With an exceptionally rainy season for California, much of the state is free from drought, including most of San Diego County, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
The latest drought monitor map released Thursday shows all but 11% of San Diego County remains in some form of drought, which is the same as last week. But that's significantly down from 3 months ago when all of San Diego County was in some form of drought.
A portion of San Diego County remains abnormally dry, which means the area shows dryness but is recovering from drought. And a small sliver in the northwest corner of the county was still under moderate drought but it's showing improvement.
“San Diego is kind of in a moderate category there and it has since come down," Adam Roser with the National Weather Service said. "So out of the drought in the San Diego area. And really, you know, this means that we've received enough precipitation across the San Diego metro area to kind of get out of that water deficit, that rain deficit."
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At this time last year, all of California was in a drought, but according to the latest drought monitor, just over a third of the state remains in some level of drought.
San Diego has received over 13 inches of rain since last October, which is well above average.
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That is good news for homeowners, who can turn off their sprinklers and save on their bill.
Karen Vanriper said the drought was making it quite expensive to keep her grass green.
"It was so much money and it just never looked great, so we finally took all the grass out and replaced with plantings and gravel, and trees and stuff like that," Vanriper said.
Her neighbor, Carol Tiernan, is one of the few on the street that still has a lawn.
"Normally we struggle to keep it green and we really try to be conscious about the amount of water that we use," Tiernan said. "Overall our quarterly water bill is somewhere around 300 dollars and a lot of that comes from trying to keep the grass green."
Tiernan said the recent rain has given her lawn and her wallet a big break.
"In the eleven years that we've been here this is the greenest the grass has ever been," she said.
Although experts said the drought is not quite over, despite all the rain, many San Diegans are just happy for some relief.
"I smile that we still have our the people who cut grass have to actually cut grass, and that we haven't had to water to do it…It's wonderful," Tiernan said.
