By Beth Ashley, Senior Columnist
“The Man Who Made It Rain,” a book debuting this week, is a trip down memory lane for Dietrich Stroeh, general manager of the Marin Municipal Water District during the historic California drought of 1975-77.
It is a reminder of the challenging days of water rationing—of dying lawns, Navy showers and toilets that rarely got flushed.
The drought was a harrowing time for all but especially for Stroeh, whose job was to find water before it ran out, leaving 170,000 Marinites with dry faucets and an economic disaster.
“It was the first time I ever knew fear,” Stroeh says.
The book, written by Michael McCarthy of Novato and published by Novato's Public Ink press, is a cautionary tale about global warming, floods, and the time, not too far in the future, when the world may run out of drinking water.
The spine of the book is the Marin County drought and Stroeh's nightmarish scramble to find water in time.
But it is also a narrative on two other levels—one, a series of lectures at the University of California at Berkeley on the global water crisis and what has caused it—and the other a fictional tale set in 2010 of a near disaster in Nepal, starring an American president's son who is hiking glaciers.
The package is meant to warn about what will happen if the world doesn't do something soon to control global warming.
Talking about the book this week, Stroeh paid tribute to Marinites of the '70s, who groaned when water was rationed but met the challenge. They put bricks in their toilet tanks, they used recycled shower water to dampen their gardens, they stopped washing their cars and hosing their sidewalks.
Sally Stanford, the late Sausalito mayor and owner of a bayfront restaurant, saved water by closing the restaurant's men's room and advising all males to “pee off the deck.”
Stroeh says in some ways Marin brought the crisis on itself. Faced with development and no countywide zoning plan to control it, the water district became a battleground between pro-growth and no-growth interests. Environmentalists wanted the district to curb expansion by refusing new hookups to the county's water supplies.
In 1971, voters voted 9-1 against a bond issue that would have imported Russian River water to Marin.
They reaped the result soon afterward when two winters passed with little rainfall. In 1976-77, Marin reservoirs received 80 million gallons of water, down from a normal 30 billion.
All kinds of notions were floated—towing icebergs in from Antarctica, seeding clouds to make it rain. Hippies did rain dances on Mount Tamalpais. Believers took forked sticks and went dowsing.
Many dug wells, but few yielded water.
Stroeh searched everywhere for new sources of water. A breakthrough finally came when the Metropolitan Water District serving the Los Angeles basin agreed—under pressure—to release some of its water, stored in the Sacramento delta.
Stroeh then had to find a way to transport the water to Marin—engineers designed a pipeline across the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge—and then figure out how to pay for it.
“I was running the whole thing by the seat of my pants,” he says. Even his board didn't know what was going on. “Things were moving too fast to keep them informed.”
The book describes the almost anticlimactic moment when Stroeh threw a switch and water started coursing through the pipeline to Marin.
Author McCarthy has interlaced the story with chapters about droughts in the past, droughts to come, and the possibility—thanks to global warming—of an accelerated meltdown of ice caps and glaciers, sources of the world's drinking water.
These chapters are brief and mercifully understandable. McCarthy says every word was approved by “the world's leading expert on global warming” at the University of California.
McCarthy has been a freelance journalist for many years, writing for newspapers and magazines.
Stroeh, a Novato resident since age 4, is a civil engineer who got his degree from the University of Nevada. He went to work for the water district fresh out of college.
Today Stroeh, 69, runs his own firm, CSW/Stuber Stroeh Engineering Group in Novato, handling projects of many kinds.
He says Marin residents these days are much more water conscious than they were in 1975-77. Low-flow shower heads and toilets are common. Industry uses water more economically. State water supplies can be moved around more efficiently.
But problems remain.
Much water is inappropriately diverted, he says, for use to nurture crops like cotton that require huge amounts of water and are raised on marginal land.
Water authorities still serve provincial interests, when the need is for a statewide “water master” who can allocate the supply where it is most needed. San Francisco, for instance, “doesn't give a rat's fanny about anybody's water but its own.”
Prolonged droughts have destroyed civilizations in the past—the Anasazi in the Southwest, the Mayans in Central America and many others.
Marin's drought was only two years, Stroeh says, but it should serve as a warning to all.
“It did happen, it can happen—and when it happens again, it can be extremely serious.”
Copyright © 2006 The Marin Independent Journal
Reproduced with permission.