[Water_news] 1. DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS - Top Item for 7/9/07

Department of Water Resources

California Water News

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

 

July 9, 2007

 

1.  Top Item

 

Delta crisis revives idea for canal; Consideration of aqueduct, first proposed in 1980, brings back bitter divisions over fate of water supply

Contra Costa Times – 7/8/07

By Mike Taugher, staff writer

 

The crisis in the Delta is blowing a strong wind into the sails of those who want to build a aqueduct, setting the stage for a replay of one of the most bitter and divisive battles in California history.

 

The Peripheral Canal, a major threat at one time to Contra Costa's water supply, is back.

 

To supporters, the canal could fix the ongoing decline of the Delta ecosystem and avoid water supply disruptions like the ones that occurred last month when massive state pumps were turned off for nine days.

 

To opponents, it could kill the estuary and foul water supplies in Contra Costa County and elsewhere.

 

Though the details are far from settled, the basic idea is simple: A canal could be built to draw water out of the Sacramento River before it gets to the Delta, then carry it around the Delta's channels to the pumps near Tracy. From there, the water could be delivered to Bay Area communities, San Joaquin Valley farms and Southern California residents.

 

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has endorsed the idea -- prematurely, some say, because his announcement came several months ahead of a report from the task force he appointed to study the issue.

 

"In order to protect this vital estuary from complete decimation, and to protect the economy of this state and the drinking water supply for 25 million people, we must build a new conveyance system as envisioned half a century ago," Schwarzenegger wrote in a June 14 letter to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

 

Because no one knows how big it would be, what route it would follow or how it would be operated, it is difficult to predict how a new version of the canal might affect water supplies and the Delta environment.

 

It is also unclear how it would be paid for, given that it could cost billions and take at least a decade to build.

 

Nevertheless, supporters say a canal could:

 

·  Prevent a repeat of the recent water shutdowns by eliminating the risk of imperiled fish getting sucked into south Delta pumps;

 

·  Protect the state's water-delivery system from the threat of Delta levee failures while delivering fresher water to millions of people;

 

·  Reduce the pressure from large water agencies, allowing the Delta to be managed in a more environmentally friendly way.

 

But opponents fear that the canal could also be the final blow to a dying Delta. Critics say it could easily turn the West Coast's largest estuary into an inland sea, ruining Delta fisheries and farms while fouling the water supply for a half-million Contra Costa residents.

 

"A peripheral canal can solve the water supply problem," said Gary Bobker, a program director at the Bay Institute, an environmental group. "But you still have to decide what you're going to do about the Delta ecosystem and the communities in the Delta."

 

Unless the state's dependence on the Delta for water is reduced, Bobker said, a new canal would merely "postpone the date of execution" for the Delta.

 

Water or environment

 

The original Peripheral Canal was authorized in 1980 by then-Gov. Jerry Brown. But opponents put a referendum on the ballot and California voters rejected the canal in 1982 on the strength of overwhelming opposition in the Bay Area and throughout Northern California. Ninety-six percent of voters in Contra Costa were against it. In Alameda County, 95 percent of voters were opposed.

 

Canal opponents said the project was a water grab that would allow unfettered growth in Southern California.

 

Its capacity -- 22,000 cubic-feet per second -- was big enough to carry the entire Sacramento River at times. This week, for example, the river is flowing at less than 20,000 acre-feet.

 

Deprived of its main source of fresh water, the Delta would be left stagnant and polluted with farm runoff from the San Joaquin Valley, opponents feared. The water supply of the Contra Costa Water District, recreational fisheries in the region and the estuarine ecosystem could be ruined.

 

The political fight was one of the most divisive ever waged between the northern and southern parts of the state.

 

"I don't think there's been anything of this magnitude," said historian Norris Hundley, a professor emeritus at UCLA and author of "The Great Thirst," a history of California water.

 

Hundley said that geopolitical fault will fracture again unless the Delta's environmental problems are fixed.

 

If Southern California's water is guaranteed before the Delta's health is restored, Hundley said, "I think you're going to see the same level of tension, anger and resentment occur."

 

Like today, there was a lot of talk a quarter-century ago about fixing the Delta so that the fish and other wildlife that rely on the estuary are not imperiled and the water pulled out of it for Contra Costa and south Delta communities is fresh and clean. But the environmental concerns quickly gave way to the state's thirst.

 

"In no time at all, the Delta became a secondary issue to the Peripheral Canal," Hundley said.

 

Broken Delta

 

For more than a century, humans have irreversibly altered the natural state of the Delta, which once was a large inland marsh.

 

Fed by Sierra Nevada snowmelt via the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, crude levees were built beginning during the Gold Rush to create farmland. Later, pipes were inserted into the channels to draw out drinking and irrigation water for a growing region.

 

The result is an intricate and fragile maze of levees and channels that forms a triangle with points at Sacramento, Tracy and Antioch on the way to San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate.

 

The flow's single most intrusive interruption, however, is in the southern Delta near Tracy, where two sets of massive pumps owned by the state and federal governments suck the ocean-bound water to the south.

 

The pumps deliver trillions of gallons of water a year to 25 million residents from the East Bay to Southern California and to about 2 million acres of San Joaquin Valley farms.

 

The water delivery system is rife with problems, however.

 

The century-old levees that must hold up for the pumps to draw water south are fragile, deteriorating and amount to "18th century piles of dirt," as Assemblywoman Lois Wolk, D-Davis, observed at a recent hearing.

 

The powerful pumps turn the natural east-west flow of snowmelt and tides into a north-south flow, which disrupts fish migrations, pulling rivers and the fish in them uphill.

 

The pumps are at least partly to blame for the decades-long decline in the Delta's fish populations.

 

But the situation worsened dramatically in 2002, and this spring annual surveys for the threatened Delta smelt showed a 90 percent drop in their population.

 

The ecological crisis -- specifically, the alarmingly low numbers of Delta smelt -- is so severe that biologists and water officials agreed last month to turn off the state-owned water supply pumps for nine days because imperiled fish were being killed by the pumps.

 

"The Delta is broken, and we need an alternate form of conveyance," said Laura King Moon, assistant general manager of the State Water Contractors, an association of water agencies from Dublin, Livermore and Pleasanton to the Central Valley to San Diego that serve water to 25 million people.

 

Momentum

 

Despite the Peripheral Canal's defeat by voters in 1982, the idea has never been abandoned. And its re-emergence this year is not a surprise.

 

In the 1990s, Gov. George Deukmejian tried to revive a new version.

 

And in 2000, state officials unveiled a sweeping plan for the Delta and California's water, known as CalFed. Its authors rejected a canal as too controversial but said the idea should be revisited if the CalFed initiatives failed to restore the Delta environment and stabilize the state's water supplies in seven years.

 

Those seven years are up in December.

 

Today, at least two efforts are under way to consider building a canal and how such an aqueduct would be used.

 

The first is a task force, called Delta Vision, convened last year by Schwarzenegger to make recommendations about the future of the Delta and a possible canal by the end of this year. The second is a push by water users, water agencies and regulators who see the canal as a viable way to end conflicts between water supplies and endangered species.

 

Both groups have been influenced by a study released in February that concluded the Delta ecosystem and the pumping operations are unsustainable.

 

That report, by the Public Policy Institute of California and UC Davis researchers, said the state has numerous options to fix the problem. But the one inescapable, yet unstated, conclusion was that California must either build something akin to the Peripheral Canal -- a route favored by most water agencies -- or sharply reduce the amount of water taken from the Delta -- an option favored by environmentalists. The alternative is some combination.

 

Details matter

 

Twenty-five years after the Peripheral Canal's defeat, the Delta is in its most serious environmental crisis yet. The demand for Delta water is the highest it has ever been.

 

Sunne Wright McPeak was a Contra Costa County supervisor and a leading opponent of the canal in the early 1980s. More recently, she served as Schwarzenegger's secretary of Business, Transportation and Housing.

 

For McPeak, who serves on the governor's Delta Vision task force, a canal might make sense. The health of the Delta depends on California's water needs being met, she said, because when push comes to shove, water will be delivered where it is needed.

 

But unless the canal is accompanied by new reservoirs and a huge investment in Delta levees -- a proposition that makes an extremely costly plan much more expensive -- the canal could kill the Delta.

 

"They (the Department of Water Resources) are accepting an inland Salton Sea. They're acquiescing," McPeak said.

Without new reservoirs, the demand for water in dry years will inevitably lead water managers to divert water needed in the Delta to the canal.

 

And without a massive investment in Delta levees, those protective barriers will eventually fail, leading to flooding and seawater intrusion in the Delta. If the bulk of the state's population is getting its water directly out of the Sacramento River through a canal, the state will no longer have a strong interest in releasing water into the Delta to restore is freshness for the sake of the environment or local agencies that still depend on Delta intakes.

 

But, McPeak said, state water officials appear to be moving to build a canal without the other investments that she said should accompany it.

 

State voters last year approved a $4.1 billion bond measure for levees, but the bulk of that money is likely to be spent to protect developments and other regions upstream of the Delta. And despite CalFed's promise to evaluate and consider five new reservoirs, the Department of Water Resources has made little progress toward planning or building any, McPeak said.

 

"I am very alarmed at this point. I am very concerned about where we are."  #

http://www.contracostatimes.com/animals/ci_6327321

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