California saw this drought coming. Even if people in the state didn’t know it would be this bad — now the worst in recorded history — they’ve known that dry years are inevitable and had all sorts of ideas for how to deal with them.

But for all that planning, California’s current drought has been a disaster. Reservoirs are drying up. Crops are wilting in the fields. For the first time ever, towns and cities will face a mandatory 25 percent cut in their water use.

The problem isn’t that no one foresaw the drought. The problem is that no one has been able to solve an underlying issue that is simultaneously less scary and also much harder than a dry spell: California’s convoluted water system and intractable water politics.

Designed piecemeal over the last century, going back to a time when Los Angeles had one-sixth its current population, California’s system for managing water doesn’t just make it tough to deal with shortages — in some ways, it encourages inefficiencies and waste. This is partly an engineering issue and partly a political one, but it’s become a huge dilemma for a state struggling to adapt to unprecedented drought.

Much of the bickering today around California’s water crisis can be traced back to this underlying systemic issue.