A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
July 22, 2008
2. Supply –
Editorial:
Delta Rx
Riverside Press Enterprise- 7/21/08
Valley water well users asked to report any problems
Chico Enterprise
Slowdown begins as Folsom Lake level falls
The Sacramento
Dan Walters: Canal central to solving Delta water problems
The Sacramento
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Editorial:
Delta Rx
Riverside Press Enterprise- 7/21/08
But no idea will work as long as the Legislature continues its time-wasting partisan standoff on water issues.
A report released last week by the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan think tank, says a canal around the delta offers the best way to stem the delta's environmental collapse and sustain a vital water supply for
The proposal resurrects the "peripheral canal" plan that voters overwhelmingly rejected in 1982. But the ecological and policy landscape has changed greatly since then.
There is broad agreement across ideological lines that
But the delta's environmental deterioration could shut down water exports. Last year a court ruling slashed pumping from the delta to protect an endangered fish. And the current system keeps drinking and farm water away from salt water with a series of levees that are in danger of catastrophic and expensive failure. Rising sea levels will make that strategy increasingly impractical. The report estimates that increased salinity could add as much as $1 billion a year to the cost of delta water by mid-century.
Nor can the state end water exports from
Ending exports would cost $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion a year statewide to make up for the lost supply, the report says. But the secondary costs could be far higher. The southern
A channel around the delta, however, would cost Californians less than $1 billion a year at most, while improving water quality and erasing the threat of levee failure. And restoring the delta environment would be far simpler if worries about effects on drinking water were removed from the equation.
Water policy has a history of bitter political battles. But the state cannot dally while its water supply collapses. The stakes are too high for anything but prompt action.#
Valley water well users asked to report any problems
Chico Enterprise
By HEATHER HACKING, Staff Writer
While the
Well-water users in the
Monday the Butte County Department of Water and Resource Conservation issued a press release asking people to report such problems. A form is available online at www.buttecounty.net/waterandresource. (Click on "drought info.") Or phone to receive a form, 538-4343.
Paul Gosselin, director of Water and Resource Conservation, said the information will help the county plan and take proactive steps.
"We're looking at a second year of dry conditions," Gosselin said. "If things don't rebound this winter, there might be a serious situation."
The drought in the 1990s continued for four to five years, he explained.
"We're not at a crisis situation point. But we've learned from the past. We shouldn't wait until the bottom drops off to find out what we're facing," he continued.
He said the county "has a handle" on ag practices, and that those water needs are fairly constant.
However, especially in unincorporated areas, water problems in private wells are more difficult to track.
The water might begin to sputter when it comes out of the tap or the water could become murky. In other situations, the water might be delivered more slowly from the hose or tap.
""If we are finding a lot of reports from one area, it might actually show us a bigger problem," he continued. "If it turns out to be a widespread problem we would never know that if we didn't have this information.
"If you're suffering alone, that won't get us anywhere," Gosselin said.
The worst thing that could happen is for problems to continue and then for people to be caught off guard if their wells run dry, he said.
Groundwater is complicated. Wells draw water from different depths and from different underground aquifers.
Pumping by one property owner could make it more difficult for a landowner nearby to draw water from a well.
Sometimes, irrigation pumping is scheduled among nearby farms so pumps don't draw on the same water supply at the same time.
Pumping water from the ground takes energy, which costs money. Some water users are switching to lower-use irrigation systems.
For domestic-well users, watering in the early morning or evenings will cut back on water needs
.
Other basic water conservation methods will also help, such as only washing clothes and dishes on full loads and turning off water while brushing your teeth. (For more detailed ideas, go to www.owue.water.ca.gov).
On Thursday the Department of Water Resources notified agencies throughout the
While reporting low well levels won't solve the drought, it will provide information for drought relief aid and water reliability planning, the press release stated.
Citizen reports were requested from
http://www.chicoer.com/news/ci_9956746
Slowdown begins as Folsom Lake level falls
The Sacramento
By Niesha Lofing
Low and slow -- that's the reality on Folsom Lake beginning today.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation declared that because the lake continues to get shallower, exposing more hazards, the speed limit for motorboats is 5 mph.
That limit is imposed when the lake's surface elevation falls to 400 feet above sea level. The lake's level was 399 feet at 4 a.m. today.
Mounds from parts of the lake bottom that have breached or are near the lake's surface, along with increasing amounts of debris, make faster speeds unsafe on the lake.
The low lake level also may mean one of the two remaining boat ramps open may soon have to be shut.
Elevation of the lowest part of Granite Bay Stage 1 ramp is 397 feet, just two feet below this morning's surface elevation. If that ramp closes, the Hobie ramp at Brown's Ravine will be the only ramp remaining open on the lake.
Folsom Lake Marina's Web site, which announced the new speed limit regulation today, also said fuel no longer is available on the lake.#
http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/1100222.html
Dan Walters: Canal central to solving Delta water problems
The Sacramento
By Dan Walters
A TEAM OF RESEARCHERS with impeccable credentials and unquestionable independence is uttering an inconvenient truth that
The Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) assembled the team and released its 184-page report last Thursday, quite likely the most important paper PPIC has published in its 14-year history of foundation-supported research.
A peripheral canal, which would carry Sacramento River water around the Delta to the head of the California Aqueduct near
After the Legislature finally approved a canal in the early 1980s, however, an odd-bedfellows alliance of
Ever since, politicians have shied away from a peripheral canal — or the "P-Word," as many in water circles call it — because of its controversial image, even though many water engineers and environmental researchers privately agree with what the PPIC report says publicly.
Pulling water from the Delta interferes with natural flows and degrades water quality, thereby damaging wildlife habitat. While stopping exports would, perhaps, solve that problem, it would deprive
As PPIC says, the problem will grow more acute if global warming, as expected, raises sea levels, thus putting many Delta agricultural islands in danger of reverting to marshland and making its waters saltier. Meanwhile, a major earthquake could make that happen suddenly as it liquefies Delta levees.
With the courts severely restricting water exports from the Delta because of declining fish populations, there has been renewed interest in a peripheral canal, although that term is largely banned from official discourse. But fierce opposition persists, mostly from Delta farmers concerned that a canal would isolate them from public money to fix their deteriorating levees (although they rarely admit to that motive) and from environmental groups that want to use restricted water supply as a tool to curb development in Southern California (although they are equally reluctant to admit that).
Environmental groups once supported a peripheral canal as the best Delta fix, but pulled off. While shedding public tears over the Delta's plight, they have been, in effect, willing to sacrifice its environmental health for their other agenda.
Many years and countless billions of dollars and human-hours of meetings and studies have been squandered in a vain search for a consensus that does not include a peripheral canal. The PPIC team concludes that it's time to end that charade and do what's been needed for decades.
"To be viable," the PPIC team said, "a long-term solution must include governance, regulatory and financial arrangements to ensure that various goals are well served, including water supply, environmental management, and the state's local interests in the Delta. It is unlikely that local and regional stakeholders can negotiate such arrangements on their own in a timely way, given the complexity of the problem and its innumerable stakeholders.
Pursuit of a grand consensus solution for the Delta's many issues is likely only to continue the deteriorating status quo."
The PPIC report is unlikely to sway a peripheral canal's opponents, but their agendas pale next to the larger public interest in improving the Delta's ecology and assuring the state of a reliable water supply. It's time for that larger interest to assert itself. #
http://www.insidebayarea.com/oaklandtribune/ci_9955014
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