Residents have been warned to scale down their water usage this summer, as critical shortages loom.
Highlights
- Metropolitan Water District of Southern California warns six million California residents to cut back their water usage this summer, or risk shortages.
- The scale of the restrictions is unprecedented in the history of the district, which serves 20 million people and has been in operation for nearly a century.
- More than 90 percent of the western US is currently in some form of drought.
- The past 22 years were the driest in more than a millennium in the southwest of the U.S.
- Climate change is contributing to prolonged drought in the west – a “megadrought” of a scale not seen in 1,200 years.
- The district has imposed restrictions before, but not to this extent, he said.