-------------------------
The Water Watcher
By Julie Sevrens Lyons
Mercury News
Article Launched: 08/26/2007 01:37:10 AM PDT
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_6723864
http://www.mercurynewsphoto.com/2007/08/24/rain-recorder/
Clorene Akers doesn't remember exactly when she was picked, or why. But there the strangers were, half a century ago, snooping around her remote ranch in San Benito County, asking if they could install a rainfall gauge to help chronicle the nation's weather. Oh, and if she wouldn't mind checking it every day it rained.The year was 1952. The pay? A little more than $3 a month. And Akers, 38 and pregnant at the time with her fourth child, wondered how she would ever manage to scale - in inclement weather with a growing belly - the protective fence around the crude equipment. But she said yes, launching what would become a 55-year career as one of the National Weather Service's "cooperative weather observers."
The pay these days? $7.60 a month, after her last raise. In 1984.
"I've enjoyed doing it," Akers said between sips of sun tea in the great room of her century-old ranch on a recent balmy day. "Everybody's anxious to know what the weather is."
That includes the National Weather Service. And it's no stretch to say that if not for the 93-year-old great-grandmother - who still tills her own garden and does her own laundry, all while keeping tabs on the rain gauge - weather officials would not have an accurate idea of how wet or dry it is in Akers' part of the state.
She is one of about 3,000 weather observers across the country, from Gibson Dam, Mont., to quite possibly your neighbor's back yard. And while it might seem that the only folks who care about the precipitation 66 miles southeast of Hollister are the few who actually live there, meteorologists and policy-makers rely on Akers' work to determine rainfall patterns in the rugged hills near Coalinga. For half a century, her data has been influencing flood forecasts and drought reports, guiding dam operators on how much water to store, even helping track climate change. "Her little piece of the world plays a whole big role," stressed Bob Benjamin, the observation program leader for the National Weather Service in Monterey.When she started, Akers would trudge outside at 8 a.m. on cold and wet wintry days and use a special stick to take her measurements. She would jot the numbers down and then empty out the gauge. But during the heaviest downpours, she would have to repeat the process several times a day to keep the gauge from overflowing. Vacations were impossible in the winter and spring months.
There was the El Niño year of 1982-83, the wettest season yet, when Akers' ranch was deluged with 43.90 inches. Then there was 1969-70, her driest year, when just 6.90 inches of rain fell. In the year that ended July 1, the area got just 9.67 inches.The drought isn't the only reason Akers' job has become much easier. She still marvels at the day the weather service installed a new rain gauge in her back yard, one that basically measures the rainfall itself and prints the data on a spool of paper. Now instead of measuring and emptying, Akers is charged with monitoring the paper to make sure it doesn't get stuck, and then mailing it in at the beginning of every month.
When Akers sends in the official tallies (courtesy of envelopes and stamps provided by the weather service), she'll usually send along a nice little note. And, Benjamin says, she's the only one of the 24 observers in the San Francisco/Monterey Bay region - and probably of the thousands nationwide - who doesn't have a phone. And she never fails to send a Christmas card.
But it's Akers' length of service, unrivaled in the extended Bay Area, that's been most remarkable. Surely, when those weather service workers first came across Akers' sprawling, 2,400-acre ranch - christening it Station 04-3928-04 or "Hernandez 7SE" - they wouldn't have expected her to take diligent records for so long. Locally, hundreds of weather forecasters have come and gone since she started.
"At some point, they usually hand it off to their children or take a little retirement," said George Cline, observation program leader for the National Weather Service in Sacramento. "It's wonderful that she's still going."
Despite all the toil and trouble, Akers says she only really considered quitting once. That was three years ago, when an infection left her permanently blind in her left eye.
"I suggested they find someone else," she said, recalling that the weather service would have none of it.
"You're the best reader we have," she was told. "It would be wrong to take it away from you."
Akers isn't too sure, but she's kept at it. And she's proud of what she's done, even if, she concedes, it isn't the highest-paid calling.
"But," she says, "it gives me a little spending money."
She's also earned some fame in the ranching community south of the Pinnacles National Monument.
"I have lots of people run into me and ask, `How much rain have you had?' " she said. "That's quite a subject to talk about."
Most city dwellers see rain as a nuisance, snarling commutes and keeping bored children indoors. But in Akers' area, it's the lifeblood, a crucial factor for every farmer.
With irrigation difficult in the steep terrain around her property, Akers relies on a small spring in the back hills for her water supply.
One year, after her husband died 14 years ago, the land was especially dusty, the cattle particularly thirsty, and Akers realized she was in a conundrum. Unable to haul in enough water for her Herefords, she had to ask her children to help her sell them.
An abundance of rain, however, also creates problems, stirring up the river that carves through her property. When that happens, her long driveway floods, leaving her stuck on the ranch for days at a time. Even in lesser storms, she said, it's foolish to venture the more than 30 miles into Coalinga, where Akers and her daughter stock up on perishables and fill up the tank to the pickup.
Living off the land all these years, she said, "We've always respected the weather."
Akers was joined on the ranch two years ago by her daughter Nancy, 66. Nancy does some of the hard work and heavy lifting on the sprawling property, and tends to the ranch itself. And someday she might have to take over watching the rain gauge, too. But Akers still cleans her house, and grows cucumbers, corn, beans and apples in her backyard garden.
As she talks about her life, how she used to can her own meats for the winter, how her children used to ride an old, portable bathtub as a sled when it snowed, how the frost ruined her apples this year, the conversation often, if not always, makes its way back to the weather.
Telling its daily story has been part of her routine for the past 55 years, and Akers is thankful for that.
"It isn't everybody," she said, "who has the privilege of doing this."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contact Julie Sevrens Lyons at jlyons@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5989.
No comments:
Post a Comment