Foggy and quiet this early Saturday on California’s north coast and the water war continues — it’s a conflict between us drinking H2O and not.
The well-known and infamous drought has plagued the Western US for years, and in California the problem is going from bad to worse, to even worse still — and no relief in the clouds.

Last week, AccuWeather had a most-excellent story on the statistics off the California drought — ugly numbers, and my location tops the friggin’ list — in my north coast spot, titled ‘Arcata/Eureka‘ was uno numero on the statewide shit list: Since July 2011, our rainfall deficit is minus 37.07, 75 percent of normal for the period. We should have gotten nearly 50 inches of rain since then.
Next on the list was the Napa area, just northeast of the Bay Area, at -23.12 rainfall deficit, and 62 percent of normal — and the roster craters on downward from there.

(Illustration found here).

And seemingly to add insult to rainless injury, my former residence on the Central Coast of California is featured in the AccuWeather round-up — I lived there nearly 20 years, and the situation there ain’t pretty either:

These numbers really put the lack of rainfall into perspective.
Most every city deficit is at least one full year of normal rainfall behind; some cities are closer to two years.
Take, for example, San Luis Obispo.
Normal annual rainfall is 23.12 inches.
They are 40.38 inches below normal since July 1, 2011.
They would need 63.5 inches of rain this season to bring the four-year average to normal.
Historically, San Luis Obispo’s wettest year on record is 48.76 inches set in 1969.

A really beautiful place down there, one of best spots period, but when I left in 2007, the whole area was becoming like Orange County — LA Beamers and lots of money with lots of people with lots of money. And if you don’t have money, you’re pretty-much fucked.

And in the waterworld — the whole West is fucked. Since this drought started, supposedly 63 trillion gallons of water have been lost in the Western US. This water fracture is changing the physical landscape, too.
Via Climate Central:

In fact, some parts of California’s mountains have been uplifted as much as 15 millimeters (about 0.6 inches) in the past 18 months because the massive amount of water lost in the drought is no longer weighing down the land, causing it to rise a bit like an uncoiled spring, a new study shows.
For the first time, scientists are now able to measure how much surface and groundwater is lost during droughts by measuring how much the land rises as it dries.
Those are the conclusions of the new study published Aug. 21 in the journal Science by researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the the University of California-San Diego.
The drought that is devastating California and much of the West has dried the region so much that 240 gigatons worth of surface and groundwater have been lost, roughly the equivalent to a 3.9-inch layer of water over the entire West, or the annual loss of mass from the Greenland Ice Sheet, according to the study.
While some of California’s mountains have risen by about 0.6 inches since early 2013, the West overall has risen by an average of about 0.157 inches.
“Groundwater is a load on the Earth’s crust,” said Klaus Jacob, a seismologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., who is unaffiliated with the study.
“A load compresses the crust elastically, hence it subsides. When you take that load away (by the drought) the crust decompresses and the surface rises. From the amount of rising, one can estimate the amount of the water deficit.”
…
But most of the movement occurred since last year as the West’s drought has become more and more extreme, said Duncan Agnew, a professor at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC-San Diego, and a study co-author.
“The implications of this have yet to play out,” Agnew said.
“What we’ve shown is that there is a measurement technique we can use to get a total water loss — water loss in places where we have no direct measurements.”

This drought is unprecedented — all bets are off.

Or something like landscape weirdness will start to appear — lack of water puts the shits on everything.
From the Independent:

Incredible footage has emerged showing a 26ft (8m) deep crack in the in the farmland of northwest Mexico, which stretches for over a kilometre.
The crevice which appeared last week, has disconnected Highway 26 between Hermosillo and the coast, Sky News reported.
Drivers, including farm workers, have been forced to navigate around the colossal trench.
The video showcasing the crack that in some parts is 16ft (5m) wide, was shot using a camera attached to a drone device.
It shows vehicles stopped beside the crack, while a green tractor drives away from the scene. People below the drone appear to be discussing the situation.
…
The civil protection unit believes the fissure may have been caused by an earthquake which hit last Sunday.
But another investigation by geologists at the University of Sonora found that farmers in the area had built up a levee stream to contain rainwater which had begun to leak.
Experts believe that this may have caused an underground stream to develop, which soften the earth above it until it collapsed.

No water, no life.

(Illustration out front: MC Escher’s ‘Three Worlds,’ found here).