A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
October 1, 2007
3. Watersheds
LAKE DAVIS PIKE:
At Lake Davis, a happy ending for biologist but not the pike; A last effort to eradicate the invasive fish marks the culmination of Ivan Paulsen's career - Los Angeles Times
Channel project nearing completion; Finishing touches under way on river restoration - Auburn Journal
Sierra Citizen: License to Flow; A Look at Dam Relicensing on the
LAKE DAVIS PIKE:
At
By Eric Bailey, staff writer
Last week, Paulsen quietly watched the fruits of his labor unfold. Without a hitch and hardly a whimper of dissent from Lake Davis locals, California Fish and Game crews laced the Sierra reservoir with poison in a last bid to slay the northern pike, an invasive fish authorities fear could escape and wreak havoc on the state's fragile inland fisheries.
The workweek's end saw the conclusion of the project for Paulsen -- and the end of a career. Friday marked his last day with the Fish and Game Department, and the start of retirement with his wife in a house they're building by a lake in
Paulsen also hopes it's the end of
For a decade, political repercussions over pike have bedeviled
Back in 1997, folks in the nearby Sierra town of
The poisoning was a flop on all fronts. The pike returned within 18 months, and the townsfolk of Portola were in a torch-and-pitchfork mood.
Enter Ivan Paulsen.
An avuncular sort with graying hair, a trim mustache and blue-eyed twinkle, Paulsen admits now that back in 2000 he had a bit of apprehension about becoming chief biologist for pike extermination part 2.
But aside from scientific smarts, he brought his own mild-mannered, Midwestern demeanor. Paulsen quickly took to the role of goodwill ambassador to a community feeling more than a mite touchy over what most considered imperious treatment by the state.
Paulsen says he spent those first months "mending fences" left in tatters from the last go-round. He recalled that " '97 was tough on everyone -- the community and Fish and Gamers."
To earn trust, the biologist moved to the region and set up an office right in Portola. In the months and years that followed, Paulsen took pains to mosey up to locals with more than a tad of humility, a willingness to listen and the gumption to exhaust every remedy known to man.
They tried explosives in
Meanwhile, Paulsen became the local pike guru. He and his team worked hard to tactfully educate the people of Portola and neighboring mountain burghs of the need to exterminate the pike.
He noted that pike, probably dumped in the lake by an unknowing angler eager to introduce a hard-fighting game fish to the West, were indeed magnificent in their own way. But not in
If they escaped
As Paulsen amiably puts it about the audience reception, "Reasonable people can understand why pike shouldn't be here."
It was plain to most folks what pike had wrought, savaging both the reservoir's trophy-sized trout and a tourism economy dependent on visiting anglers.
Slowly but inevitably, Paulsen and the community came around to the consensus that a new, more effective round of poisoning seemed the only way to free Lake Davis of pike.
When the big day came Tuesday to unleash the flotilla of two dozen boats and dump more than 15,000 gallons of liquid poison into the lake, Paulsen half expected to see a few protesters with picket signs.
Instead, he drove through town to find placards offering thanks to the Fish and Game Department.
"What a huge difference from '97," Paulsen said. "It was very gratifying and humbling to see that all the work we did paid off."
As the fish went belly up, department crews scoured the shores on foot and searched the lake depths with nets, loading more than 600 clear plastic bags with nearly 10 tons of fish the first day alone. The bags included a few big trout that had survived the pike, but bore the teeth marks of underwater attacks. There also were loads of brown bullhead catfish and shiners and sunfish.
But nearly one in 10 fish hauled in was a pike. The biggest measured nearly 4 feet long and weighed more than 20 pounds, Paulsen said.
He heads off now to retirement, praying the pike stay away for good. Paulsen is not making promises, just offering hope.
"We feel good that we've done the best we can," Paulsen said. "But there are no guarantees in life except death and taxes." #
Channel project nearing completion; Finishing touches under way on river restoration
Auburn Journal – 9/29/07
By Gus Thomson, staff writer
Just under a month after water started flowing again on a restored
One of the major final projects was installation of steel beams on the face of the half-mile-long diversion tunnel that had channeled water underground through the canyon's dam construction area since the early 1970s.
While dam construction was halted nearly 30 years ago, the tunnel had continued to channel the river's water away from its natural stream course - and left the area dangerous and off-limits to boaters.
As part of a $75 million project by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the Placer County Water Agency, the river has been re-routed along a sculpted, open-air course and a new permanent pump station installed.
The pump station allows the agency to move water it has rights to on the
Bob Meador, construction manager with the bureau, said Friday that work has been taking place at the mouth of the tunnel to build a berm and stabilize it with rocks. A wide channel past the tunnel entrance should allow flows during storms. About 400,000 cubic yards of earth and rock were removed from the streambed and placed elsewhere on the site. Lower levels have been hydro seeded and a nearby parking area is due to be paved in coming weeks.
The public will be kept out of the area while construction takes place on the final stages. Meador said heavy equipment should be removed by the beginning of December, leaving the state Parks Department to prepare for recreational river use sometime after the start of the new year. Einar Maisch, the water agency's director of strategic affairs, toured the site with other agency officials and the media on Friday. He said the pumps - which will replace temporary pumps that had to be put down every spring and removed in the fall - are being tested and close to fully operational.
They should be available to pump water during canal maintenance shutdowns starting Oct. 14 but if they aren't, the temporary pumps are still in place, Maisch said.
Agency Director Mike Lee, whose district takes in much of the county's growth areas, recalled that when he first became a Placer County Water Agency director in 1973 as part of his duties as a member of the
While the closure of the diversion tunnel represents a current change in direction, the work has been undertaken with the idea that the tunnel could one day be re-opened as part of a revived
Lee said that the project makes a statement on the agency's commitment to provide a stable supply of good-quality water.
But the new construction will also produce recreational benefits by opening up a stretch of the river closed for more than three decades.
"It's a man-made marvel," Lee said. "We're not only getting our pumps back on a permanent basis but the recreational aspect is a benefit." #
http://www.auburnjournal.com/articles/2007/09/30/news/top_stories/02river30.txt?pg=2
Sierra Citizen: License to Flow; A Look at Dam Relicensing on the
YubaNet.com – 9/29/07
By Eric Winford for The Sierra Citizen
In 1850, the Rock Creek Ditch Company built a nine-mile canal, the first canal of any significant length in
The system that moves this water around is one of the most complex in the state, if not the country. "I have never heard of anything more complicated," Ron Nelson, General Manager of the Nevada Irrigation District, says.
NID and Pacific Gas & Electric are responsible for the majority of the dams and canals that gather the waters of the Middle Yuba, the South Yuba, the Bear, and the North Fork of the North Fork of the
In 2013, the federal license to use the water for hydropower, issued in 1964 to NID and PG&E, will expire. As part of the relicensing process, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) will review the benefits and consequences of the Drum/Spaulding and Bear/Yuba hydropower projects, and decide how much water should flow through those turbines. The license will also determine how much water should be released to the rivers. The process to renew that license has already begun.
Not all Precipitation is Created Equally
Rain is not shed upon the
In the higher reaches of the range, the precipitation falls as snow, a convenient method of storage that delivers sudden pulses as well as sustained releases of water. The pulse will peak in spring as rain falls on snow. After spring, the rivers steadily lose flow as the snowpack slowly releases its water. Lower down, winter rains fill creeks instantly.
The Bear and the
Water from the Sierra Nevada built
The Yuba-Bear Hydropower Project
Water from the Yuba-Bear system PG&E and NID powerhouses provides 1.15 million mega-watt hours of electricity annually. The electricity generated from NID turbines is sold to PG&E. Hydropower revenues support NID's infrastructure. The revenues "underwrite the costs of those systems, the operation and maintenance of those dams and reservoirs, and profits after that go back to the district," Nelson said.
Of the 16 powerhouses under this license, 13 produce less than 30 MWh and are thus considered to be small hydro projects. Small hydro projects can be counted as part of a utility's Renewable Portfolio Standard; state law requires utilities to have 20 percent of their energy provided by renewable sources by 2017.
Irrigation was and continues to be the main use of water from the Yuba-Bear system, comprising over 80 percent of water deliveries. However, domestic demand for water is growing, and NID currently has seven treatment plants.
"The agriculture economy was the first need," Nelson says. "As the years have gone on the community's needs have changed and we added treated water as one of the services."
But before
"While it might have been pieced together 100 years ago, its quite an amazing bit of engineering," Nelson says of the Yuba-Bear system.
The Origins of the Yuba-Bear System
The system developed for carrying the water of the
Hydrologic mining boomed in the following decades, but its success proved its downfall. The erosion of such large amounts of soil caused immense problems downstream, resulting in an 1884 court decision (the "Sawyer Decision") to halt the practice. Losing their most important consumer, the companies owning water rights and canals began seeking new revenue. Domestic use was small, irrigation was growing, but the next juicy contract was for electrical power.
Once again, the Yuba watershed became the scene for major technological breakthroughs. The first hydroelectric plant in the Yuba system was built in 1892 outside
PG&E and NID are Born
In 1905, two large power companies merged to form PG&E, whose inheritance included the mass of canals constructed by the South Yuba Canal Company and others in the mining boom; more importantly, though, they inherited the associated water rights.
NID came into existence in 1921, purchasing some of PG&E's water rights and gathering others from various owners. The cooperation PG&E offered to the local governmental agency is a remarkable-though not unprecedented-act in
It stems from the different functions of their charter. "They [PG&E] are not a consumptive user; their mission is power production and our mission is consumptive, so there's no competition in that respect," Nelson says. "We're interested in moving water around; they're interested in power for production. It's those facts that make it easy to work together."
In 1963, the two entities agreed that more water storage was necessary for their interlinked system. The increased storage would serve growing towns, an increasing agriculture economy, and provide electricity to a power-hungry state.
"Because they had the canals and infrastructure, it was natural to add hydropower to the mix," Nelson says. The cost to NID for these improvements was $65 million.
The hydropower plants were licensed in 1964 by FERC. It is this license that is now under review. The license covers only a part of the entire infrastructure within these watersheds, but the part it covers is immense. NID's permit lists four powerhouses, nine on-stream reservoirs, three off-stream impoundments, and two diversion dams. PG&E's permit lists 12 hydropower facilities and 29 reservoirs.
The contract that governs the transfer of water between NID and PG&E is based upon their water rights. These rights are more precious than gold because they determine who has the legal right to the use water on a particular stretch of stream.
"In Western water law, priority is significant; first in time, first in line," Nelson says.
In order to get their water, PG&E and NID have created a mutually dependent system over the hundreds of miles of watershed between the upper reaches of the Middle Yuba and the small creeks of
"We share some of our facilities; we run some of our water through systems they own, and they store water in systems we own," Nelson says.
The Altered Dynamics of Our Watershed
Many of the tributaries to the South Yuba are gathered and put into a canal that takes the water to
"Human uses have drastically altered the natural flows of the Yuba and Bear watersheds," Katrina Schneider, SYRCL River Scientist, says. "Many of the South Yuba tributaries intercepted and diverted by the Bowman-Spaulding canal have zero flow requirements (i.e., 0 cubic feet per second), while the canal can transport up to 350 cfs to Spaulding reservoir. The cumulative result is an array of dry river beds and a substantial amount of water transported out of the
>From Lake Spaulding, water is divided into three directions: into the Drum Canal heading toward the Bear River, along the South Yuba Canal to Deer Creek, and into the South Yuba River.
"Spaulding and Englebright are the only dams on the
"If you put water in the top, you have the potential to rewater the whole system; that's good news for river restoration," Steindorf says.
Additional river flow can create more aquatic habitat as well as provide colder instream water temperatures, which benefits aquatic species and their life stages. "Yuba river native trout and amphibians have low temperature tolerances and require cold water to grow and reproduce," adds Gary Reedy, SYRCL's RiverScience Director and fish biologist. "The bad news is that any water that gets out of Spaulding, PG&E waves goodbye to it; that's going to be very expensive water because they don't get to put it through their dams," Stendorf continues.
The Bear River: Workhorse of
Moving nine miles from Spaulding to its terminus, the
"There is a huge amount of water imported into the Bear watershed from
There are six powerhouses and seven reservoirs on the
"The Bear is the workhorse of the system," Liembach said. "It has so many facilities on it and so many diversions that there are sections of it that are severely dewatered."
Water from the Yuba and the Bear eventually makes it to NID and PCWA users. Some of that water is put into natural stream channels, such as Auburn Ravine, Dry Creek, and others in
Relicensing Questions and Concerns
The FERC relicensing process requires studies of the impacts of the hydropower facilities. Some of those study questions will focus on desirable releases of water to rivers.
"The major problem that we're working on is that the water temperatures are too high for native fish," Liembach says. "We don't have the ecological flows to have fish passage, as well as the temperature."
Reworking the timing of water releases could modify the system enough to provide sufficient flows for aquatic life.
"There is a great potential to provide colder water releases in river reaches through managing, preserving, and utilizing current cold water pools in project reservoirs and other actions," Schneider says.
But exactly what the right ecological flow is unknown.
"Many of these rivers so rarely have flows that we don't know much about them, and part of this process is to find out what's out there," Steindorf says.
Another question will be water quality.
"The reservoirs are collecting sediment, and mercury collects in the sediment," Liembach says.
Improving recreation on the rivers will also be on the list.
"It's a huge area, and within that area is contained what is already known to be the best whitewater resources in
Recreation can bring in revenue, but Steindorf doesn't see the question of new recreation revenue replacing hydro revenue as a valid one.
"One of the questions is, does the revenue generated from recreation replace the revenue generated by hydro? The answer is no, but we're not looking at a direct comparison," he says. "We don't have a good way to value those resources appropriately. It's easy to calculate values in terms of kilowatt hours, but what is the value of being able to walk down the South Yuba and look at a healthy river system instead of a dry riverbed?"
A Once in a Lifetime
"It's a public resource," Steindorf continues. "That's why the FERC relicensing process exists, because they don't own the water. Rivers are considered to be part of the public trust."
In relicensing, the public gets to decide what the benefits should be.
"I think of it as a once in a lifetime opportunity to restore aquatic habitat and recreational benefits," Liembach says. "This is a huge opportunity to change the hydropower system so it takes into account the protection of those benefits." #
http://www.yubanet.com/artman/publish/article_66667.shtml
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