Emergency Water Conservation

Drought Conditions and Emergency Water Conservation Update

Calleguas Municipal Water District (Calleguas) operates as a member agency of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (Metropolitan).  Metropolitan provides Calleguas with imported water supplies, which Calleguas in turn distributes on a wholesale basis to water agencies that serve the communities and cities (Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks, Moorpark, Camarillo, Oxnard, and Port Hueneme) in southeast Ventura County.  Imported water supplies account for approximately 80 percent of all potable water uses in this area.

Virtually all imported supplies delivered by Calleguas originate from the State Water Project (SWP).  The SWP is a 700-mile network of reservoirs, aqueducts, and pumping facilities that convey water from the Feather River Watershed (northern Sierra Nevada Mountain Range) to southern California.  The SWP system relies on Sierra snowpack conditions, which have experienced a shift in both mean climate and year-to-year variability:

2022 will end as a third consecutive year of drought during which annual precipitation, Sierra snowpack, and resultant runoff levels are below that which is needed to both replenish key reservoirs and meet current water demands.

On March 18, 2022, the California Department of Water Resources (DWR), operator of the SWP, announced a reduced water allocation from the SWP system following a historically dry winter.  The new limited allocation has led to restrictions on outdoor watering as priority must be given to ensuring the health and safety needs of residents.

Metropolitan is limited in its ability to provide water from the Colorado River Aqueduct (CRA) to Calleguas and other areas in southern California to make up for the shortfall in SWP supplies.  Calleguas is known as a SWP Dependent Area within the Metropolitan service area:

SWP Service Area Map 

Metropolitan projects that it will exhaust normal SWP supplies by June 2022 and will then transition to extraordinary supplies intended to meet critical human health and safety (HH&S) needs.  Mandatory conservation actions are necessary to preserve the availability of this HH&S supply for the remainder of the year – and into 2023.

On April 26, 2022, Metropolitan declared a Water Shortage Emergency and implemented an Emergency Water Conservation Program (EWCP) for its SWP Dependent areas that effectively limits all outdoor water use to just one day per week.  On April 27, 2022, Calleguas adopted the same EWCP and passed through the mandatory conservation restrictions to its own customer water agencies.