Brian McInerney knows what we need around here. Rain for 40 days and 40 nights, that's what we need. And a decent umbrella.
Forget the ark.
If it rained steady for the next six weeks —- steady as in half-an-inch or so every day — then by Memorial Day our reservoirs would again be full, our water tanks would be at capacity, and nobody would be screaming at us to only water our grass at midnight when it looks like a Kansas wheat field.
Least of all Brian McInerney.
Brian, it should be pointed out, is the senior service hydrologist for the National Weather Service office here in Salt Lake City.
That means he's our chief water scorekeeper.
By nature, Brian is an affable, upbeat, gregarious kind of guy who loves to spend time out-of-doors. A native of Chicago, he has a master's degree in hydrology — the science of water — from the University of Montana and he's been based in Salt Lake the past 12 years.
The first eight, he was very popular.
The last four, people want to throw ash trays at him.
Being the state hydrologist during four years of drought doesn't exactly make you Ed McMahon. People see you coming and their throat gets dry.
"They see me and think, 'here's the guy with the bad news,' " says Brian. "They don't want to hear what you have to say, and who can blame them?"
Brian says he used to try to sprinkle his hydrology reports with a little humor, but no more. "I play it straight," he said. "This is no joke."
In a nutshell, the straight story Brian is forced to tell is this: four years of dry conditions have conspired to put a real drain, no pun intended, on our water supply.
The recipe begins in the fall, when nice, sunny, dry days are great for golf, hiking, biking and hanging around outside, but terrible for properly saturating the soil before the freezing temperatures of winter arrive.
It continues in the winter, when lower-than-normal snowpack sits on top of what is essentially dry ground.
Then, when the spring thaw comes early, the snowpack either soaks into the dry ground or, if it gets too hot (as it did this year from March 20 to April 15), the snowpack evaporates into the air.
Meanwhile, the reservoirs just sit there, waiting for that big deposit that never comes.
This scenario has been going on, more or less, since 1997-98.
From a historical perspective, there's nothing to get alarmed about. A hundred years of record-keeping clearly reveals that the water situation has been this bad before, and worse, in Utah. "We're still between really bad and really good on the 100-year graph," says Brian.
And change is inevitable. We could have four wet years as easily as we just had the four dry ones.
But in the meantime, Brian McInerney sits in his office and keeps his fingers crossed. When he sees storms blow through the region and drop sizeable amounts of moisture on us as happened twice this past week he gets encouraged but not exactly excited. This late in the game, it's got to be a sustained effort to make much of a difference. As in 40 days and 40 nights of sustained effort.
Sometimes it can be a real drag knowing exactly what's going on.
Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.