In 1977, water rationing killed a family's garden in San Rafael, California. In 1981, a federal tax judge had to decide whether a drought can happen suddenly.
In 1970, Norman and Betty Ruecker built a house on a hillside in San Rafael, in Marin County, just north of the Golden Gate. They put in twelve separate irrigation systems for the landscaping. I grew up in a house where the irrigation system was my mother with a coffee can, so twelve stopped me for a second. But a hillside garden in that country doesn't get through a dry California summer on hope, and the Rueckers had planned accordingly.
A federal judge later found that on February 11, 1977, their landscaping was healthy. By June it was dead.
What came in between was the second dry year of California's 1976–77 drought. The local water agency, the Marin Municipal Water District, passed Ordinance 168 on January 26, dealing with prices and nonessential uses, and Ordinance 169 on February 9, which set how much each household could draw. So two days before the judge's date of good health, the rules that would kill those plants were already on the books.
Allotments went by headcount. A news story from the time, reprinted in the Congressional Record, gave examples: 49 gallons a day for somebody living alone, 129 for three people. The Ruecker household of four got 148. That comes to about 37 gallons per person per day, on average. Toilets back then took several gallons a flush, and one long shower could eat up most of a person's share.
According to federal investigators, the district doubled its base price that February, from 61 cents to $1.22 per 100 cubic feet, which is about 748 gallons. Going over your allotment cost $10 and then $50 per 100 cubic feet by their account; another study puts it at $10 and $40. Watering lawns, shrubs, trees, and vegetable gardens was sharply restricted, and so was washing the car or hosing down the driveway. Let water run into the gutter and you got two warnings. After that they shut your service off, and it cost $35 to get it turned back on.
The court record shows the Rueckers' watering stopped and their plants died. Whether they hauled bathwater out to the roses or just let everything go, the record doesn't say.
Fire, storm, shipwreck
On their 1977 federal return, the Rueckers claimed the dead landscaping as a loss. The IRS disallowed it and said they owed another $953.
The rule they were up against went like this. Federal tax law let you deduct property losses from "fire, storm, shipwreck, or other casualty." To deduct is to subtract the loss from the income you pay tax on. Anybody who's been to sea knows what Congress meant by shipwreck, and the courts read "other casualty" in the same spirit: something sudden, unexpected, and unusual. Termites working on a beam for ten years don't qualify. Neither, as a rule, does a drought, which is about the slowest disaster the weather knows how to make.
The IRS took a hard line on drought losses in 1976 and softened it in 1977 to allow some of them. Neither the Rueckers nor the government's lawyers brought that change up in court. The judge mentioned it anyway.
May 27, 1981
Judge Dawson ruled for the Rueckers. He agreed that plants dying slowly in a drought usually fail the casualty test. But healthy, watered landscaping that died inside three or four months was, he wrote, "relatively rapid, i.e., sudden."
He rested that on four findings:
- the drought was extraordinary,
- the water district had banned the watering,
- the ban killed the plants,
- and nothing else intervened.
He set aside two earlier cases: in Kemper the taxpayer couldn't show the drought caused the damage, and in Broido the taxpayer couldn't prove the property lost value. He did not rule that droughts count as casualties in general.
I've stood watches where four months went by like a week, and others where one afternoon took about a year, so I'm not going to quarrel with a judge over how fast time moves. What interests me is where the suddenness came from. The drought crept in over two winters. The ordinance had a date on it. The way I read the decision, the district's rule did as much as the weather to turn a slow disaster into an event with a start date and a cause a court could put its finger on.
Then look at what winning was worth. The court accepted a $2,000 drop in the property's market value, meaning what the house and land would bring if sold, instead of what it would cost to replant twelve zones of hillside. Under the 1977 rules you could only claim it if you itemized, listing your deductions one by one instead of taking the standard flat amount, and you had to knock $100 off each loss. There was no income-based threshold yet; Congress added one in 1982. So the Rueckers could take $1,900 off their taxable income, and that was worth whatever their tax bracket made it worth, which is to say a fraction of $1,900. A family on the standard deduction with the very same dead lawn would have gotten nothing.
The door's narrowed since. Beginning in 2018, federal law has generally allowed personal casualty deductions only for losses in declared disasters, so a household that lost its garden to a rationing ordinance today would most likely have no Ruecker argument to make.
We only know about this lawn because two people were willing to take the IRS to court over it. Renters without gardens, homeowners who didn't itemize, and anybody who never filed left no court record. The case tells you what happened to one family's landscaping and one family's tax return. About how the drought's hardship got spread around Marin, it tells you nothing.
Where the 148 gallons came from
Dawson's finding put the cause of death in one place: an ordinance passed by one local board. Follow the Rueckers' tap backward, though, and that ordinance turns out to sit inside a chain of trades that ran most of the length of California and delivered its first water to Marin the same month the garden finished dying.
The Marin district depended on its own reservoirs, filled by local rain, and in 1977 there wasn't enough of it. So the state rigged up emergency supplies through a series of swaps. California's State Water Project is the system of reservoirs, canals, and pumps that carries Northern California water south. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California agreed to draw more from the Colorado River and give up part of its State Water Project share in return. Three deals like that freed 400,000 acre-feet statewide; an acre-foot is enough to cover an acre of ground a foot deep. No Colorado River water came anywhere near Marin. Southern California just leaned harder on that river so northern water could stay north, and given how the Colorado's allocations were built, which Wren Castellano has covered here and here, it was a peculiar place to go borrowing.
The water's route to San Rafael ran through the South Bay Aqueduct into San Francisco's system, then to the City of Hayward, then to the East Bay Municipal Utility District, and finally across the bay through a 24-inch pipe laid in the right lane of the upper, westbound deck of the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge. The state Department of Water Resources, the Southern California agency, San Francisco, Hayward, East Bay MUD, and the Marin district all signed on, and Caltrans, the state highway agency, approved the pipe. In April a state water board decision cleared a second route as a backup, which the state later said it never needed. I spent years watching cargo move through ports, and I can't think of much of value that ever went anywhere in a straight line. This water didn't either.
The first traded water reached Marin on June 7, 1977. By December 31, 4,594 acre-feet had come across, roughly 1.5 billion gallons, and the Sausalito Historical Society says deliveries ran as high as 10 million gallons a day. Nobody can trace a particular gallon from that pipe to the Rueckers' kitchen, or say what their allotment would have been without it.
KQED reports the pipeline was in service less than a year and came off the bridge in 1982; the historical society says Caltrans pulled it after extensions gave the district time to build up storage. Marin Water is still working the same problem, studying a proposal to move winter water from the Russian River into reservoir storage, with no water in it yet.
For the Rueckers, the order of things mattered. The ration came in February. The first pipeline water came in June, by which time the garden was already dead. The ruling came four years after that.
