As the drought developed, local and state agencies started receiving anecdotal reports of household water shortages. At the time there was no means to record or track these reports. The Governor’s Drought Task Force created a Less than 15 Connections Work Group (Work Group) in early 2014. This cross-agency Work Group agreed that we needed an easily accessed system to get a more systematic understanding of which parts of the state had households at risk, and improve cross-agency response and coordination. The Work Group created a Google Form to receive ongoing reports of outages from local, state, federal and non-governmental organizations. A google form was created to record information submitted directly to the State. At the same time several counties developed their own tracking mechanism. The data from these counties is manually entered into the State database.
To improve and streamline data collection and reporting the Department of Water Resources has created a new integrated data system. The State has begun transitioning to the new system. The first step was to transfer the google form data into the new data system. This has been completed and the following figures were produced using the new system.
A cross-agency team, led by DWR, will work with counties to transition data submission to the new system. During this transition household water shortage counts by week may fluctuate due to the transition and not because actual counts have changed.
Source: DWR
