Drought: A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

 

In 1986, we were told in late spring that we were going to be “in drought” that summer, so “Don’t water your lawns or wash your cars.”

I bought that story, not realizing that Oregon declares drought if there might be insufficient snowpack to water the city because of a warm, wet winter.  A foggy winter, which is dry after the sun burns through the fog, also triggers a drought forecast, as fog in the valleys doesn’t contribute to snowpack.  1985-1986 was a foggy winter, with fogs that lasted for weeks.^*

We had 103 days without rain that summer.  I was not surprised, as a drought had been declared. 

I left Grants Pass in the fall of 1986 and didn’t know, until the Daily Courier in 2018 published a list of years close to 100 days without rain, that 1987 was also a drought year, with 97 days without rain.

I eventually realized that a drought declaration before the fact is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Rivers depend on springs more than snowpack to keep them running, as we could see every time we’ve had a summer without rain in the last 20 years.  Springs depend on the water that is pushed out of the mantle of the earth; they don’t depend upon snowpack.

 

*  Eager: The surprising, secret life of BEAVERS and why they MATTER, Ben Goldfarb, “drought, wet” pgs 100-101. Published 2018.

 

10-15-2025 2-minute Speech to Grants Pass City Council

Published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com and shared on Facebook and Nextdoor

Like Ratepayers for Fair Water and Sewer Pricing on Facebook

 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener      541-955-9040           rycke@gardener.com

Hiking units for a new water plant

 

Our old water plant.  The new one has only started to be built, a few blocks away.

 At your workshop, City Manager and Staff went straight to hiking our already high unit rates to satisfy lenders that we can pay the debt we are about to incur.  But higher unit rates bring lower use, which staff habitually fix by hiking unit and base rates even higher. 

Lenders will be satisfied if you would return our rate system to what worked for 50 years: paying all the overhead, monthly bills that do not rise or fall with production, including debt payments, maintenance and contingency funds, with our monthly base rates, and charging one low unit rate to pay costs that rise and fall with production of cleaned water.

The time to start doing it is tonight, by voting no.

Water is not precious, it is vital. Rationing our water is killing plants, animals and people, with drought, fires and floods. Rationing water by high unit prices has returned our weather to the time before water plants were built, when cities burned and forest fires were huge.

We don’t want our city to burn.  We want it to be clean, green and beautiful, like it was in 1985, when we watered our yards because water was cheap to use.

 

11-5-2025

Published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com and shared on Facebook

Like Ratepayers for Fair Water and Sewer Pricing on Facebook

 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener           541-955-9040                rycke@gardener.com

We need sprinklers to make rain in summer

I came to Grants Pass in the fall of 1984. Water and sewer utility bills had $25 for base rates: $20 for water; $5 for sewer. Units were literally pennies on the dollar. Come July and August, our utility bill rose to just over $26. We had thunderstorms nearly every weekend in the summer of 1985. 

I love thunderstorms, but I wondered: “Why only on weekends?” If it looked like rain and I didn’t water, it did not rain enough to make a difference. A Grants Pass gardening superstition was born; “If it looks like rain, and you don’t water, it won’t rain worth a darn.” 

Sixteen years later, in Landscape Management class, I learned that most residents of Grants Pass didn’t have automatic sprinklers and watered only on the weekends. Our teacher also told us, “Sprinklers evaporate half of what they throw before it hits the ground--and evaporation is waste.” 

But evaporation is not waste; it is the first step in the water cycle: evaporation; condensation; precipitation. Without enough sprinkler evaporation and transpiring plants, we get no rain in summer; the last three years excepted because Hunga Tonga threw 150 million tons of seawater into the stratosphere on January 15th, 2022. It’s still coming down. 

11/5/25 

Published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com and shared on Facebook, Neighborhood and X

Like Ratepayers for Fair Water and Sewer Pricing on Facebook 

Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener           541-955-9040         rycke@gardener.com