Thick clouds veiled the peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains. Not far away, just south of East Riverside Drive in Ontario, water gushed into an earthen basin the size of 10 football fields.
It had washed up there from the rain-filled gutters of East Merion Drive, Doral Court and South Grove Avenue. Most parts of Southern California would have shunted the storm runoff to the sea as fast as they could.
But here, on the southwestern edge of San Bernardino County, a local utility hoarded it, letting it sink into the earth and into the future drinking supplies of the Inland Empire.
The simple act defied a century of Southern California tradition.
Ever since cold Sierra meltwater first tumbled into the San Fernando Valley from the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the Southland has been addicted to water from someplace else.
But as the big straws that carry that water hundreds of miles from the Eastern Sierra, Colorado River and Northern California all shrivel under long-term environmental forces, water managers are shifting their gaze homeward, toward sources that Martha Davis calls "overlooked, mistreated or underutilized."
Davis is executive manager of water policy for the Inland Empire Utilities Agency, a district at the forefront of the emerging local-is-good movement. About 70% of the agency's water comes from its own backyard: a patchwork of dairies, industrial parks and planned communities overlying the big Chino Groundwater Basin.
In Los Angeles, local sources make up less than 15% of the city supply. The Southern California region overall gets more than half its water from afar. In a typical year, the L.A. Basin sends the equivalent of three-quarters of Los Angeles' annual water demand into the ocean in the form of runoff and treated wastewater.
"We're going to have to live within our means," says Richard Atwater, chief executive of the Inland Empire agency. "Do you really want to wait until we all go over a cliff?"
Davis, 55, and Atwater, 57, are at first glance an unlikely management team.
Atwater grew up in Long Beach, wears white button-down collar shirts and spent a decade working for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California -- powerful agencies that move water around California and the West as though it were a railroad box car.
