Over the past few months, a lot of rain has fallen in Santa Barbara County, so I asked Matt Young with Santa Barbara County what impact that’s having locally.
“We had a very wet rain year last year, more than 200% of our annual average, so we filled all of our surface water reservoirs and started to make progress filling our groundwater basins,” Young said.
Lake Cachuma, Jameson, and the Gibraltar Reservoir are all full, but it’s not just water filling up the lakes.
“We have young mountains here and they are very erodible and every time it rains, a lot of sediment gets washed into all three of the basins on the Santa Ynez River,” Young explained.
Siltation is a problem for the Gibraltar Reservoir, which provides 40% of the City of Santa Barbara’s water. The reservoir’s capacity has decreased by 30% since 1920 due to erosion and wildfires, according to Santa Barbara County.
“There have been numerous studies done on how to remove this silt and what the cost-effectiveness would be, and the result on all these reservoirs is that it would not be cost-effective to remove it,” Young said.