OT Just how bad is the drought? Just curious OT

Paul , how sweet was Monitor Pass on that last stretch heading down to 395 ? Long sweeping curves ... beautiful riding .

The Christmas flood of 1964 was a major flood that took place in the Pacific Northwest and California between December 18, 1964 and January 7, 1965, spanning the Christmas holiday.

Considered a 100-year flood, it was the worst flood in recorded history on nearly every major stream and river in coastal Northern California and one of the worst to affect the Willamette River in Oregon. It also had an impact on parts of southwest Washington, Idaho, and Nevada.

To grow crops or even just to keep trees alive, everyone will be pumping groundwater. The water table will drop quickly and many pumps will run dry. Wealthier farmers who could afford to drill deeper wells in the recent past, will be able to continue pumping while their neighbors go dry.

The Sacramento Daily Union reported that 1/3 of the taxable property in the state of
California was lost, and also estimated that ¼ of all cattle were drowned (200,000). One house in eight was destroyed and 7/8 of all houses were damaged. The loss of all property was between $50 and $100 million (Brewer, 1966, p246). This sum corresponds to an average loss of between $100 and $200 for every person in the state. (The loss of cattle by flood, and the record drought year that followed, ended the early California cattle industry, and the cattle-based ranchero society (Jelinek, 1998/1999).
Brewer writes, on January 19, 1862:
“The great central valley of the state is under water – the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys -- a region 250 to 300 miles long and an average of at least twenty miles wide, or probably three to three and a half millions of acres! Although much of it is not cultivated, yet a part of it is the garden of the state. Thousands of farms are entirely under water – cattle starving and drowning. All the roads in the middle of the state are impassable; so all mails are cut off. We have had no “‘Overland” for some weeks, so I can report no new arrivals... The telegraph also does not work clear through, but news has been coming for the last two days. In the Sacramento Valley for some distance the tops of the poles are under water. The entire valley was a lake extending from the mountains on one side to the coast range hills on the other. Steamers ran back over the ranches fourteen miles from the river, carrying stock, etc, to the hills.”
Remember Judge Field? He was responsible for support for Whitney and Brewer’s investigations. His home, although located on one of the higher areas of Sacramento, was filled with two feet of mud after the food waters subsided.

For a week the tides at the Golden Gate did not flood, rather there was continuous and forceful ebb of brown fresh water 18-20 feet deep pouring out above the salt water. A sea captain reported that his heavily laden ship foundered in the Gulf of the Farallons off of San Francisco, due to the layer of fresh water. Fresh-water fish were caught in San Francisco Bay for several months after the peaks of the flood. These events have not happened since. (Ellis 1936)

Agriculture now uses approximately 80 percent of California's developed water supply, but produces less than 2.5 percent of California's income.
Alfalfa, the biggest water user of any California crop, soaks up almost a quarter of the state's irrigation water. Yet alfalfa -- harvested mostly for hay to feed dairy livestock -- is a low-value crop that accounts for only 4 percent of state farming revenues. An alfalfa farm using 240 acre feet of water generates $60,000 in sales, while a semiconductor plant using the same amount of water generates 5,000 times that amount, or $300 million. (And while such a farm could function with as few as two workers, the semiconductor plant would employ 2,000.)
In short, California devotes 20 percent of its developed water supply to a crop that generates less than one-tenth of one percent of the state's economy. Given the degraded state of California's rivers and growing demands for water for higher value agricultural crops and urban areas, is this an efficient use of a precious resource?
Alfalfa covers more of California's land than any other kind of produce. About 26% is grown in the state's parched southern deserts, and despite the existence of demonstrated techniques for achieving high crop yields with water-saving methods -- such as drip irrigation and bedded alfalfa
    most California growers use inefficient irrigation techniques such as flooding.
Excessive water use isn't the only cost associated with alfalfa crops. Seventy percent of the state's alfalfa feeds California's largest agricultural industry: its dairy cows. Dairy farms in the Central Valley alone produce as much waste as a city of 21 million; illegal manure waste from dairies is believed to threaten the drinking water of 65 percent of Californians. In total, 7,000 gallons of water go into keeping a single cow alive for a single day, yielding a daily return of about 30 cents. Wasteful subsidies worsen this problem by increasing dairy demand for alfalfa.
Although alfalfa does yield some environmental benefits -- maintaining soil health, providing some wildlife habitat and preventing erosion through its extensive root systems -- current production levels are unsustainable, contributing to the destruction of ecosystems all over the state.
Even a modest reduction in production would result in tremendous water savings.

There are probably a billion people in the world that have never peed into a basin of clean water like we do several times a day.