving.

“These droughts are now on a new timeline,” says Newsha Ajami, a hydrologist and director of urban water policy at Stanford University’s Water in the West program. “There used to be at least 10 years in between droughts in California, which was time enough for water ecosystems to recover.”

No longer. The last California drought, which persisted six years, ended in 2017. The current one began three years later and poses an existential threat to places like Marin County, which rely on local water sources for most or all of their supply. The past year has been the second driest on record in California.

That’s forcing a reckoning with a century of water management that has largely focused on expanding supply rather than on conservation and managing demand.

Alpine Lake, a century-old reservoir, is one of seven that supply 75% of the Marin Water District’s water. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

There's no escape ...