More than 6 million Southern California residents will be affected by water restrictions taking effect on Wednesday, June 1. That means many of us will have to limit outdoor watering to one day a week. In L.A, it'll be two days a week.
If you live in one of the affected cities, which you can see in the below map, you need to check the specific restrictions from your local water agency.
If you live in the city of L.A. and your address ends with an odd number, you’ll only be able to water outside Monday and Friday. For addresses with even numbers, your watering days are Thursday and Sunday. You can only water before 9 am or after 4 pm.
You can still hand-water trees and gardens where you’re growing food.
In response to the last major drought, in 2016 L.A. enacted a water conservation ordinance with six phases of restrictions that can kick in depending on how serious the drought is.
Starting June 1, Angelenos will move from Phase 2 to Phase 3 rules.
You can only water before 9 a.m. or after 4 p.m.
Last month the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, or MWD, declared a water shortage emergency. The MWD is the largest water supplier in the nation, serving 19 million people across southern California and the water shortage emergency applies to more than 80 cities that completely or heavily rely on the State Water Project, a system of pipelines that brings water to the Southland from Northern California.
The emergency declaration required six of MWD’s 26 member agencies, including the L.A. Department of Water and Power, to develop additional rules to drastically cut customer water use this summer, starting June 1.
Here in L.A., most of our water is piped from northern California and the Colorado River. Those resources have been severely depleted by drought made even worse by the climate crisis.
The restrictions primarily target the use of drinkable water for outside irrigation.
At the state level, water regulators voted last week to adopt an emergency drought regulation that bans using drinking water to irrigate decorative lawns at commercial, industrial and institutional properties. That ban doesn’t (yet) apply to yards at individual homes.
Experts say conservation is a critical part of learning to live with an increasingly dry climate.
“In California, it's not that there's one kind of silver bullet solution for everything,” said Alvar Escriva-Bou, a senior fellow with the nonprofit Public Policy Institute of California. “We have to try to work with everything that we have, so conservation is one important part of that, especially during droughts.”
Currently, outdoor irrigation makes up about 35% of L.A.’s total water use. During the last severe drought in 2015, Angelenos successfully cut water use by 20%, according to the city. But since then, water use has crept up. This winter was the driest on record, but in March water use in L.A. was 22% over 2020 levels, according to state data.
