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Dried Marsh Mud, 1979, California Tomorrow Records, California Historical
Society, MS 3641_001
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Dried and cracked earth, brown
lawns, low reservoir levels, mandatory water rationing: these are some of the
consequences of California’s record-breaking drought, now in its fifth year.
But they also once described the devastating drought of 1976 and 1977, “the
worst in the state’s history,” as Ronald
B. Robie, director of the state’s Department of Water Resources, wrote in 1978. (1)
That
historic drought ushered in many of the water conservation policies we know
today. As consumers statewide embraced rigorous and widespread urban water
conservation—refraining from watering their lawns, washing their cars, and
flushing their toilets—then Governor Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. commissioned the publication of a
water atlas to help explain the state’s complex water systems.