Rainy Season’s Ninth Inning : A last-minute rally doesn’t mean the game is won

WHAT HAPPENED LAST WEEK: A national weatherman likened California’s wave of March storms to a “tremendous rally” in the late innings of a baseball game. What is missing from the baseball analogy is that California went into the ninth inning of the rainy season trailing 20 to 0.

It got perhaps as many as 10 runs, but the odds against getting 11 more before the end of April are so high that the drought is bound to hand California a fifth losing season. As hometown teams often have to say, “Wait till next year.”

The Sierra Nevada snowpack, for example, jumped from just over a foot at the end of February to just over six feet by late last week, but that is still nearly 30% short of normal.

Federal and state dams still hold only about half the water they should at this time of year.

HARD SELL: By late last week, Los Angeles was only an inch below a normal year’s rainfall and San Diego was over its norm. Roads to some resorts were so packed with snow that skiers could not get to the slopes.

And state and local officials were straining to persuade Californians that the state water barrel was still critically low.

Yet just as nobody predicted March’s record rains, nobody can say that October won’t start another dry season. Even if drought and downpour seem to send a mixed message to Californians, water officials must keep rationing in place and leave as much water in reservoirs as possible against the chance that 1992 will bring a sixth year of drought.

WATER BANK: The state Department of Water Resources kept lobbying farmers to sell their lower-priced irrigation water so the department could sell it to cities at higher urban prices. Without an expanded system of dams and canals, such transfers of water may be all that will save cities from more severe rationing than is now in effect if the drought continues.

The going is slow. At the end of last week, the department was still far below its original goal of contracts that would add up to 1 million acre-feet of water in its bank. With the rain, some farmers talked of using water for farming that they might have sold to the bank.

The slow going would be no surprise to Ronald H. Schmidt, senior economist of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. In a paper on buying and selling water, he wrote recently that changing the system is no “trivial exercise,” partly because it involves developing entirely new institutions.

But he encouraged the state to persist because introducing market incentives would improve most existing plans for allocating scarce supplies.

Another reason for the state water bank to continue is that such “water marketing” would increase in importance if there is a sixth year of drought.