Tag: water

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California Water News Flash: The Pumps Are On

Allowing that one person’s misconception is another’s gospel truth, I still have the impulse to correct others when I hear them say something that I know or believe to be, well, wrong. So here’s something from the current battle over California water that always makes me want to say, “Hey, wait a minute.”

San Joaquin Valley water interests and their allies, including members of Congress, want more water than they’ve gotten the last few years. Their biggest problem is that nature has not cooperated. The previous three winters were drier than normal, and the amount of rain and snow that fell on the state’s watersheds were far below normal. That circumstance happened to coincide with Endangered Species Act litigation that has led, for the time being at least, to limits on the amount of water the state and federal water projects are allowed to pump from the Delta to the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California. Those limits, set by federal wildlife agencies and designed to protect the Delta smelt and runs of chinook salmon, have led the aforementioned water interests to scream that the Delta pumps have been shut down, that farmers are being wiped out and valley communities sacrificed for a few lousy fish.

Now, whatever you happen to think of the last part of that formulation–that those who are trying to figure out how to save the fish want to see the San Joaquin Valley “dry up and blow away” (as Rep. Jim Costa, a valley Democrat, put it)–you shouldn’t have to think much about the first part, that the pumps have been shut down. That’s because it’s not true. The pumps are running, day in and day out. The major destination for a lot of that water is the San Luis Reservoir, a key storehouse for valley water, and it’s filling up.

But despite all the readily available data on Delta water shipments, the untruth that the pumps have been switched off is too good a propaganda point for some people to pass up. Rep. Devin Nunes, who represents much of Fresno and Tulare counties in Congress, says about water resources policy: “Its [sic] Simple: Turn on the Pumps.” Since last session, he’s been pushing a bill called the “Turn on the Pumps Act.” (The bill is, in fact, very simple: “In connection with the operations of the Central Valley Project, neither the Bureau of Reclamation nor any agency of the State of California operating a water project in coordination of the Central Valley Project shall restrict operation of their projects pursuant to any biological opinion issued under the Endangered Species Act of 1973, if such restrictions would result in levels of export less than the historical maximum levels of export” (italics mine).

Got that? No limits on pumping to protect endangered species, period, unless the limit results in as much or more water being pumped out of the Delta than the projects have ever pumped.

Rep. Tom McClintock, a Southern California Republican who relocated to and won the northeastern California congressional seat in 2008, is also a source of unrelenting “turn on the pumps” rhetoric. Earlier this month, he issued a broadside against Democrats in the House Water and Power Subcommittee for blocking consideration of Rep. Nunes’s excellent bill. “For the sake of humanity, Madam Chairwoman and my Democratic colleagues, turn on these pumps.” You have to admire the way these folks keep their rhetoric on a short leash.

If I were in Congress myself, I’d rise to tell my good friends and respected colleagues, “I have good news. The pumps are on! Even as I speak, rain is sweeping over your districts and on your thirsty constituents, helping fill the reservoirs not just with water, but with hope. And in that spirit of optimism, here’s a nonpartisan, nonsectarian suggestion: Pray for more rain. I am. That way, the reservoirs will keep rising, agriculture will get its water, and maybe there will be some left over for smelt and salmon and the thousands of people who depend on them. And maybe we won’t have to hear you shriek ‘Turn on the pumps!’ again.”

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California Water: Hearts and Minds

I saw an interesting story last night from the Sacramento Bee’s Matt Weiser: “Underground Tunnel Gets Closer Look for Shipping Water Through Delta.” The piece deals with the latest twist on a long-talked-about fix for the plumbing in the state and federal systems that move water from Northern to Southern California. Back in 1982, Governor Jerry Brown promoted a ballot initiative for a massive new waterway–dubbed the Peripheral Canal–that would iron out some kinks in the current system of pumps and canals. Seen in the north as a Southern California water grab and almost everywhere as an overpriced boondoggle, the initiative went down with a 62.7 percent “no” vote.

But because the need and competition for water has only increased since then, the idea has never gone away. It’s back this year as part of the debate over the $11.1 billion bond measure on this November’s ballot. The initiative doesn’t specifically set aside money for a Peripheral Canal, but everyone assumes that at least some of billions in the initiatives uncommitted funds will go to what’s now called a “conveyance” project.

The canal is still the object of fear and loathing in the Delta and elsewhere in Northern California–just another act in the endless plot to take the region’s most precious resource. But one thing different from past years, though: Some major environmental groups have signed on to both the bond and plans for some sort of Peripheral Canal. Why the change of heart? I think it comes down to the widespread recognition that the tortuous method of channeling water from the Sacramento River into the Delta and then into the aqueducts is broken and is a prime suspect in the collapse of the Central Valley’s once-magnificent chinook salmon runs and other environmental problems. The thinking is that if you straighten out the plumbing, you take care of the major hazards to the fish and to the Delta ecosystem.

Once you have the new canal or tunnel, all you have to do is manage the water flowing through it to the benefit of everyone involved.

And that’s the problem. To believe a canal will fix an environmental disaster, one must believe that the demand for new water and the machinations to get it by any means possible will suddenly just evaporate. Letting high river flows sweep through the Delta and out to sea–part of what’s necessary to aid salmon migrate to the Pacific–is condemned as a waste by those who want to put that water to work in the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California. That belief just won’t disappear overnight.

Today’s outstanding exhibit of that mindset is a move from Senator Dianne Feinstein to essentially suspend the Endangered Species Act to guarantee increased federal water deliveries to the valley (apparently no one has told her that the main reason less water has been going down there is California’s three-year drought; maybe she could write a bill to outlaw below-average rainfall, too). Feinstein says she’s concerned about farm jobs–the areas worst-hit by the drought have been prone to cycles of high unemployment for decades. But the first thing that comes to mind when you hear about her plan is her eager readiness to go to bat for big campaign donors in the valley who are unhappy with federal plans to protect salmon and other endangered species (see “Corporate Farmer Calls Upon Feinstein to Influence Environmental Dispute” by Lance Williams of the Center for Investigative Reporting).

That’s the way the game is played. New ground rules about how water is handled might change that. A new tunnel or canal won’t

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California Water: Face of the Drought

It’s California Water Saturday in these parts. Let’s see if I can keep it simple:

Continued wet weather means most of the state’s reservoirs are filling up. But if your definition of drought means all reservoirs brim-full, no, we’re not out of the woods yet. (My KQED Radio News colleague Amy Standen just finished a story that will air Monday: “Is the Drought Over?” (I have a starring role in her accompanying blog post.) Another take on our drought status comes from the U.S. Drought Monitor. Over the last couple of weeks, this report has shown a dramatic contraction of the area of the state affected by drought.

The face of the drought: At the end of January, the state Department of Water Resources issued its latest drought update (18-page PDF). The most interesting aspect of the document is the way it adopts the Westlands Water District as a proxy for the drought’s impact on agriculture throughout the state. It’s not a subtle touch, either: the front and back covers of the drought report contain dramatic photographs, courtesy of Westlands, of dead orchards. We’re to understand from the context that drought has killed these productive groves. Inside the report, there’s a writeup on Westlands, complete with a table on page 12 showing the reduction in planted acreage since 2006–a little misleading to use as an index year since it was a decidedly wet year when no one had to worry about water supplies. The table does show that virtually all field, seed, and truck crops have experienced dramatic reductions since ’06 (exception: wheat, for which acreage grew by 53.4 percent, and garbanzo beans, which had a 42.5 percent increase in acreage). At the same time, though, the Westlands table shows that the acreage in tree and vine crops–remember the dead orchards?–has increased by 20 percent since the drought began. Most of that jump has been in almonds, which grew from 55,000 acres in 2006 to 70,000 acres in 2008 before falling back to 67,000 acres last year.

Now, there is no question at all that the district, which includes about 1,000 square miles along the western fringe of the mid-San Joaquin Valley, has been hit hard by the shortage of water. It’s dry country and because the district was formed relatively recently (in the 1950s), it’s near the bottom of the totem pole for getting a share of the water pumped into the valley from up north. Yes, land has been fallowed and fieldworkers have lost jobs–pretty much the same way that’s happened during every dry cycle. The question is whether Westlands really represents the face of the drought across the state. Reading about the plight of the district, one would hardly guess that the state’s harvest of processing tomatoes–by acreage the biggest vegetable crop in California–hit an all-time high in 2009 (data by way of the U.S.D.A.’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, in its latest “California Vegetable Review“).

Of course, the processing-tomato harvest doesn’t tell you much, either–by itself. And neither does Westlands, if your interest is understanding the wide impact of California’s water challenges. Of course, if your interest is putting the grimmest possible face on the drought to scare up support for a new round of dam- and canal-building–which is exactly what many environmentalists say the Department of Water Resources is doing–then Westlands will do just fine as a poster child.

Delta pumps–turn up the volume: The biggest water news of the week came out of the Fresno courtroom of U.S. District Court Judge Oliver W. Wanger (W. is for Winston, not Wendell; and those who know say his last name rhymes with “ranger”) in a case featuring Central Valley chinook salmon, federal fishery and water managers, and (again) the Westlands Water District. On Friday, Wanger issued a temporary restraining order that blocks a federal plan to protect endangered chinook salmon that migrate back and forth through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The plan limits, but does not halt, exports from the Delta to avoid sucking fish into the pumps that send water south. Westlands and other water districts argued that pumping limits are letting hundreds of thousands of acre feet of water escape into the ocean instead of being shipped to San Luis Reservoir, the main storehouse for San Joaquin Valley irrigation supplies. Letting the water flow out to sea would amount to irreparable harm to communities depending on it for growing crops and providing jobs.

Wanger agreed, issuing a 23-page decision that sets aside the federal protection plan for two weeks, pending a permanent ruling. He found a) that recent pumping in the Delta hasn’t killed enough endangered winter-run chinook to threaten the species’ survival; b) that our wet weather has caused flows that ought to be captured now; and c) that the federal defendants have brought this ruling on themselves by failing to assess the impact of their salmon plan on people. A portion of the ruling that’s gone generally unnoticed, as far as I can tell, acknowledges that it’s unknown what effect increased pumping will have on migrating juvenile winter-run salmon. That being the case, “the temporary restraining order … shall initially be for a period of fourteen days, subject to renewal by plaintiffs upon an affirmative showing that neither the species’ nor their critical habitat will be jeopardized by continued injunction” of the pumping limits (emphasis mine). In other words, Westlands and company will need to prove that the increased flow of water they’re getting hasn’t caused a big jump in the number of salmon killed off at the pumps. (You can follow the dead salmon count at home, if you’re inclined: the federal Central Valley Project, which runs one set of the pumps in question, publishes a daily report, Chinook Salmon Loss Data.)

The key piece of Wanger’s decision, though, is not really about the amount of water being pumped out of the Delta. It’s about the winning legal strategy (in this court, anyway) used by Westlands and its allies in arguing that the agencies trying to enforce the Endangered Species Act must weigh their actions’ impact on human communities. The judge seems to be saying, “Yes, you can protect plants and animals that we humans have driven to the edge of extinction–but only if protecting them doesn’t harm us humans.” Wanger made a similar ruling last year in a case involving endangered species protection for the delta smelt. Legal Planet, an environmental law blog from UC-Berkeley and UCLA, called his findings “curious” and said, “Judge Wanger is asking the agency to balance on an absolute knife edge, ensuring that it doesn’t deny farmers a single drop of water that the fish don’t critically require.”

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California Water: Enough for Everyone Except You Fish

The results of the state Department of Water Resources monthly snowpack survey are in. On the surface, the news looks good. The snowpack is 115 percent of normal for the end of January, and nearly double the amount for a year ago, when we had gone through a very dry January. But the state water managers want to make sure we don’t think the glass is half-full:

“Today’s snow survey offers us some cautious optimism as we continue to play catch-up with our statewide water supplies,” said DWR chief deputy director Sue Sims. “We are still looking at the real possibility of a fourth dry year. Even if California is blessed with a healthy snowpack, we must learn to always conserve this finite resource so that we have enough water for homes, farms, and businesses in 2010 and in the future.”

True, true: Our water account has not been replenished to the point where we can start writing blank checks again. Maybe, given our growing population, we’ll never have that sense about water again. Losing that mindset, in fact, would be a good thing. To the degree that Chief Deputy Director Sims reminds us of that, I applaud her.

But it’s notable that she omits the California environment from her list of clients for the state’s precious water supplies. Maybe she’s not aware that the state is now populated by a host of endangered fish species, once-abundant populations that have been driven to the brink of extinction in large part because of the way we have managed water and aquatic ecosystems.

In reality, of course, Sims and everyone else in the state’s water bureaucracy know all about the fish issue–in fact, they can’t help but be preoccupied with it. So declining to mention the environment in a statement like this is really a kind of negative policy statement about who ought to get water and who will have to fight for it.

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California Water: Is the Drought Over?

Is California’s drought over? OK, let me take a step back. Yes, I realize one could debate whether the last three years in California actually constitute a drought. But that’s a discussion for another time. For now, I think everyone can agree that we’ve had lower-than-average precipitation for the past three years.

The only reason to ask the question is that, after the first half of the wet season delivered only spotty rain, we’ve had a pretty solid week of downpours. Water is sluicing into our reservoirs, and the hills are greening up. All of that is a sign of what we think winter should be here. ( My favorite water statistic of the week: when the storms were at their heaviest around Lake Shasta, California’s biggest reservoir, water was flowing into the lake at about 500,000 gallons per second. That’s 1.5 acre feet, or about enough for three “average” households for a year, every second.*)

Amazing numbers like that aside, the people who get paid to think about whether the drought is over say “not yet.” The San Jose Mercury News published a good summary of the situation a couple days ago: “It’s soaking. But the drought’s not over just yet.”

That story does contain one bit of typically odd California thinking about rain and water, though. It quotes a very knowledgeable local meteorologist, Jan Null, about where we stand in terms of normal rainfall. He says: “”We need February and March to be wetter than January to really end the drought. You have to look at the long game here. This is a great start, but we need to keep it going.”

The last sentence stopped me: “This is a great start, but we need to keep it going.”

Of course, Mr. Null recognizes better than most that the amount of rain we get and when we get it is out of anyone’s control. Still, “we’ve got to keep it going.” Maybe he’s a professional rainmaker.

Once you understand the importance of water in California, once you get how crucial the winter rains are, there’s a score-keeping aspect to weather-watching here. It becomes second nature to study the rain gauge and the seasonal precipitation table as an index of performance, a reflection on whether a great collective goal is being attained. Lots of rain means we’re doing well (and that we can put the complexities of water supply out of our minds). A dry spell means we’re failing (and that there will be hell to pay, or at least the strong possibility of stringent conservation measures).

But in reality, there’s no performance going on. The rain is the rain, and the climate is the climate. California’s rainfall is famously variable. Dry spells can be counted on, and the current run of dry years is the third we’ve had since I arrived in Berkeley in the ’70s. My first California winter, 1976-’77, was bone dry and was in fact the second year of the driest two-year period ever recorded here. A decade later, from roughly 1986 through 1992, we had another run of dry years. And if our winter rains were to stop now, we’d be in the fourth year of drier-than-normal years. In between these periods we’ve had average years and very wet years and years that didn’t quite hit the average. That might not be too different from anywhere else. The reason it’s a bigger deal here than it might be in, say, central Wisconsin, is that we have a six-month dry season, we need to store water to get through that, and we have 37 million people and millions and millions acres of farmland that need water whether it’s falling from the sky or not. Thus the need to believe we can wish the rain to keep going during the wet season and the tendency to feel disappointment when the winter turns into a string of dry, sunny days.

*500,000 gallons per second. Here’s the arithmetic: California Department of Water Resources figures (here: http://bit.ly/6HzIuu) show that in the hour between noon and 1 p.m. on Tuesday, January 19, the net inflow into the lake was 66,288 cubic feet per second. That’s the highest inflow figure for any single hour all week. One cubic foot equals 7.48 gallons. 66,288*7.48=495,834.24 gallons. One acre foot=325,851 gallons. And 495,834.24/325,851=1.52 acre feet. Per second. For the entire 24 hours of the 19th, Lake Shasta’s inflow averaged just over 1 acre foot a second.

Bonus feature! KQED’s latest California Reservoir Watch map, updated earlier today:


View KQED: California Reservoir Watch in a larger map

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Journal of Self-Promotion: Water

As part of my job as a news editor at KQED, I’ve become a sort of part-time water watcher. In that capacity, I’ve done a couple of maps and a couple of posts for KQED’s Climate Watch blog. The latest post just went up yesterday: Everything You Know (About Water) Is Wrong. It’s a short writeup on a new report from the Public Policy Institute of California called “California Water Myths.” The institute is mostly trying to remind us opinionated Californians that we have a lot of misconceptions about how much water we have and how it’s used.

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Water Project: California Reservoir Watch

The background: The state Department of Water Resources announced yesterday that its “initial allocation” of supplies for the next year is 5 percent. What that means: It’s only promising to deliver 5 percent of the water that customers have asked for. The reason: Three low-rainfall years–nothing Mother Nature can’t handle, but a disaster for us humans–and some limits placed on water shipments to protect endangered fish. The reaction: Agriculture and other water contractors say it sure looks like the sky is falling. So does the governor, whose biggest agenda item for his last year in office is getting the voters to pass an $11 billion bond for water projects. The rhetoric from the water interests has led some environmentalists and other water-policy skeptics to say the 5 percent allocation is little more than a scare tactic to sell the bond.

Whatever the case may be, I noticed an interesting thing in the documents the Department of Water Resources released with its allocation announcement: The water managers are cutting the promised deliveries to 5 percent even though a chart (PDF) they put out shows they have 20 percent more water in the bank than they did last year–when the initial allocation was 15 percent. One of my colleagues at KQED asked the department’s deputy director about this, and the initial answer was along the lines of, “That’s weird–I don’t know.” Later, she suggested the chart was wrong because it didn’t take into account the fact some of the water in storage is already committed to other customers and can’t be allocated. (As a matter of fact, current combined storage at major reservoirs in the Sacramento-San Joaquin system is running 17 percent ahead of last year at this time; of course, last year was really, really bad, and that same group of reservoirs is only storing 72 percent of average for this date.)

The chart still hasn’t been fixed, though, and it lends credence to the arguments that the allocation–which is only a beginning number and is likely to be adjusted far upward as the season progresses–is being used to aid the bond campaign.

Anyway; Since I got into all this stuff yesterday, and since reservoir levels are such a big part of this debate and the state’s well-being, I put together a map showing where the biggest reservoirs are and the current storage levels. Here it is:


View KQED: California Reservoir Watch in a larger map

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Spare-Time Work Project

As I was saying the other day, California’s new water bond measure sure is interesting. The voters will be asked next November to let the state borrow $11.14 billion for a whole slew of water projects: water conservation efforts, water reclamation, water recycling, groundwater monitoring, drought relief, and measures that will let local and regional agencies do semi-water-related things like build bike paths near rivers. A good piece of the $11 billion will simply be a pile of cash for the Legislature to sit on and hand out to worthy dam projects and other water-development initiatives. Governor Schwarzenegger signed the bill calling for the bond measure yesterday, and he’s talking as if it’s a done deal. At the same time, snipers have appeared. Legislators from both parties are saying the initiative is flawed and padded with unnecessary spending. Some reporters are getting in on the act, too. I decided to find the text of the bond bill myself and pore through it. Once I started to do that, I started thinking of ways to highlight the spending provisions. A spreadsheet? That’s good if you like raw data. A map? It seemed doable, so I went to work on Google Maps. The result–still a work in progress, and sing out if you have any suggestions–is here and also embedded below. We put it up on a KQED page, it’s gotten passed around some on Twitter and maybe elsewhere. And tonight I found out that one of the governor’s press aides was consulting it (well–the press aide is a former colleague of mine).


View California’s Water Bill: Where Would the Money Go? in a larger map

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California Water: A Taste of Pork

Tomorrow, our Action Governor is going to star at a media event at Friant Dam, near Fresno. He’s using the dam, which impounds the San Joaquin River, as a prop for a ceremony at which he’ll sign an $11.1 billion bond measure that will go onto next November’s ballot. The money’s supposed to go for building new dams and reservoirs and for environmental restoration of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which has been laid waste by earlier generations’ water schemes.

It’s a big bond. In ordinary times it might be a tough sell. But these are lean, lean times for the state, which is suffering through a staggering series of budget deficits and will have to pay interest of $700 million or $800 million out of its general fund every year once all the water bonds are sold. Schwarzenegger said last week he thinks voters will go for the measure because they’ve recently passed other big infrastructure bonds, such as last year’s $10 billion initiative to finance a California high-speed rail system.

Maybe so. But enter the Associated Press. One of its Sacramento reporters has been leafing through the bond bill. Here’s what she found:

“… Dozens of projects … were injected into the bond bill to secure enough votes to get it passed. The projects will add tens of millions of dollars to the interest taxpayers will have to pay on the bond if voters approve it next year.

“Many of the projects are only peripherally related to the purpose of the legislative package, which is intended to increase California’s water supply and restore the ecologically fragile Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

“For example, $30 million was earmarked to the state Department of Parks and Recreation for grants for watershed education facilities. Another $20 million is set aside for the Baldwin Hills Conservancy, which manages land for recreation and wildlife and is the Los Angeles district represented by Assembly Speaker Karen Bass.

“In the final days of negotiations, lawmakers in both chambers padded the bond bill with an additional $1.7 billion, despite previous statements by legislative leaders that the state could not afford such a large bond.”

The AP is following up here on what was widely rumored around the state Capitol when the bond was passed In fact, a reporter asked Schwarzenegger about the add-ins during his a self-congratulatory press conference the governor held after the Legislature acted. Here’s what the governor had to say last week to the suggestion that some of the projects in the bond measure might be “pork”:

QUESTION: Governor, how can voters support this package when you passed it in the middle of the night and the — so the pork, so-called pork, inserted in there including (Inaudible) pulled out?

GOVERNOR: Are you talking about — I don’t know what you’re talking about, because the end package does not have any pork whatsoever, so I don’t know what you’re talking about.

QUESTION: Late in the evening the bill, as it was being drafted, contained — was amended and contained — and these projects were added for various counties and for various projects. So the tab grew from 9 billion to 11 billion. So how can the voters take on something like this at a time when they’re still feeling the pinch and how can they be sure that all the money will be spent well?

GOVERNOR: Well, first of all, as you know, I’m not as interested in the process as in the end result. So throughout the process we went from 8 billion to 12 billion, to 9 billion, to 11 billion, back to 9 billion and back up to 11 billion. So I think this is maybe something interesting for the journalists but it definitely is not as interesting to me. To me always what’s interesting is the result and the result was a great, great package of approximately $11 billion.

One of the things you have to love here is the way Schwarzenegger, reputed to be a hard-headed businessman, so breezily dismisses the appearance of billions of dollars of extra stuff. That’s something that’s only interesting to journalists, he says. And, he may find out very soon, to the people who will have to pay the tab.

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Rain on the Roof

Who owns the water that falls on your rooftop? In most of the western United States, it’s not you, and if you try to catch and store that water, you may be interfering with someone else’s water rights. NPR aired a story on the issue this morning, “Water Wars Out West: Keep What You Catch,” about a Colorado law that breaks with the usual legal regime. The law allows water collection by residential property owners who need to dig a well or get their supply trucked in (in other words, if you’re served by what city dwellers think of as a regular water system, it’s still illegal for you to catch and save rainwater and snowmelt in Colorado.)

The links:

An Act: Concerning Limited Exemptions for Water Collected from Certain Residential Rooftops

Southwest Colorado Water Information Program: Understanding Water Rights

U.S. Bureau of Land Management: Western States Water Laws

NPR: “Water Wars Out West: Keep What You Catch!“

And also, for generally interesting reading on water rights questions, Aguanomics, a blog from two UC-Berkeley economists.