Changelog

Bakersfield has fifteen separate elementary districts sitting under one high-school district, so most families here deal with two districts, two offices and two calendars. Type your address and this reads the US Census boundary maps to name both. It names the district, not the school — each district draws its own attendance areas, and the links go to their own school-finder pages.

Seven water systems supply parts of Bakersfield, not two, and their watering rules are not the same. Type your address and this tells you which one you are on, its phone number, billing and outage links, and what its rules say. Where we could not confirm a system's current watering days from an official source — including the City of Bakersfield's — it says so instead of guessing.

How full Lake Isabella is right now — its live daily storage as a share of gross pool, and which way it's moving — read from the state's Data Exchange Center. A full reservoir isn't a promise of water in the channel through town; the tool says so and links the dam operators.

A colored-pencil drawing of oil pumpjacks among the orchards under a band of tule fog, ringed by the dry foothills, now heads the town page.

A winter companion to the heat and air tools. It reads the forecast model's visibility hour by hour, says in plain words how far you can see right now and over the next mornings, and puts the official fog and road channels first — the NWS Hanford Fog Severity Index and Caltrans live cameras. It never tells you it's safe to drive.

"When Can I Be Outside?" now shows the day's easiest hours and peak feels-like at a glance, alongside today's air — the two forecasts a Bakersfield summer runs on.

Bakersfield's summer question, answered at a glance: the new page reads the hourly weather forecast and the hourly air-quality model together and names the day's easier windows — today as an hour-by-hour strip, the next two days summarized. Hours are banded only on published scales: the National Weather Service heat-index categories, applied to the modelled feels-like temperature, and the US EPA air-quality index. Each hour takes the harder of the two constraints, and the strip says which one. A day with no comfortable window says so plainly and names the least harsh stretch instead of pretending. The limits are on the page too: these are modelled, area-wide estimates from Open-Meteo (CC BY 4.0), not street measurements; heat lands differently person to person, so the page says easier or harder, never "safe"; and the official channels — the NWS Hanford forecast, AirNow, and the Valley Air District — are linked for the readings that count.

A glanceable answer — dry, a trickle, or flowing at so-many cfs — read every half hour from the USGS gauge at the Enos Park footbridge, with a 7-day trend. Around it, the context residents actually want: why the bed through town is usually dry, where the Supreme Court case stands as of June 2026, and why water at a downtown bridge doesn't always reach the gauge. Today's reading: dry.