By now you know the story. After he faced more than 20 allegations of sexual misconduct, the Cleveland Browns sold their franchise’s soul to go all-in on the disgraced Deshaun Watson last spring. For a fleeting moment, you thought it might even work out for Watson in Cleveland, as his situation made a mockery of the NFL’s disciplinary system.

Eight games into his Browns career, Watson looks like a shell of the player Cleveland was willing to set aside all of its principles for. After a catastrophic knee injury for Nick Chubb Monday night, it’s about to get a lot worse before it (ever) gets better.

Given the severe nature of Chubb’s injury, he will officially miss the rest of the regular season. His absence will leave a Grand Canyon-sized chasm of offense in Cleveland’s backfield. You don’t just replace players like Chubb, who has rushed for at least 100 yards in 30 of 77 career games. Losing a player like Chubb means reorganizing your entire offense on the fly. He is a vintage backfield bell-cow of the highest order — a player that teams like the Browns build their entire schemes around.

To state the obvious: This is a problem for both the Browns and for Watson’s attempt at the NFL’s least-coveted “redemption” arc.

Without Chubb to lean on, the Browns will now ask Watson to carry the brunt of their offensive load. This is the same Watson who has amassed one of the worst cumulative expected points added (EPA) and completion percentages over expected (CPOE) since taking his first snap with the Browns. There’s an argument to be made that he’s the NFL’s worst starting quarterback right now, and it isn’t even close. What good is having Amari Cooper and David Njoku as pass targets if they can’t get the ball?

This is also the same Watson who gifted the hated Pittsburgh Steelers not one but two “gimme” defensive touchdowns in arguably the biggest professional football game for Cleveland in the 21st century. Instead of helping put the Browns back on the AFC’s map, Watson did his best 2018 Carson Wentz impression (packaged with the inexplicable yips and all). And he wasted no time doing it:

.@STEELERS PICK-6 ON THE FIRST PLAY

: #CLEvsPIT on ABC
: Stream on #NFLPlus https://t.co/zWM8hlwLFw pic.twitter.com/qrdHkRoZHK

— NFL (@NFL) September 19, 2023

Then, in an embarrassing attempt to salt away a crucial road victory over a divisional opponent, Watson spontaneously combusted in the waning moments of a 26-22 defeat that had his fingerprints all over it:

ANOTHER HIGHSMITH AND WATT COMBO. TOUCHDOWN STEELERS.

: #CLEvsPIT on ABC
: Stream on #NFLPlus https://t.co/zWM8hlwLFw pic.twitter.com/3T15PdcCSI

— NFL (@NFL) September 19, 2023

After their brazen display of prioritizing winning football games above all else, the Browns now face a worst-case scenario.

Without Chubb, they no longer have easy offense to lean on. Running backs who average more than five yards per carry over half a decade don’t grow on trees. Watson will be their default life preserver — a reality the Browns once had to feel confident about before his game lost every aspect of its electricity. There’s no snap, no charge to his atrocious Browns’ passing offense, which is 26th in total yards through two games and somehow only has a higher yards-per-pass-attempt than rookie Bryce Young’s Panthers and the Bengals’ Joe Burrow on precisely one healthy calf. There’s bleak and grim and hopeless in this silly sport. Then there’s Watson plumbing the depths of atrocious quarterback play after receiving nearly a quarter-billion dollars in guaranteed money.

In the next two months, Watson’s fledgling Browns will square off with Mike Vrabel’s scrappy Tennessee Titans, two bona fide Super Bowl contenders in the Baltimore Ravens (twice!) and San Francisco 49ers, an upstart Indianapolis Colts squad led by the promising Anthony Richardson, and Pete Carroll’s rising Seahawks in Seattle all before the Steelers visit Cleveland in mid-November to flatten Watson like a pancake (again). There is a very feasible reality where Cleveland has just two or three wins by December. That is decidedly not how the Browns thought their Watson era would unfold.

Nothing Watson has “achieved” with the Browns suggests he’s prepared to elevate them in this impossible moment. He is somehow less of a (positive) difference-maker than noted franchise talents like Zach Wilson and Justin Fields. But the New York Jets and Chicago Bears aren’t nearly as invested in their current quarterbacks’ respective futures as the Browns are with Watson. Everything says Watson is about to recklessly drive them off a cliff like best friends Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis taking an impromptu road trip. Except this tale will not contain any of the wacky hijinks of a beloved cinematic classic.

The worst part for the Browns is that they have no eject button. They traded three first-round picks for a quarterback with a $63.9 million salary cap hit in each of the next three seasons. That is not a typo. Watson’s contract will indeed carry more weight on the Browns’ books than Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, and Justin Herbert for each of their teams well into the 2020s. Barring some gold-medal-winning financial gymnastics, Cleveland is effectively locked into an extended future of expensive and horrendous quarterback play at the same time. While the Browns are probably accustomed to the latter outcome, years of incompetence under center couldn’t have possibly prepared them for Watson wasting their time and money.

It took all of eight starts for the Watson trade to blow up in the Browns’ face. Their humiliation is likely only just beginning.

The post Nick Chubb harm places greater highlight on Deshaun Watson’s terrible play appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

• Several city council members are renters, while others have experience in a competitive home buying market.
• Although councilors are tasked with assessing the city’s housing crisis, they are also experiencing it.
• The revaluation of residential real estate last year hit some Council members hard.

PROVIDENCE – Councilman Justin Roias knows what it’s like to go through tough times.

For years he lived with his wife in a small one-bedroom flat on Ledge Street, where they coped with a broken central heating system and a leaky roof, and both took to the habit of setting out buckets to catch the drips.

Despite chronic problems and the landlords’ sloppy repairs, it was an affordable place, but with a baby on the way, Roias and his wife decided to move in search of more space. However, when it came to social worker salaries, it was almost impossible to find anything affordable.

“We got to know the cut-throat competition among hundreds of other potential tenants,” Roias recalls. “In order to stand out, I dressed best on Sundays and articulated my thoughts carefully, treating these interactions with property managers like job interviews. Unfortunately, many real estate managers have taken advantage of the real estate crisis and the high demand. They have informed the hopeful attendees that they are ready. Submitting rental applications and paying non-refundable fees on site had a higher chance of getting the apartment.”

Roias is one of several council members who are renters and find themselves in the same turbulent market as their constituents, giving this year’s council fresh insight into the housing crisis that has been created by personal hardship.

A monthly rent was her only option

Roias said he and his wife had “relentlessly combed Zillow and monitored it daily with eagle eyes” and encountered “snaking” lines when they went sightseeing. They are “exhausted and on the verge of giving up,” Roias said. Neither could afford a home as property prices skyrocketed, and the couple felt left out of the market, not just to buy, but to rent.

They missed a chance to apply for an apartment after they said a property manager refused to pay for lead testing to keep their child safe. Eventually, Roias stumbled upon the third-floor flat on Langdon Street, where they have to carry their newborn and groceries up several flights of stairs and where they are currently renting out on a month-to-month basis – a precarious situation for tenants.

Council President among the city’s long-term tenants

Roias’ problems are not unique. Council President Rachel Miller counts herself among the rented council members, and she worries about where she would go if she ever had to leave her Willow Street apartment.

“I’m lucky to have found a stable situation,” Miller said. “I’ve rented from the same landlord for over 10 years, seven or eight of those years in the same property. I’ve often thought that if he decided to sell the house for any reason, I’d be kicked out of District 13.” It would be extremely difficult to find an apartment in the neighborhood that I would be able to afford.”

Property:What does $250,000 buy in this market?

Having also faced issues related to affordability, Councilman Miguel Sanchez is somewhere between renting and owning. He and his partner had been renting a house for two years until the landlord suddenly decided to move into the house last summer.

“We kind of got stuck trying to figure out our housing situation… We started looking for apartments and couldn’t find any,” Sanchez said, adding, “Even some of the places we looked at were below average. ” Condition.”

In July 2022, Sanchez’s partner bought a Rushmore Avenue home that had been on the market for a few weeks for $300,000 before dropping to $285,000 – the amount his partner had bid. Sanchez said the condition of the home may have been a factor in the price drop. He described “dog poop stains all over the house” from the previous owner’s three pets. Basically, the couple had to immediately rip out the carpeting and air out the house.

Sanchez is now making payments to his partner for the mortgage.

Some councilors ‘can’t afford to buy a house in town’

Although the majority of city council members own their homes rather than rent them, both sides share similar frustrations with competitive markets and difficult searches. Councilwoman Helen Anthony has owned a house on Angell Street since 2014, but even then finding property was next to impossible.

Anthony said she traveled all over the East Side when she and her husband were looking for a home, but most offers went quickly. When they finally found the copy they had bought, they refused to leave.

“We walked in practically without our agent that day — because we seemed to go to every open house — and I didn’t go until my agent came in and we immediately made an offer,” Anthony said in an interview with The Journal in early June .

Political scene:In the RI general assembly, landlords far outnumber renters. These legislators own multiple properties.

But that wasn’t the councilwoman’s last problem. Last year’s property reappraisal hit Anthony harder than any other council member, causing the value of her home to increase by a whopping $246,300, resulting in an estimated total value of $927,000.

Anthony said she appealed the first revaluation — which initially added about $150,000 to the value of her home — but the tax officer’s office subsequently added an additional $100,000 to the value. Most council members who own homes have increased in value by about $100,000, making Anthony’s increase relatively large.

But Anthony realizes that she is one of the lucky ones.

“We have new councilors who are trying to get houses … We have councilors who work very hard to make a living but can’t afford to buy a house in the city,” she said. “So I feel very privileged to be able to live where I live.”

“It’s only gotten worse,” says City Councilor Sue Anderbois

Councilwoman Sue Anderbois, who bought a 1,200-square-foot Fifth Street home with her husband in 2015 — a year after Anthony’s purchase — described a similarly wolfish market.

“We felt it was very competitive in 2015,” said Anderbois. “I think it’s only gotten worse talking to friends. Most things were gone within a day.”

Affordable housing is scarce in Rhode Island:What income do you need to live in these cities?

Anderbois spent a lot of time searching nights and weekends, and once lost a bid when a competitor offered a cash payment of $100,000 over the asking price. Eventually, Anderbois and her husband bought their home for around $340,000 but needed a mortgage to afford it.

The “politics of underproduction” created and fed the ongoing crisis

According to Zillow, the average one-bedroom apartment in Providence cost $1,850 a month in June — a $250 increase from a year earlier. The median rent for all properties is $2,167, nearly $70 more than the national average. A renter would have to earn more than $85,000 to afford that rent without being considered rent-burdened, meaning they wouldn’t spend more than 30% of their gross income on housing.

According to Realtor.com, the average home price in Providence in May was nearly $350,000, up more than 6% year over year.

real estate market:Rhode Island home prices neared their all-time high in April, but sales are down. How to compare the numbers.

Councilwoman Jo-Ann Ryan, one of the homeowners who make up the majority on the city council, said the ongoing lack of construction in Rhode Island has fueled the crisis.

“As a city and state, whether out of insensitivity or design, we have systematically pursued policies of underproduction that have brought us to the crisis we face today,” she said. “We just have to work together and build more houses, regardless of the price range, to remedy this.”

Anderbois has seen both sides of the crisis. Initially a renter in the San Francisco Bay Area, she thought she would never own a home because of the cost. Now her old apartment costs a few hundred dollars more a month than her mortgage.

She had one word to describe the status quo: “crazy”.

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Visa has sublet its downtown San Francisco headquarters before planning a move to a new center south of Oracle Park.

The San Francisco-based credit card issuer has put its 190,000-square-foot office on One Market Street on the sublease market before moving to a new complex in Mission Bay. reported the San Francisco Chronicle.

Potential terms of the five-story sublease at the Embarcadero were not disclosed.

According to Savills, the listing, which is among the city’s largest, will squander thousands of square feet in the office market, where vacancy has hit a record 32.7 percent during an era of remote work.

The listing alone will increase the city’s vacancy rate by 0.22 percentage points, the Chronicle reported.

However, Visa’s move has nothing to do with cutting costs or working from home.

The payments giant inked a deal in 2019 to move to a 13-story, 300,000-square-foot headquarters currently under construction in Mission Rock. The 28-acre mixed-use project, developed by the San Francisco Giants and New York-based Tishman Speyer, is across from McCovey Cove from the Giants’ ballpark.

The Buildings at NEC 3rd and Mission Rock streets has more than 50 percent more space than its current hub, Visa told the Chronicle. In 2019, 650 Visa employees worked at One Market Plaza, while the 210-foot Mission Rock tower is expected to house 1,500 people.

With 1.6 million square meters in two towers, One Market Plaza is one of the largest office properties in the city, which is 200,000 square meters more volume than the Salesforce Tower.

The building, which is owned by New York-based Paramount Group and Blackstone, was 96.6 percent occupied at the end of last year. According to Paramount filings, the company generates $151.7 million in annual office rent and $2.8 million in retail and restaurant rent.

In January, Autodesk has offered 73,000 square feet for sublease, citing a rise in flexible work. Visa and Autodesk’s sublease offerings increase the building’s vacancy rate by 16.4 percent.

In January, Visa listed an office with 64,000 square feet 385 Sherman Avenue in Palo Alto for sublease as part of the Mission Rock consolidation.

The company still has a main office in Foster City, where it was formerly based.

In a similar move in 2019, Uber moved its headquarters from mid-market to Mission Bay, making its former hub at 1455 Market Street available for subleases. But after 3.5 years, the ridesharing company had no prospects.

Meanwhile, Block, Reddit, and WeWork have left or plan to leave the building.

— Dana Bartholomew

Continue reading

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SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX) — With the Omicron wave of COVID cases still rising, more jobs are stuck in downtown San Francisco trying to figure out if, how and when they will return to their offices in any way.

Leonid Plotkin, a small business owner in San Francisco’s Financial District, is keeping a close eye on developments.

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“Probably the most important thing is when offices reopen their doors to their staff for at least part of the week,” he said.

Plotkin has managed to keep his barber shop open during the pandemic, but as a business that relies on walk-in customers who perform traditional 9-5 jobs in the Financial District, he’s lost a large chunk of his clientele.

“It was very up and down,” he said. “Last week was probably my slowest week since coming back from lockdown.”

“Employers kind of pause and think, ‘What are we actually trying to do with our long-term plans?'” said Kelly Obranowicz of the Bay Area Council.

They survey approximately 200 Bay Area employers of all sizes monthly to gain a better understanding of plans for the return to the office.

“Approximately 6% of employers who took part in the survey say they have no plans to return to the office. We’ve seen a lot more comments saying people are considering this possibility,” she said.

However, the vast majority of companies plan to return to the office in some capacity, she says.

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“Employers say they anticipate about a quarter of their employees will be remote post-pandemic,” Obranowicz said. “Even that means you still have to rehire 75% of your workforce, maybe three days a week on average. It’s not like we won’t have anyone in the downtown San Francisco corridor. It may just be a little less or with less frequency.”

Obranowicz says it appears many employers are likely to move to a hybrid way of doing business remotely as the new norm.

“We now have nine months of data where 40% or more of employers have said, ‘Yes, three days a week we will ask employees to come in.’ And 60% of employers also polled in December that they were confident or very confident that this will be their new norm,” Obranowicz said.

A good sign for the recovery: Sephora announced that they will be moving their headquarters to the Salesforce building at 350 Mission St.

A Sephora spokesperson provided KPIX 5 with the following statement, which is attributed to Jeff Gaul, Sephora’s senior vice president of store development.

“Sephora is pleased to confirm that we will be moving our San Francisco headquarters to 350, 16-story Missions in 2023. 350 Mission has been carefully crafted to support and enhance the future of work at Sephora, which places a strong focus on our employee culture, collaboration and flexibility,” the statement said. “Most importantly, this move consolidates the number of buildings our corporate employees work in and supports our hybrid on-site and remote work practices while providing ample room for growth as Sephora continues to be a leading employer in the Bay Area .”

Obranowicz said the Bay Area Council is excited to learn more from its next series of data from the latest poll results.

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“I think we want to look at not just when you plan to bring people back, but when your new, long-term norm will be implemented?” she said. “Do we still expect about 85% of employers to have employees back with the consistency they want by May, or are we looking further ahead?”

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WASHINGTON – From the revered giant sequoia trees of the southern Sierra to the unbroken views of historic Route 66 in the Mojave Desert, five national monuments in California are waiting for President Trump’s Home Secretary to judge whether they are left alone, shriveled, or eliminated by Thursday should be.

The California monuments were reviewed in an unprecedented review – ordered by Trump in April – to see if their protected status prevents potential commercial use. They are among the more than two dozen monuments that Home Secretary Ryan Zinke is examining nationwide.

The United States has 129 national monuments named by President of Theodore Roosevelt under the Antiquities Act of 1906 to improve the protection of the existing state, and none have ever been abolished. No president has tried to downsize a memorial since President John F. Kennedy.

The current review covers monuments created by presidents dating back to Bill Clinton. So far, Zinke has announced that he is likely to propose reducing the size of the 1.35 million acre Bears Ears memorial in Utah and leaving six others unchanged, including the new Sand to Snow memorial northeast of Palm Springs, which Created by President Barack Obama.

The government review has sparked outrage from democratic lawmakers and environmental groups.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-California, who had a strong hand in designating three desert monuments, is grappling with the administration on this matter.

“This is war,” said Feinstein in an interview. “This is our story.”

While Congress has the power to revoke or change monuments, there’s not much a Democrat in the minority party can do to stop Trump from changing them. So the fight has to be fought in court, where Trump’s legal powers are called into question.

In California, the monuments yet to be reviewed are the 330,780-acre Berryessa Snow Mountain Monument, northeast of Santa Rosa; the 204,000-acre Carrizo Plain in San Luis Obispo County, known for its stunning wildflower blooms, but also includes oil and gas leases; the 346,000 acre Monument in the San Gabriel Mountains in Los Angeles County; the 328,000 acre Giant Sequoia National Monument in Tulare County; and the Mojave Trails National Monument, which includes the distinctive stretch of Route 66.

The Cascade-Siskyou National Monument in Oregon, which leads to California, is also being reviewed.

Trump’s executive order calls for determining whether the monument awards had no input from local and state officials and “other relevant stakeholders” when they were created, or would prevent energy development or “otherwise slow economic growth”.

The California attorney general Xavier Becerra promised in an eleven-page letter to Zinke that he would sue immediately if any monument changes were attempted in his state. A large number of environmental groups are committed to doing the same.

Ryan Henson, senior policy director of CalWild, a California wilderness coalition, called the government’s actions a “time on our corpses.”

Although a president has unilateral authority to erect monuments, the Antiquities Act provides no provision to revoke a designation, and the 1976 federal law governing the administration of state politics expressly prohibits the Home Secretary from revoking or altering a monument.

But the review even has its defenders in California, where public land is overwhelmingly popular. One monument that appears most taboo by name – the Giant Sequoia National Monument – has some local officials calling for its size to be reduced.

A giant sequoia dwarfs the surrounding forest along the Trail of the 100 Giants in Sequoia National Monument north of Kernville, California.David McNew / Getty Images

They say the memorial, named by President Bill Clinton in 2000, threatens the ancient sequoia groves by preventing the use of wood on thin conifers that are now choking the forests.

“It sounds very selfish that I work for a sawmill,” said Darren Mahr, wood manager at Sierra Forest Products sawmill in Terra Bella, Tulare County. “But we drew a line around the forest hoping it would be safe and instead we put it on the line.”

A century of fire fighting has turned the open grove forests John Muir described into thick fir and pine thickets, many of which were killed by drought or beetles.

Stephen Worthley, Tulare District inspector, led a board vote asking Tine for a cut to make the deforestation possible. He said the U.S. Forest Service lacks the money to carry out the controlled burns needed to restore the health of the forest, and cutting down to thinn the trees would pay for itself.

The harsh fire of 2015 put more stress on the monument than it should have been due to the density, he said. Some of the “ancient trees we should protect with everything inside died due to the intensity of the fire,” Worthley said. The groves “are in greater danger today than they were before the monument was erected”.

Rabbit owls can be found on both the Mojave Trails and the Castle MountainsDavid Lamfrom / National Parks Conservation Asso

In Southern California, Rep. Paul Cook, R-Yucca Valley, San Bernardino County, wrote a letter to Zinke asking him to cut the 1.6 million acre Mojave Trails National Monument by half a million acres. The memorial is the centerpiece of three California desert monuments, including Sand to Snow and Castle Mountains, which Obama named at Feinstein’s request last year.

The Mojave Trails Monument protects the last pristine stretch of Route 66 and maintains a biological link between Joshua Tree National Park and Mojave National Preserve.

If Cook’s request is met, he will help a plan by a private company, Cadiz Inc., to pump billions of gallons of water from the desert aquifer beneath the memorial for sale to southern California cities. Cook joined nine other members of the California House from both parties in a private letter in March, urging Zinke to clear the way for Cadiz.

David Lamfrom, director of California’s desert and wildlife program for the National Parks and Conservation Association, a conservation group, said Cook’s proposed monument reductions “directly overlap with the Cadiz Project.”

Zinke has already overturned Obama-era regulatory decisions that blocked the project. Deputy Home Secretary David Bernhardt is a former Cadiz attorney and lobbyist and his former law firm holds shares in Cadiz. Bernhardt also led a Trump transition team that put Cadiz on a list of the top 50 infrastructure projects in the country.

The aquifer feeds rare desert springs that support plant and animal life, and the US Geological Survey said Cadiz grossly overestimated the aquifer’s natural ability to self-recharge. The National Park Service said the estimates were so out of bounds that they “shouldn’t even be taken into account”.

“The public needs to understand that this is the first big step in the destruction of Mojave Trails,” said Feinstein. She called the Cadiz Project “a murderer. I don’t trust these people. “

Both Cook and Feinstein had proposed laws to protect the Mojave Trails, Sand to Snow, and Castle Mountains, but they never agreed on the exact limits, and so the legislation never got through Congress. Feinstein turned to Obama in frustration.

Cook told The Chronicle in a statement that the area he plans to remove is not warranted for historic monument status as it was never included in legislation created by him or Feinstein. He called the Cadiz question “immaterial”.

The Yucca Valley Congressman also asked Zinke to include the Castle Mountains Memorial in the review process. It is not known if Zinke will do this. The 21,000-acre monument protects rare tall desert grassland and large Joshua Tree forests. Cook said in his letter to Zinke that downsizing the monument would help a Canadian gold mine.

The method used by Zinke to review his monuments remains unclear. Inside spokeswoman Heather Swift said in an email that Zinke had opened the process for a 60-day public comment period “to make the process transparent and give people a voice”. The department received 2.7 million comments, mostly in favor of the monuments.

Swift said Zinke also held “dozens of meetings” with various groups, including “people and organizations representing all sides of the issue.”

Zinke has visited eight monuments, but none in California.

David Myers, executive director of Wildlands Conservancy, which has bought nearly 600,000 acres of Mojave Desert and donated it to the federal government for protection, said he invited Zinke to visit Mojave Trails but never heard a word. There are approximately 45,000 acres of donated land in the area that Cook plans to remove.

Myers said the Mojave Trails Memorial is “really what keeps the desert intact with this mega-landscape that connects Joshua Tree National Park and Mojave National Preserve. Otherwise there are only protective islands in the desert. “

Jim Conkle, a Marine known as “Mr. Route 66, “for his efforts to protect the historic road, said neither Cook nor his staff would speak to him. “They don’t answer my phone calls, my emails, I go there to see them, they are there, but they are not there for me,” he said. “You don’t want anything to do with me. Because they know that I just want to sit down and say, ‘Why are you doing this?’ “

Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, who took former Home Secretary Sally Jewell on two hikes in the Berryessa-Snow Mountain area to help her expulsion, said the memorial review “looks like another attempt to wipe out everything President Obama did”. He said the monument review was exhaustive.

“The idea of ​​them coming back and trying to handle this,” he said, “is just a colossal waste of time.”

Carolyn Lochhead is the Washington correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: clochhead@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @carolynlochhead

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The latest version of the US Drought Monitor Map shows increasingly dire drought conditions across California and the entire San Francisco Bay Area region is in “extreme drought”. Last week, parts of the nine counties region – including much of Santa Clara counties and parts of Alameda and San Mateo – were still in the less critical “severe drought”.

The map classifies the degree of drought on a color-coded scale from “unusually dry” (yellow) to “exceptional drought” (maroon). The May 6th map shows the severest “extraordinary” conditions along the southern portion of the state’s eastern border with Nevada and Arizona. “Extreme drought” (red) covers most of southern and northern California, and “severe drought” (orange) covers small parts of the state.

Climatologist David Simeral, the author of the map, said conditions in the Bay Area were not surprising given that the state has seen dry water for years in a row and he expects conditions to continue to deteriorate over the summer months. (The water year runs from October 1 to September 30, and this is how scientists measure annual rainfall.)

“When looking at total rainfall over the past 12 months, parts of San Mateo, Marin, Contra Costa, Sonoma and Alameda counties all had record arid areas for that period,” wrote Simeral, who works for the Western Regional Climate Center, in an email . “If you look at other indicators, such as the reservoirs in your area and across the state, the situation doesn’t look good as the state’s largest reservoirs for this time of year after another bad year in terms of snowpack Marin County’s reservoirs are really in poor shape at 50% of the system’s capacity, while they are typically 90% full at this time of year.

— —.

The most recent California drought lasted from 2012 to 2016, and at its peak in 2014, the entire state was affected – 100% – from severe to exceptional drought from May 13, 2014 to July 29, 2014, and 81.92% were covered by extraordinary to extreme drought from August 5, 2014 to October 28, 2014.

Today the severe to extraordinary drought is 92.88% and the extraordinary to extreme drought is 73.31%.

While conditions are not as severe as at the height of the last drought, they are moving in that direction and are rapidly worsening.

“The most alarming aspect [of the California map] is the fact that the conditions are currently in a very bad state and we are just beginning to move into the dry season, “wrote Simeral.” The situation will only worsen in the course of the summer months. It is difficult to decide which is the most alarming as there are several reasons for concern, such as: B. Impact on the agricultural sector, sinking reservoir levels, impact on ecosystem health, forest fire potential and impact on sectors that receive less attention, such as B. Recreation other than rafting and fishing. “

The federal government publishes a new map for the Drought Monitor every Thursday, showing drought conditions across the country. News organizations and Twitter users often share the latest version, with the card going viral.

With the worsening situation in California, the map has become a flagship for an impending drought as the amount of red indicating extreme drought increases every week. California has had two consecutive winters of arid conditions, and major reservoirs across the state are half full.

The Drought Monitor is a joint effort by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The weekly map is not a forecast, but reflects the rainfall of the past week.

While the map takes into account total rainfall, it indexes a variety of indicators including aquifers, river levels, soil moisture, satellite-based assessments of vegetation health, and much more.

The map is a drought measurement mechanism primarily used in agriculture and the USDA uses it as a basis for making decisions about financial support for agriculture. But the card is used well beyond the farming community.

“The weekly map provides an up-to-date snapshot of drought conditions at the national level and is an integral part of drought planning, preparedness and efforts at the national, regional and local levels,” said Simeral. “It is also used by the public and the media.”

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