​Going dry in California

On 1 April, while the rest of the country was engaged in harmless pranks, California’s governor Jerry Brown was getting serious. Reports were coming in from government agencies that the Sierra Mountains snow pack, the source for most of the state’s drinking water, was somewhere between 6 and 8% of normal, the first time in history it had ever fallen to a single digit. Later that day he issued an unprecedented executive order affecting the entire state of California (see The worst drought in five centuries).

Effective immediately, every municipality in the state was going to be forced to...