"Seems it never rains in southern California
Seems I've often heard that kind of talk before
It never rains in California
But girl don't they warn ya
It pours, man it pours"

A singer named Mike Hammond had a Billboard No. 5 hit in 1972 with the song, "It Never Rains in Southern California."  If you grew up in the 1970s (or channel surf on the radio even today) you may have heard of this song.  I thought about it this week because it has been raining hard in Los Angeles just as local authorities announced that water rationing may be coming to LA. The downpours created torrents of runoff in the streets near my house, rising up the wheel wells of parked cars, and mildly flooding many intersections, as all this fresh water swept into storm drains and out to the sea.  Billions of gallons literally turned into a pernicious waste (since the water picks up urban pollution on the way to the ocean) when-at the very same moment-fresh water is desperately needed in LA and many other places in the West.  

NRDC has a vision for twenty-first century water management that would resolve the cognitive dissonance confronting anyone thinking about how we waste a scarce resource like fresh rain water in a desert, in a drought.  My colleagues Barry Nelson and Doug Obegi have blogged about this vision, which Barry coined the "Virtual River."   The Virtual River concept refers to our ability by implementing progressive water policy to "create" more new water than we can get from any real river in California, as much as seven million acre-feet,  but without draining any of them or building a lot of new dams.  We get the water in the "Virtual River" from water recycling, capturing storm water, increasing water use efficiency, and from related measures.  One of the virtues of the Virtual River is that the actions that augment our water supplies, like storm water capture, also have the significant benefit of being potent antidotes to urban water pollution.     

The concept is powerful, but sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words in illustrating what we are talking about.  I took this video driving home last week when I saw a key aspect of the problem we are trying to solve neatly summarized:  fresh rain water sheeting across an intersection and into storm drains as the rain fell, while sprinklers watered an adjacent lawn already thoroughly soaked by the rain.   When we talk about a twenty-first century approach to water -- a "Virtual River" -- we are trying to change this sort of scene.  Simple stuff.   Capture the rain water.  Stop wasting the water from the tap.   Fix the state's water resources problems.  Is it that simple?  In fact, it pretty much is or could be, if we change the way we think about water policy.