California’s drought is over. Now what?
By Taylor Kate Brown, BBC News
At the height of California’s multi-year drought, Rafael Surmay’s well – the only source of water to his house – went dry. For two and a half years, Surmay, his wife, and his four children showered, cleaned, drank and cooked using a water tank and 10 gallons of bottled water per month. They depended on monthly deliveries to refill their water tank
Over the past several months, rainstorms have brought relief to parts of California, which has been suffering from drought since 2012. Some areas have had record rain, and snowpack across the Sierra Nevada is close to 200 percent of normal.
But several years of widespread, deeply dry conditions have extracted a toll on the state that will take more than one wet season to fix. In some cases, the landscape may be forever altered.
