For decades, water pumped from beneath the California desert has flowed to an oasis of lawns, golf courses, pools and lakes. That lush lifestyle has sold homes, promoted growth and helped transform the Palm Springs area into a world-renowned destination.

But the mirage of water abundance is colliding like never before with one of the most severe droughts ever recorded in California. State water officials have called for cuts of up to 35 percent, which could dictate an extraordinary shift in the area’s insatiable water habits.

If the state-mandated drought measures are effective, some of the grass that covers vast expanses of the Coachella Valley could fade from green to brown, and gradually turn into desert gardens.

It’s a water diet brought on by an increasingly bleak statewide water outlook. The snowpack in the Sierra Nevada has shrunk to a record low. Groundwater levels have plummeted across much of California.

With reservoirs running low, deliveries of water through the canals and pipelines of the State Water Project have been slashed. And that has reduced the amounts of imported water reaching a series of ponds on the outskirts of Palm Springs. The oblong ponds beneath Mount San Jacinto are normally used to recharge the groundwater, but lately they have sat bone dry, leaving a crust of cracked silt.

Even as water from the Colorado River has kept flowing to other ponds in La Quinta, the drought has meant less water seeping down to an aquifer that has declined for decades in much of the Coachella Valley.

Groundwater data for more than 300 wells in the area show significant long-term declines in water levels, even as imported water has helped partially counteract that trend.

The Desert Sun first analyzed the state of the aquifer in 2013, and has now updated that review to track the impact of the historic drought through the end of 2014. The updated data reveal a similar picture: a valley drawing heavily on its underground water while its water agencies try to combat falling water levels.

In 1975, water levels in 83 existing wells were 129.8 feet below ground on average. By 1995, the water levels in 225 wells were down to 158.7 feet on average. Last year, the water levels of 303 wells across the same area averaged 163.8 feet below ground — 34 feet lower than four decades ago.

Since 2010, though, the water table has risen significantly in areas near the groundwater recharge ponds in La Quinta and Palm Springs. Higher water levels in those areas coincided with increased flows of water from the Colorado River, especially from 2010-2012. That pulse of water has been gradually spreading underground through the sponge-like matrix of tiny holes between sand, silt, rocks and clay.

The biggest declines in the aquifer have occurred away from those ponds in the middle of the valley. Water levels have dropped by 90-100 feet or more since the 1950s and 60s in parts of Palm Desert, Indian Wells and Rancho Mirage where there are many grass-filled subdivisions and golf courses.

During the past three years of drought, less imported water has been seeping into the aquifer in the Palm Springs area. That water from the Colorado River Aqueduct is obtained by local water agencies in exchange for their allotted amounts from the canals and pipelines of the State Water Project. Last year, the area received just 5 percent of its full allocation. This year, it’s expected to receive 20 percent — far below the last high of 80 percent in 2011.

On top of the drought, California’s crisis has been compounded by the warmest three-year period on record. The few storms this winter brought little relief, leaving a dire water deficit heading into the dry summer months.

“When you look at the Sierras, we see that there is absolutely no snow up there. When we look at our reservoirs, we see that they are practically empty, and when we think about our groundwater and we look at the groundwater levels, we see that there are record lows,” said Jay Famiglietti, a hydrologist and senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “And so when you put that whole picture together, it’s as bad as it can possibly be.”

“The severity of that in total, looking at the total water picture, I don’t think that severity is really fully appreciated,” Famiglietti said. “In fact, I know it isn’t.”

Sprinklers on

In the gated community of Esplanade in La Quinta, large lawns line streets of Mediterranean-style homes. On a recent afternoon, sprinklers were running outside several homes, and water was flowing in the gutters in the streets.

It’s a frustrating sight for Sharon and Richard O’Donnell, who replaced their lawn with desert landscaping and have been encouraging others to do the same.

“See this water coming down the street? That’s from irrigation right now,” said Richard O’Donnell, a retired architecture professor. He said it upsets him to see water running off “like a river” in the gutter.

“The use is obscene,” he said. “People just don’t have the consciousness of the water and where it comes from. There’s so much apathy about the use of water.”

Sharon O’Donnell, an administrator with the Boys & Girls Club, has taken to saving water in a bucket while the shower warms up. She carries the bucket outside and uses the water for plants and trees in her drought-tolerant garden. If the couple has one water luxury, she said, it’s the swimming pool out back where their golden retriever, Dillon, can cool off.

“We have a lot of residents here who are adamant about going to brown grass and taking out the turf here,” she said. “And there’s a lot of chatter about the water that runs down the street, but we live in a community and we don’t want to be water cops. And we don’t want to be the bad people in the neighborhood, but what do you do? Who’s going to help us to enforce these things that all matter?”

Walking around the neighborhood, she pointed out several grassy areas where she hopes the homeowners association will gradually be able to remove turf and replace it with desert landscaping.

“This could go brown,” she said, standing on one patch of turf. “It’s the grass. It’s just so out of place, and so overused.”

O’Donnell said she feels especially frustrated when she sees medians and roadsides covered with grass. With so much green in the desert, she said, the goal of scaling back by about 35 percent seems very doable.

Motioning to a large field of groomed turf between the development and an intersection, she said: “If we were to take just this swath of grass out here, we would be very close to doing our 35 percent reduction.”

The O’Donnells’ neighborhood has a similar look to other upscale communities across the Coachella Valley. It receives its water from Myoma Dunes Mutual Water Company, which according to recent state figures has ranked No. 1 in the state in per-capita water use. The nonprofit company was founded in the 1950s to provide water for new homes as the unincorporated area of Bermuda Dunes was being developed, and it now has more than 6,000 customers.

Some of the area’s largest homes are set back from the road on 5-acre lots, with green lawns beneath towering eucalyptus trees, old orange groves, and stables with horses.

The Coachella Valley has long had relatively low water rates and some of the highest levels of per-capita water use in California. When the State Water Resources Control board listed the local agencies that will face the most aggressive mandatory water cuts of 36 percent, the area’s main water suppliers were on the list.

And while the details of how the cutbacks will be enforced remain to be finalized, the state water board has the power to fine any water agencies that flout the rules up to $10,000 a day.

Green desert

Looking down at the Coachella Valley from a plane, the golf courses, resorts and patches of farmland stand in stark contrast to the dry mountains and open desert.

Snaking across the desert is the Coachella branch of the All-American canal, the artery that brings Colorado River water to the farms, some of the golf courses, and eventually a series of ponds in La Quinta.

Artificial lakes glisten in the sun, fringed with grass and dotted with palm trees.

These blue-green patches evoke Hawaii or Florida more than the Sonoran Desert, and that’s what people like environmentalist Joan Taylor find so odd and outrageous.

“It’s completely unsustainable,” said Taylor, who is conservation chairwoman for the local Tahquitz Group of the Sierra Club. “We have this wonderful fossil water in this valley, and it’s a crime to be spraying it up in the air. This is a precious resource.”

She said the region should move much more quickly to get rid of grass, and that includes the Coachella Valley’s 122 golf courses, which use nearly one-fourth of the groundwater that is pumped from the aquifer.

Others residents have been calling for mandatory measures targeting big water users, saying it’s only fair that farms and golf courses be required to pitch in.

“Agriculture and certain industries, like golf courses and various hotel businesses, are always sacred cows,” said Ed Woch, an environmental consultant who lives in Cathedral City. “They’re the elephant in the room that can’t be spoken about because they have a giant lobby.”

The state’s latest drought measures focus on urban water use and largely spare agriculture. In defending that approach, water managers have pointed out that farmers in many areas are already being forced to leave fields fallow and eliminate jobs.

The state water board has, however, included a provision in its proposed drought regulations that would require golf courses using private wells to reduce water usage by 25 percent or limit watering to two days a week. Those regulations will be finalized next month.

As the state designs new drought policies, there will likely be more debate about how large water users are treated. There has already been one legal dispute in the Coachella Valley over whether the public should have access to information about the amounts of groundwater pumped from private wells by individual golf courses, farms and resorts.

The First Amendment Coalition sued the Coachella Valley Water District and the Desert Water Agency last year after the two agencies stopped releasing detailed information about groundwater use by businesses with private wells, and after the agencies denied requests for public records by The Desert Sun. The water agencies had previously included that information in annual reports but began keeping it confidential after The Desert Sun published the names of some of the area’s biggest users of groundwater.

DWA later settled the lawsuit and agreed to resume releasing the names of businesses and organizations that pump from wells. But a Riverside County Superior Court judge sided with CVWD and ruled that the water district doesn’t need to make the information public.

Some residents have objected to the secrecy. Richard O’Donnell said he thinks the public ought to have information about how much water golf courses and other businesses are using. He said golf courses also should have to make especially large cuts in water usage.

“It cannot be just the individual homeowners as an aggregate. We have to look at the big users,” O’Donnell said. “It’s all coming from the same source, and they’re depleting our aquifer.”

Water ‘bank account’

Many scientists liken groundwater to a bank account that farms and cities can draw upon in dry times. Those accounts have been severely depleted across much of California during the drought, especially in the Central Valley, where some families’ wells have gone dry and farmers have been investing heavily to drill new wells hundreds of feet down.

In an effort to prevent more rapid declines, Gov. Jerry Brown last year signed legislation that for the first time establishes a statewide system for managing groundwater. The measures put local agencies in charge of managing groundwater supplies, while also giving the state new authority to step in when necessary to keep water tables from falling further.

Officials of the Coachella Valley’s water agencies say their approach to managing groundwater already meets the requirements of the new measures. They have been using Colorado River water to recharge the aquifer near Palm Springs since the 1970s, and the long-term declines in the water table have not been as pronounced as in other areas of the state.

Still, there have been costs as groundwater levels have declined. Pumping from deeper underground requires more electricity, and in some areas new wells have been drilled.

A study by the U.S. Geological Survey last year found that as groundwater pumping has led to declines in portions of the aquifer, the ground sank by between nine inches and 2 feet from 1995 to 2010 in parts of Indian Wells, La Quinta and Palm Desert. That has caused damage in other parts of the Coachella Valley in the past few decades, cracking the foundations of some homes and damaging swimming pools, roads and other infrastructure.

The USGS found that the Coachella Valley Water District’s efforts to boost groundwater levels are having a positive effect near ponds in La Quinta where water from the Colorado River has been pouring in to recharge the aquifer during the past decade.

No one knows exactly how much groundwater remains in the desert aquifer. Water agencies have calculated the cumulative overdraft since the 1970s at more than 5.3 million acre-feet of water. That’s enough to fill more than 2.6 million Olympic swimming pools, with each acre-foot equivalent to 325,851 gallons. The state Department of Water Resources in 1964 estimated that the aquifer, in the first 1,000 feet below ground, had a total capacity of at least 39.2 million acre-feet. The aquifer has lost roughly 13.5 percent of that estimated volume since the 1970s.

Nevertheless, managers of the area’s water districts express optimism that they’ve been making progress in combating the long-term “overdraft” situation. They point out that during the past several years, groundwater levels have risen in many areas. In fact, records show water levels have increased in all of DWA’s active wells during the past five years, despite the drought.

But that optimism is partly based on borrowed water. Between 2010 and 2012, a whopping 903,650 acre-feet from the Colorado River poured into ponds to replenish the aquifer, dwarfing the amounts received during the entire previous decade. Nearly one-third of the water used to replenish the aquifer during those three years came through a “water banking” arrangement with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

The Coachella Valley’s water agencies will need to pay back their water debt — now about 248,000 acre-feet — by receiving reduced deliveries of water. For the second year in a row, the Metropolitan Water District plans to not deliver water to the Coachella Valley in order to chip away at that debt.

Calls for a ‘water consciousness’

Just a few months ago, meetings of local water boards seldom attracted large audiences. That has changed since the governor ordered a statewide 25-percent reduction in water use.

Board rooms in Palm Desert and Palm Springs have been packed this month with people voicing a variety of concerns. Some said they’d like to take out their lawns but haven’t yet qualified for programs that provide cash incentives. Others complained that those who’ve made efforts to conserve water over the years will now be penalized. Several people called for stronger efforts to reduce the area’s water footprint.

John Powell, Jr., president of the CVWD board, said that a 36-percent reduction in water use is achievable and that it makes sense to adjust the district’s tiered pricing system so that those who don’t meet conservation targets would have to pay more. He said that even during the drought, the Coachella Valley — with its aquifer and rights to imported water — is in a better situation than other areas of the state.

“We have a sustainable supply of water in this valley,” Powell said. “We’re very fortunate in that regard. But that doesn’t mean we have any less responsibility to be a part of the solution for the state and to essentially do what we need to do to meet the governor’s requirements. So we are doing that.”

Powell touted plans to run pipes carrying recycled water or Colorado River water to more golf courses. He said the agency is also evaluating potential sites for new groundwater replenishment ponds in the middle of the valley, where the aquifer’s levels have declined the most.

Recharging the aquifer in that central part of the valley would likely have a very positive impact, Famiglietti said. He said that approach would make sense because data from wells show “a clear decline in groundwater levels across a wide, central swath of the Coachella Valley.”

“There is a notion that the region will be able to rely on imported Colorado River water into the foreseeable future, but the reality is something much different,” Famiglietti said. “The Colorado River Basin faces exactly the same drought issues that California faces and will likely be hard-pressed to meet its full water allocations to the seven basin states in the coming years.”

The laws governing water rights in California and along the Colorado River were laid during much wetter times in the early 20th century. In one recent study, University of California researchers found that the state has allocated about five times more water rights than the total amount of surface water runoff in an average year. Those findings suggest some water agencies may be basing their planning on scenarios of more water than is actually available.

“In the long run, I think none of us should assume that our water supplies are going to be safe and reliable, unless we change the way we do things,” said Peter Gleick, president of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute. He and other researchers point to the record-breaking heat of the past three years as a symptom of how climate change is starting to compound the problems of a water system that is fundamentally out of balance.

The crisis in California demands a sense of urgency, said Lynne Joy Rogers, a La Quinta retiree who has proposed to form a community advisory board to help promote water conservation.

“We have to have a water consciousness,” Rogers said. “We can’t take this in a blasé manner.”

She said she often sees sprinklers running during the daytime and water running in gutters.

“I see people in very deep denial,” Rogers said. “We’ve taken water for granted. I mean that’s the basic aspect of what’s going on. We’ve taken nature for granted. We can no longer take anything for granted.”