[Water_news] 1. DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS - Top Item for 6/17/08

Department of Water Resources

California Water News

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

 

June 17, 2008

 

1.  Top Items -

 

 

 

Newsblog

The San Diego Tribune -6/16/08

 

Tiny, Clingy and Destructive, Mussel Makes Its Way West

The New York Times- 6/17/08

 

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Newsblog

The San Diego Tribune -6/16/08

Peripheral Canal budget battle

 

SACRAMENTO - Guarding against a unilateral move by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to build a revised Peripheral Canal, key lawmakers have inserted special provisions in the state budget to prevent an end-run around the Legislature and voters.

 

Schwarzenegger's top water advisers maintain they have no intentions of independently launching a new north-to-south delivery system. But, the state has already initiated exploratory environmental studies for four different conveyance options.

 

Even the Legislature's own attorney, in a recent opinion, concluded that the Department of Water Resources "has the authority, without further legislative or voter approval, to build a conveyance facility, commonly referred to as the peripheral canal."

 

Assemblyman Sam Blakeslee, R-San Luis Obispo, who requested the opinion from the Legislative Counsel, called it troubling.

 

"I am concerned that an issue of this statewide importance could be made unilaterally by an agency without the deliberation it deserves," he said.

 

And if the governor insisted on using that power? "I would find that a troubling development," Blakeslee said. "The Legislature should be at the table."

 

Sen. Alan Lowenthal, D-Long Beach, said the Senate wants to make the point that "we're not out of the game." Lowenthal, who chairs a subcommittee, stripped $1.4 million from the governor's request to fund eight positions to study conveyance options.

 

"Without us taking this specific action at this moment, the Legislature would have no role at all on this important subject," Lowenthal said.

 

Contractors that rely on state supplies -- growing more strained by the drought and a court order to protect the rare Delta smelt -- have offered to pay the approximately $4 billion price tag for a new canal that, they say, can protect fish and the fragile Sacramento Delta estuary even as water flows to the south.

 

Schwarzenegger champions a new canal, but has not publicly suggested that he would sidestep lawmakers or the public to start pouring the concrete. He advocates a comprehensive approach, which includes an $11.7 billion bond to pay for a new delivery system, restore the Sacramento Delta, build reservoirs and accelerate conservation. He also has appointed a panel of experts that is developing recommendations for a comprehensive restoration plan.

 

Nevertheless, Assembly and Senate lawmakers want to make sure he doesn't get a chance to seize his authority. They know that Lester Snow, the governor's top water adviser, has long held that the state "has broad authority and discretion" to build a facility, as he told them in a letter last fall.

 

Budget subcommittees in the Assembly and Senate have taken different approaches, but each has the goal of using language in the 2008-2009 spending plan to ensure that the Legislature has a major say in the final program. The governor's team says it wants to continue negotiations on a system-wide fix.

 

That suits Lowenthal, who believes the governor should be free to move ahead on environmental studies -- but stop short of independently selecting a conveyance route.

 

Unless there is a breakthrough, the canal could move up alongside taxes and education as hot-button hang-ups if the budget stalemate drags through the summer, as expected.

 

Mindy McIntyre, who monitors the issue for the Planning and Conservation League, said the Department of Water Resources "would benefit greatly from legislative oversight and stakeholder input" rather than go it alone.

 

"There are a lot of projects that are legal that aren't politically viable or environmentally viable and not good for California," she said.

 

McIntyre said someone needs to apply the brakes to make sure that if a project proceeds it answers environmental concerns over fish, water quality and other environmental issues beyond moving water south.

 

"We're not saying no. We're saying show us it can work," she said.

 

Water officials have tried without success to bring back a smaller, more fish-friendly Peripheral Canal, rejected by 62 percent of the electorate in 1982. Each time, worries about cost, environmental damage and the possibility of the south draining supplies from the north derailed the campaigns.

 

Blakeslee said much has changed in the last quarter-century to warrant a new look at the delta's plumbing system, including global warming, dry spells, plummeting fish populations and revelations of greater seismic threats.

 

"The Legislature should step up proactively and put their own proposal forward," he said.#

http://weblog.signonsandiego.com/news/breaking/2008/06/peripheral_canal.html

 

 

 

Tiny, Clingy and Destructive, Mussel Makes Its Way West

The New York Times- 6/17/08

By John Collins Rudolf

 

A living blanket of tiny, striped mussels covered each one.

 

“The conditions here are ideal for these things, absolutely ideal,” said Mr. Baldwin, 70, a retired design engineer and a National Park Service volunteer.

 

The mussel-coated debris is unmistakable evidence of an event occurring silently and largely out of sight — the colonization of the Colorado River by the quagga mussel, a fingernail-size Eurasian bivalve with an astonishing sex drive and a nasty reputation for causing economic and ecological havoc.

 

Like the closely related zebra mussel, the quagga can cling tenaciously to hard surfaces, like the equipment of the many hydroelectric and water-supply plants along the lower Colorado.

 

“They’re going to be all over the pipes, all over the intakes,” said Gary L. Fahnenstiel, senior ecologist with the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “It’s going to be devastating.”

 

Dr. Fahnenstiel ought to know. The quagga has carpeted much of the Great Lakes, largely displacing the better-known zebra. Its invasion of the Colorado, presumably after crossing the Rockies on recreational boats hitched to trailers, foretells major disruptions not just for utilities, but also for the entire ecology of the lower river.

 

By stripping nutrients and microorganisms from the water, the mussel could do grave damage to a wide variety of species, including small invertebrates, fish and birds.

 

“This is one bad hombre,” Dr. Fahnenstiel said. “It’s almost your worst-case scenario for affecting the entire food chain.”

 

The quagga’s introduction in the Colorado can hardly be a surprise. For almost 10 years, a small chorus has warned of ruinous consequences if the mussels crossed into the West.

 

In 1998, a group called the 100th Meridian Initiative brought together biologists, wildlife officials, water managers, environmentalists and others with the goal of preventing invasive species from crossing the 100th meridian, a historical boundary separating East and West. For seven years, Mr. Baldwin has been the group’s sentinel at Lake Mead.

 

In 2001, Mr. Baldwin, then president of the Lake Mead Boat Owners Association, heard a presentation by a biologist from the initiative on the zebra mussel. The zebra invaded the Great Lakes from Ukraine in the 1980s and spread to major rivers and more than 800 lakes.

 

Mr. Baldwin lobbied officials at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area for more inspections of recreational boats, which carry mussels in bilge pumps and live bait wells. He distributed brochures and spoke widely on the threat. “I started researching it and put on some programs, trying to get people to pay attention. Some did.

 

Most didn’t.”

 

He even built monitoring stations on docks around the lake, but found nothing. In January 2007, however, Mr. Baldwin received a call from a maintenance worker who had spotted a suspicious-looking mussel clinging to a steel cable below a Lake Mead dock. It was a quagga. Investigation quickly found colonies throughout the lake, at depths much greater than usual for zebras. “We were monitoring for zebras, and the quaggas snuck right in beneath us,” he said.

 

At Lake Mead, a deep, narrow reservoir hundreds of miles long created by the Hoover Dam, quaggas appear well on the way to taking over.

 

“Within a year of discovery, it was apparent that they were lakewide, and in areas they were really numerous,” said Kent Turner, chief of resource management for the park service at the recreation area. Sampling the lake bottom has found mussel concentrations in the thousands per square meter, he said.

 

Like the zebra, the quagga breeds externally, forming clouds of veligers, microscopic, free-swimming larvae that can float up to five weeks before settling on any surface that strikes their fancy.

 

By riding the current, quagga veligers have floated hundreds of miles downstream. Adult mussels have been found as far south as the Imperial Dam, near the Mexican border.

 

They have not stopped there. At the Lake Havasu reservoir, on the California-Arizona border, giant pumping stations pull millions of gallons of water a day for cities and farms. Drawn into the Colorado River Aqueduct and the Central Arizona Project canal, veligers have journeyed as far east as Phoenix and Tucson and as far west as San Diego.

 

Skip to next paragraph  “Wherever the river takes them, they have gone,” said Alexia Retallack, a spokeswoman for the California Fish and Game Department.

 

The infiltration of the Colorado poses a major challenge for a water system already strained by record drought. Las Vegas is particularly reliant on the river, drawing 90 percent of its drinking water from Lake Mead.

 

The Metropolitan Water District, which provides water to 26 cities in Southern California, regularly deploys scuba divers to clear mussels from its intake pumps on Lake Havasu. To kill the mussel larvae, 9,000 gallons of chlorine, equal to two trailer tanks, are added to the Colorado River Aqueduct daily. “What we want to do is contain them,” said Ric de Leon, a microbiologist who directs quagga control for the district. “So far, we’re doing fairly well.”

 

California officials have begun aggressive boat inspections, even enlisting canine units trained to find mussels.

 

“We have the first quagga-sniffing dogs on the planet,” Ms. Retallack said.

 

Lined with dams, reservoirs, canals and pipelines, the Colorado more closely resembles a giant plumbing project than a wild river, giving the mussels ample opportunity for mayhem. David Pimentel, a professor of ecology at Cornell and an expert on the economic effects of invasive species, said the maintenance and control costs might run “into the billions, as it has been in the East.”

 

More alarming to some experts are the potential ecological effects. Dr. Fahnenstiel called the mussels’ explosive growth the most significant ecological disruption in modern Great Lakes history. “It’s a huge perturbation,” he said. “I don’t think that can be understated.”

 

In Lake Michigan, fish populations have plummeted as quaggas strip the water of nutrients. “The fish are taking a hit because there’s no food for them,” said Tom Nalepa, a research biologist with the Great Lakes laboratory. “All the food is being sucked out by the mussels. What we’re seeing is the replacement of the fish by the mussels.”

 

By filtering the water, quaggas can increase clarity, letting in sunlight that leads to algae blooms and explosive weed growth. That can, in turn, result in oxygen-starved “dead zones,” observed recently in Lake Erie. By accumulating toxins filtered from the water, the mussels have also contributed to botulism.

 

“In the Great Lakes, we’ve seen avian botulism go through the roof,” Dr. Fahnenstiel said. “We’ve had huge die-offs of loons, which are one of the most beloved species here.”

 

In the Colorado River, two native fish species, the bonytail chub and razorback sucker, are considered particularly vulnerable to mussel competition, and avian botulism may threaten bald eagles around Lake Mead.

 

Biologists also warn that the vector behind the quaggas’ spread, to the Great Lakes by oceanic freighter and to the West on recreational boats, remains open to exploitation by other potentially destructive species. An estimated 180 alien species have reproducing populations in the Great Lakes Basin, with new ones added almost yearly. Most recently, viral hemorrhagic septicemia, a European virus that can cause large fish kills, has spread to three Great Lakes: Huron, Michigan and Ontario.

 

“Everybody in North America needs to be concerned about what species come into the Great Lakes,” Dr. Fahnenstiel said. “There’s no system that’s geographically isolated anymore. We’re all linked.”#

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/science/17muss.html?_r=1&ref=science&oref=slogin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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