© AP Photo/Damian DovarganesIn this Dec. 14, 2017 file photo, Los Angeles skyline is seen through burned trees after a brush fire erupted in the hills in Elysian Park in Los Angeles.
California is rapidly plunging back into drought, with severe conditions now existing in Santa Barbara, Ventura and Los Angeles counties-home to one-fourth of the state's population, a national drought monitor said Thursday.
The weekly report released by the U.S. Drought Monitor, a project of government agencies and other partners, also shows
44 percent of the state is now considered to be in a moderate drought. It's a dramatic jump from just last week, when the figure was 13 percent.
"It's not nearly where we'd like to be," Frank Gehrke, a state official, acknowledged after separately carrying out manual measurements of winter snowfall in the Sierra Nevada mountains, which supplies water to millions of Californians in a good, wet year.
Overall, the vital snowpack Thursday stood at less than a third of normal for the date.
Comment: See also these 2 recent reports from other areas of New Zealand: Hundreds of dead and starving seabirds wash up on beaches at Tasman Bay, New Zealand
Mass of dead and dying seabirds on Bay of Plenty shores in New Zealand