A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
February 25, 2008
2. Supply
WESTERN CLIMATE ISSUES:
Heavy snowfalls could help dry West - USA Today
New water plan keeps Valley in good shape - The Valley Chronicle
LOCAL SUPPLY ISSUES:
Water's source issue for power plant; Local utility company could lose millions in potential revenue - Desert Sun
IRRIGATION:
Carlsbad farmers test electronic water meter program; Water district hopes to eventually use it for all its 27,600 customers - North County Times
WATER CONSERVATION:
Editorial: Water party is over -
Guest Column: A Glimpse of
Water chief defends Vegas mayor - Imperial Valley Press
WESTERN CLIMATE ISSUES:
Heavy snowfalls could help dry West
By Alan Gomez, staff writer
Heavy snowfall in the West this winter is likely to have a major positive impact on a drought that has dried up water supplies and parched farmland for the past eight years.
The heaviest snowfall in 10 years has produced snowpack levels 180% above normal in some areas and a return to normal snowpack levels in most other areas.
In
"We'd been seeing improvement in parts of the West, then it dives back into drought the next year. But this year, you're seeing widespread recovery," Gillespie said.
Gillespie and others said that while the good news does not necessarily mean an end to the drought, it does means that water supplies will likely be abundant this summer and reservoirs can partially fill up again.
At
Davidson and others said the new water does not mean an end to the drought. Dry conditions could easily return next winter, and even a late-winter warm-up in March could cancel out the gains made so far this winter.
"That doesn't break the drought," Davidson said. "It takes a number of years to actually end a drought period. The only thing we can say is that things are looking a lot better."
The drought has hit hardest in a region surrounding the
Facing the worst drought in a century, the seven states signed an agreement last month to share and conserve their water. Water restrictions are commonplace throughout the region, causing great difficulty to ranchers and farmers.
Since 2000, ranchers in
Stevenson, a co-chair of
"We have really shifted from saying, 'We're in a continued drought' to 'Maybe we need to look at this as the new standard,' " Stevenson said.
Brian Fuchs, a climatologist with the
"You don't see a lot of normal years," he said. "You get dry years and wet years, and when you average that out, that's your normal."
He warned that the big snowfall may not get to where it's needed.
Snow faces obstacles as it melts and flows to become usable runoff. A dry mountain can soak up a lot of water before it reaches rivers and streams, Fuchs said. And farmlands and grazing lands are so dry the soil has turned to hard crusts and gaping cracks in areas. Water can spill into the cracks and leave the topsoil dry.
"It could take an entire spring into summer before there's enough rain and moisture from runoff to break up that crust to let the water get in," Fuchs said. #
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/drought/2008-02-24-drought_N.htm
New water plan keeps Valley in good shape
The Valley Chronicle – 2/25/08
By Charles Hand, staff writer
A water allocation plan adopted by the Metropolitan Water District board of directors last week has left the
The plan was adopted in case drought should reduce the amount of water available below the amount of water sought by member agencies.
Randy Record, a member of the Eastern Municipal Water District board and the district's representative to the Metropolitan board, said the plan will not cause the region undue hardship if a drought should bring
In fact, the plan may never be invoked. Record said he hopes it is not, in part because more efficient water use should be more than enough to reduce water demand to water availability.
The primary benefit of the allocation blueprint is that it makes the system more equitable, Record said.
In the early years of
| |
Along the way, those who contributed more to construction of the facilities earned a right to more of the water, while those who contributed less earned less access to water. That worked for a while, Record said, but a couple of recent developments have made a better system desirable.
One was the more-or-less-forced addition of
With those two powerful members of Met expressing a desire to protect their futures, the district's engineers and administrators began reconsidering the allocation plans, which culminated in the plan adopted last week.
Record said he sees the allocation plan as more equitable since it is based in part on the willingness of water agencies to encourage more efficient water use through education and tiered rate structures. Tiered rate structures increase the cost of water as water use rises.
“If you waste water, you're going to have to pay for it,” Record said.
But there is more that the district can do, that all districts can do, Record said.
Eastern, for example, has put will-serve letters on hold while the district works with developers on ways to improve water efficiency. Will-serve letters are required before any development project can be started. They are a statement from the water district that water will be available for at least 20 years from the time the project is finished.
During the hiatus, Record said, the district is exploring innovative concepts, such as offering developers a will-serve letter if they are willing to find a way to save as much water as their projects will use. Such savings could come from financing modernization of a school district's water system when the schools cannot afford to pay for the upgrades.
“We have been able to work really well with the builder community,” Record said, and such concepts have been well received. “I believe these could be the first steps on the path to a different water future.”
The difficulty with increasing efficiency is not the technology, Record said. “The opportunity for better efficiency is tremendous.” The issue is that it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to implement all of the possible systems, and even those agencies already working with Eastern are having trouble finding enough money to do all they can.
An example is Valley-Wide Recreation & Park District, which Record said has cooperated well with the water district in the search for water efficiency, but cannot afford to make all the improvements it would like at once.
Recycled water will likely play an increasing part in supplying the demands of a growing population, Record said, and Eastern is looking for ways to maximize that process. “We want to use the water as many times as possible before we pass it on.”
The district is fortunate in the sense that previous boards of directors and staff members saw the need for more efficient water use years ago and left the current board and engineers with a healthy system headed in the right direction, Record said. “We are fortunate that previous staffs and directors started this.”
That is unusual because there was a time when water planners and engineers, those who built the systems that serve
http://www.thevalleychronicle.com/articles/2008/02/22/news/08nwater.txt
LOCAL SUPPLY ISSUES:
Water's source issue for power plant; Local utility company could lose millions in potential revenue
Desert Sun – 2/23/08
By Mariecar Mendoza, staff writer
A Maryland-based company seeking to build a power plant near Desert Hot Springs may not go through with a plan to purchase water from the city's water district. The firm now wants to obtain the water it needs itself.
For more than a year, officials have discussed plans to build, as part of a joint venture with GE Energy, a backup power plant by 2010.
It would be an 850-megawatt electrical-generating facility on 37 acres of unincorporated land near Desert Hot Springs.
Officials with the Mission Springs Water District say the change in plans would result in the loss of millions of dollars in potential revenue for the local utility company.
The new plan, however, would not affect the company's original promises of a one-time $3 million pay-out to the city of Desert Hot Springs, along with plans for more than 700 jobs - albeit temporary - tied to the project, officials said.
Announced Tuesday during a meeting of the water district board, officials with CPV Sentinel LLC said they have submitted a new plan to the California Energy Commission which would bypass the district in favor of obtaining the groundwater necessary for energy production itself.
Details of the new plan
CPV now wants to bring in three to five of its own wells to pump water out of the sub-basin. The company projects it will need 1,100 acre-feet of water per year during peak times, with an average of 550 acre-feet per year to cool its plant.
Under a memorandum of understanding with the Desert Water Agency, the state's water contractor that imports water into the sub-basin that the water district uses, CPV would recharge the sub-basin with
Desert Water Agency, which would oversee the plan, would be paid as much as $10 million over the life of the project, according to the new proposal.
The new plan took water district officials by surprise. The two sides have been working on the original plan since November 2006.
On Tuesday, water district board director Mary Gibson said she felt CPV "pulled the rug out from under us."
Vice President John Furbee, who has been an adamant supporter of CPV's original plans, said "there was an element of surprise" to the decision.
Water district officials, however, agreed to a negotiation meeting with CPV, which took place Thursday. Negotiations apparently are ongoing.
Under the original proposal, the water district said it would have sold CPV water from the Mission Creek sub-basin, an underground aquifer officials say is the only water source for Desert Hot Springs, for use as a coolant in the facility's production process.
As part of that plan, officials said, CPV would pay the water district between $8 million and $10 million in connection fees, with anticipated annual revenues of between $250,000 and $500,000.
CPV also would have paid Desert Hot Springs an annual 5 percent utility tax of up to $25,000, according to water district officials.
CPV officials, however, dispute these figures, saying that the company never made these kinds of proposals and that "MSWD as a public agency cannot make a profit, so most if not all of this revenue would be applied to cover the costs to MSWD (for) producing the potable water. The net revenue to MSWD would have been negligible. (and) no agreement was concluded on this after over one year of negotiations."
CPV officials also said no connection fees were involved in its plan with the water district because "MSWD does not have the capability to import water, so this cost would never have been a revenue stream to MSWD and thus MSWD is losing nothing."
According to spokesman Michael Shepherd, CPV "attempted to work exclusively with MSWD to negotiate agreements to implement its water plan. MSWD was either unable or unwilling to complete these agreements."
If approved the water district believes CPV's new plan would have detrimental effects on Desert Hot Springs' aquifer.
"I'm not against the plant, I'm just against them not buying water from us while they are still depleting our aquifer," said Furbee.
Water is all the talk
"We want to serve them water, but they have this plan now that they'll do their own wells and use up our groundwater and replace it - maybe - with Colorado River Water, which is much harder water than our groundwater," he said.
CPV officials, however, say they are "providing a net positive benefit to the groundwater in the basin."
Desert Hot Springs City Manager Rick Daniels said the city will still receive the benefits contained in the original plan and therefore is remaining "neutral."
Mayor Yvonne Parks added: "They worked for more than a year trying to get a deal with MSWD and finally when they couldn't come to any kind of mutual understanding they turned to DWA. This doesn't mean CPV isn't willing to work something out with MSWD though."
Arden Wallum, the water district's general manager, however, said everyone will lose out if CPV's new plan is approved.
"There is no benefit to Desert Hot Springs or Mission Springs Water District if they don't buy water from us," he said.
"The most important thing is not in the dollars and cents it's the fact that we are the purveyor and the watch dog of the water supply in our district." #
http://www.mydesert.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008802230325
IRRIGATION:
"For a little plastic device, it's pretty powerful," said Mario Remillar, a city employee who's coordinating the effort, as he described the amount of data the machines can generate.
The goal is eventually to roll out the program to all of the water district's customers ---- some 27,600 households and businesses in town, district Director Mark Stone said.
The water district is a subsidiary of the city, but it doesn't serve everyone in town. The southern end of the city is handled by the Olivenhain Municipal and Vallecitos water districts.
Unlike regular water meters, these new electronic radio transmission devices allow the Carlsbad Municipal Water District to track water usage hour-by-hour, using remote sensing equipment linked to the district's computer system.
Regular water meters ---- those bulky boxes attached to homes and businesses that have displays like a car's odometer ---- require monthly visits by city employees to check consumption rates. But with these devices, employees don't need to leave the office to find out how much water's being used.
The district could even investigate differences between daytime and nighttime usage to pinpoint whether water is running all the time ---- an indication that a customer might have a leak in the pipes, Remillar said.
Each device costs the department $250, so the district isn't planning to install them all at once. Instead, tentative plans call for spreading the installation out over a five-year period, Stone said
So far, the district has installed the devices on 25 water meters used by participants in a special agricultural water program. Under that regional program, growers receive lower water rates in exchange for agreeing to being first in line when cutbacks are ordered by the area's main water supplier ---- the Metropolitan Water District.
On Jan. 1, the growers received just such an order.
They have been directed to cut usage by 30 percent, so now is a great time to install the new technology, Stone said. If the meters are checked hourly, the customers can get a better handle on whether they're meeting the monthly cutback requirements, he said.
"We're watching them daily, so if we see any problems, leaks, we can call (the growers) immediately," Remillar added.
Representatives for several growers contacted during Friday's rainstorm said they weren't sure if they had the devices yet. They added that they would be more likely to notice the benefits later in the year when dry weather forces them to irrigate more often. #
http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2008/02/23/news/top_stories/28_06_552_22_08.txt
WATER CONSERVATION:
Editorial: Water party is over
Our view: Grand jury issues report that shouldn't be ignored
Reports from the county grand jury don't usually get much attention. A recent one should be the exception.
Earlier this month the grand jury released a report on
Such pleas are doomed to fail because they rely on the good intentions of consumers rather than decisions and behavior guided by self-interest. In the case of water use, self-interest means minimizing water bills.
The grand jury's "Water Conservation: Sober Up,
According to the report, single-family homes in the city of
As families use more water, they get bumped into a new tier and are charged more. Water districts throughout the county use a similar pricing system.
This system falls apart, however, when it comes to multiple-family residences and commercial and industrial users. Both categories pay a flat rate no matter how much water they use. This, too, is how it works in many of the county's other water districts.
Extending tiered-rates to commercial and industrial would be a controversial change, but it is one that deserves further study and consideration.
The grand jury deserves credit for not only raising the issue of flat water rates but giving it priority over conservation programs and unrealistic attempts to stop new growth. #
http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2008/02/24/opinion/editorials/23_05_032_22_08.txt
Guest Column: A Glimpse of
By Tim Barnett, research marine physicist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC
The idea of global warming is an abstraction to most folks. However, very shortly we who live in
The Achilles' heel of
About 0.8-1.7 million acre feet of water, enough to support about 6 to 12 million people, comes into the
In a warmer world there will be less snow and what snow there is will melt earlier. The Sierra, which has been our water banker, will go out of business or at least be seriously impaired. This trend, toward less snow and earlier river flow, has recently been documented by rigorous scientific studies. The water climate of
The Sierra source also has been threatened because the pumps that carry the water from the Sacramento Delta have also been killing the federally protected delta smelt, an endangered species, and who knows what else. A judge has ordered a temporary curtailment in pumping water from the delta by over 500,000 acre feet to protect the smelt. Compare this number with the amount of water delivered to
That's not the only problem. The delta has other endangered, protected species as well. As the snow pack dwindles under the impacts of global warming, there will be less fresh water available in the summer to dilute the sea water influx from
The
This overdraft alone would draw down the reservoirs on the
Just-released studies show these reductions will lead to lakes Mead and Powell going dry by 2021 with a 50 percent probability, in other words, a 50-50 chance the Colorado System storage will be gone in just 13 years, and a one in ten chance it will be exhausted by 2014.
So
What can we do about these coming water crises?
First, the bad news. These impacts will be on us before we get any relief from reduction in atmospheric greenhouse gases. The planet would continue to warm for some decades even if we held fixed carbon emissions at today's values immediately. So our actions must first be toward adaptation.
Now the good news. We have many options available right now to help stabilize the situation and sustain the Southwest as we know it, at least for a few decades.
One option is start a serious water conservation effort and that includes the judicious use of recycled water. More dams in
We can shift water between agriculture, which uses 70 to 80 percent of it, and thirsty urban populations.
Desalination is also an obvious solution, as long as it does not require fossil fuel to run the desalination plants.
Another option is to seriously curtail the run away building boom that has succeeded in building communities in our deserts without thought to the stability of their water supply.
These actions, and others like them, will buy us some time. But in the not too distant future, we will have to figure out how to get by with less water than we have today. This is especially true of the
That loss would be equivalent to the total supply of water that Southern California takes from the
Maybe by then, we will have stabilized carbon emissions and brought the greenhouse warming to a near standstill.
Whether that happens or not is totally up to us, the present inhabitants of Planet Earth, not the next generation. That means it is up to you and me! #
http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2008/02/24/perspective/23_08_032_22_08.txt
Water chief defends Vegas mayor
By Victor Morales, staff writer
Comments made by the mayor of Las Vegas saying Imperial Valley farmers will make their fields bone dry in order to irrigate his city in the event of a grave water crisis was not insensitive, Las Vegas’ top water chief said.
Pat Mulroy, the general manager for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which delivers water to more than 1.8 million customers and 40 million annual visitors in
She said Mayor Oscar Goodman’s comments, which have triggered a usually suppressed debate among Western states over water rights, were a reaction to a scientific study suggesting
“You got to put it into context. … There are severe concerns in
“It was not meant as an insensitive comment. Unfortunately it has lent itself to be interpreted that way.”
Another interpretation, Mulroy admitted to, was how “
“
So perhaps, when Goodman uttered what farmers here regard as “fighting words,” it was a reflection of the kind of prevalent atmosphere outside the Valley.
“The
Goodman is not the only one who appears to believe the
Opponents to the Nevada Water Authority’s plan to extract groundwater north of
Imperial Irrigation District spokesman Kevin Kelley said that kind of reasoning is typical.
“It is a kind of disconnect that agricultural areas like ours runs into. … We don’t think it’s an accident that the mayor of
The
“Without a doubt
Mulroy herself has championed water interests lately, she said.
“I’ve been going around the community saying, ‘You need to slow down here.’ … You are severely going to cut the food supply with that kind of thinking,” she said of the opposition to extract ground water.
She said the
But even Mulroy has insinuated in the past the possibility of buying water from
The IID is already transferring a combined 370,000 acre-feet of water to coastal urban areas and the
“We are emphatic about wanting to get out of fallowing as soon as possible and improve (water quantity) through active conservation,” Kelley said.
And last year the Imperial Irrigation District entered into an agreement that was intended to deflect water conflicts. That agreement included Mulroy’s Nevada Water Authority.
Those compromises by the
“We understand that there are urban needs but we have to meet in the middle, and we have demonstrated that,” Rothfleisch said.
Mulroy said the cooperation from the IID in a reservoir project on the All-American Canal that served Las Vegas was a good thing and that there was a limit to getting water from other states.
“We can’t keep on looking to
Despite her present harmonious tone, a line in the sand may have been drawn by Goodman’s comments.
“If his purpose was to get our attention, he succeeded,” Kelley said.
Goodman has not responded to requests from the Imperial Valley Press to clarify his remarks.
“Thank you for your request. Unfortunately, Mayor Goodman is not available for comment,” the mayor’s spokeswoman, Elena Owens, wrote in an e-mail Friday. #
http://www.ivpressonline.com/articles/2008/02/24/local_news/news04.txt
####
No comments:
Post a Comment