About the editor: George Skelton’s view that California’s drought is over is short-sighted.

More than 80% of Californians depend on groundwater, which continues to suffer from severe drought. Despite the rain we’ve had, 121 new wells have already dried up this year, an increase of 55% compared to last year. During this drought, more than 1,600 household wells dried up and most families without access to drinking water still depend on water from tanks.

In fact, drilling replacement wells is so slow that even if no more wells dried up, it would take more than a decade to replace those wells.

The governor wisely lifted most drought-related emergency orders for urban areas while maintaining safeguards to protect groundwater-dependent families and communities.

We need further executive action to expedite the drilling of replacement wells now. Families without water do not have the luxury of waiting for the legislature.

Kyle Jones, Sacramento The author is the political and legal director of the Community Water Center.

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About the editor: Skelton accurately describes the wet-dry climate pattern that California has always experienced. His column recalls an excerpt from John Steinbeck’s novel Out of Eden, set in the Salinas Valley in the early 1900s:

“I was talking about the rich years when it rained abundantly. But there were also dry years, and they frightened the valley. The water came in a cycle of thirty years. There would be five or six wet and wonderful years… and the land would screech with grass… And then the dry years would come…. It never failed that in the dry years one forgot the rich years and in the wet years lost all memory of the dry years. It’s always been that way.”

Mike Urane, Long Beach..

About the editor: Skelton provides only one piece of statistics, the Sierra’s snow record, along with the recent spate of seasonally intense rainfall, to support his argument that the drought appears to be over.

A well-informed hydrologist will tell us that there are no fewer than four, and perhaps now five, criteria used to statistically confirm the presence of drought, namely meteorological, agricultural, hydrological, socio-economic, and perhaps increasingly ecological criteria.

If Skelton had actually launched an investigation, starting with the University of Nebraska’s Drought Mitigation Center, he would have learned that his view that the governor should declare the drought over while complying with political expediency is not supported by the evidence.

Michael J. Harley, Laguna Niguel