The Water Banker

Outside the window of Helen Dahlke’s office, at the University of California at Davis, the clouds hang low, their edges seeming to brush against the building.

- Mary Beth Griggs

It’s raining intensely, an unusual event in a perpetually parched state suffering from a five-year drought. “It looks like the end of the world,” says Dahlke happily. As a hydrologist and professor who studies how water flows over and through rock, soil, fields, and farms, she is something of an H2O whiz. For the past two years, Dahlke has spent days like this doing what water conservationists might find abhorrent: standing in the rain, in knee-high rubber boots, opening sprinklers on a dormant farm or orchard, and letting them spray. She’s good at it. She can spray about 45 million gallons in 42 days.

She admits: “I was always fascinated by water as a child. I always liked to play with it.”