[Water_news] 1. DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS - Top Item for 4/12/07

Department of Water Resources

California Water News

A daily compilation for DWR personnel of significant news articles and comment

 

April 12, 2007

 

1.  Top Item

 

New pipeline to feed water to millions; Project's last section finished Wednesday near Lost Hills

Bakersfield Californian – 4/11/07

By Vic Pollard, staff writer

 

One of the largest pipelines in California was completed in a ceremony outside Lost Hills Wednesday, a move that will provide new protection against costly droughts for millions of urban Californians and hundreds of Central Valley farmers.

 

Will Boschman, general manager of Semitropic Water Storage District, front, and Rick Wegis, president of the board of the Semitropic Water Storage District, behind, break a bottle of champagne against a concrete pipe that is part of a project to expand its water banking program.

 

A giant crane placed the last section of a cavernous concrete pipeline, 10 feet in diameter, that runs from the California Aqueduct near Lost Hills eastward to a key pumping plant operated by the Semitropic Water Storage District seven miles away.

 

Semitropic's two-year, $180 million construction project will allow it to expand a unique water-banking program that provides an underground reserve water supply for cities from Los Angeles to the Bay Area.

 

Semitropic charges the urban water agencies hefty fees to store their water beneath Kern County and uses the money to provide cheaper irrigation water to farmers in the sprawling district northeast of Bakersfield.

 

The pipeline will be a key link, allowing Semitropic to move huge amounts of water owned by the cities from the aqueduct to the groundwater banking area west of Wasco, which is being expanded by more than two-thirds. When the cities want their water back, it will be pumped from wells and put into the pipeline to flow back into the aqueduct, where the cities can get it to their residents.

 

I-5 tunnel

 

The project required tunneling under Interstate 5, which made Caltrans officials "kinda nervous," Semitropic manager Will Boschman said.

 

"We had to prove that we had somebody that knew what they were doing," he said.

 

The new pipeline is needed because when the water banking program is expanded, the volume of water to be moved in and out of the banking area will exceed the capacity of the canal that now connects the district to the aqueduct, said Boschman.

 

The canal must also be used to get irrigation water from the canal to the district's farmers, its original purpose.

 

And the pipeline is being completed none too soon, Boschman said. With California's sparse rain and snow this winter, the city agencies have already put in requests to withdraw some of their banked water, something they have done only twice since they started putting water into the bank in 1995, he said.

 

That can only help the district sell new urban customers, which the district calls "banking partners," on the value of parking some of their water in Kern County until they need it.

 

"It's going to be a major, major benefit to the state of California in upcoming drought years," said Jim Crettol, a farmer and a member of the Semitropic board of directors.

 

Semitropic invented the concept of selling underground storage capacity beneath land owned and worked by local farmers. It only recently has begun to be adopted by some other water agencies.

 

It is different from the sprawling Kern Water Bank area west of Bakersfield, which exists to store water for local irrigation districts and the city of Bakersfield, which own the land above it.

 

Crettol said the Semitropic program is a "unique example" of farmers and urban water agencies cooperating to help reduce water shortages.

 

The benefit to Semitropic's farmers is that the cities' water raises the water table, reducing their pumping costs, and the fees pay for facilities to bring more water to the farmers.

 

Banking expansion

 

Semitropic currently has seven partners who together have stored 1 million acre-feet of water in the banking program, maxing out its planned capacity. They include the Metropolitan Water District and Newhall Land and Farming Co., which provide water to millions of residents in the Los Angeles area. They also include three Bay Area agencies that serve several million more. A million acre-feet of water is enough to serve 2 million average households for a year.

 

Calculated another way, Boschman said the existing program "could serve 20 million people with 15 to 20 gallons of water per person per day in the worst drought."

 

That's part of the sales pitch the district will use to lure new customers when the pipeline goes into service and the banking program is expanded by 650,000 acre-feet.

 

And it's being done largely on speculation. It has signed up just one customer so far, for a fraction of the new capacity.

 

But Boschman says he's not worried. There is no end to the demand for such water supplies because of relatively new laws that require developers to prove they have a water supply before they can build new homes.

 

Bank envy

 

If the Kern Water Bank could expand its capacity, it would, said Bill Phillimore, president of the board of the Kern Water Bank. He called Semitropic's investment "sensible" given the coming demand for reliable water.

 

"Water is getting shorter and shorter throughout the state," Phillimore said. "As California urbanizes, there's more and more demand for reliable supplies."

 

Semitropic Water Storage District’s pipeline project

10 Pipeline diameter, in feet.

7 Length, in miles.

10 to 20 Depth underground, in feet.

 

Ground water banking program

1 million acre-feet. (An acre-foot is 326,000 gallons, enough for two households for a year.)

650,000 acre-feet. Second phase, in progress. #

http://www.bakersfield.com/102/story/117425.html

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