On September 22, 2014, Jeffrey Kightlinger, General Manager, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, spoke with Town Hall Los Angeles on why "Water is Serious Business." Kightlinger's speech addressed the current water supply, what Metropolitan has historically done to ensure reliable water access in Southern California and the challenges of enduring the past few years of drought. It is unlikely that the end of 2014 will provide a strong El Niño as hoped, so California must find new solutions to the water issues of our region.
"Last year was a bad year, but this year there was just virtually zero snow that you saw in the Sierras. So you had some incredible drought, but it’s also – what a lot of people don’t notice but maybe noticed the last couple weeks as it got incredibly hot – this has been an incredibly hot year. This year is averaging about five to six degrees a day hotter than usual in Southern California. Normally, when we break temperature records, we do it in like two-tenths of a degree, so five or six degrees would be like breaking the 100-meter dash by three, four seconds or something like this. This is one of those years."
