[Water_news] 3. DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS: WATERSHEDS - 10/27/08

Department of Water Resources

California Water News

A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment

 

October 27, 2008

 

3. Watersheds –

 

Outdoors: As lakes empty, sunken treasures emerge

San Francisco Chronicle

 

Northern California wetlands are getting back to natural

Los Angeles Times

 

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Outdoors: As lakes empty, sunken treasures emerge

San Francisco Chronicle – 10/26/08

By Tom Stienstra

 

(10-25) 15:19 PDT -- Plummeting water levels at many reservoirs in Northern California this fall are unveiling an array of sunken treasures, including cars and boats, old tunnels and roads, and even towns and the remains of historic gold-mining operations.

 

The ambitious scrounger can also find hundreds of dollars worth of fishing lures on rocky snags and bushes now high and dry.

 

Enlightened anglers can study exposed lake bottoms and find all of the best fishing spots for future years, that is, the ledges, rock piles, holes, channels and old trees where fish hide and feed.

If you haven't seen the phenomenon, the low water at Shasta, Oroville, Camanche, San Luis, Berryessa and many other lakes can be shocking. Some lakes, such as Shastina, Success and Kaweah, are empty except for little pools near the dams.

 

These scenes are the result of so much water being sent south the past two years in a period when California has received 70 percent of historic rain and snowfall.

 

All the empty lakes have created the chance for real-life scavenger hunts, adventures where you never know what you might find. Here are some examples:

 

Shasta Lake, Shasta County: The state's largest reservoir, with 370 miles of shoreline, is down 155 feet and is only 29 percent full. That is the lowest since 1992 (also down 155 feet). The upper lake arms are now dry canyons, unveiling ghosts of the past. Off Lakeshore Drive at Lakehead, you can see an old railroad tunnel and a train trestle, an old bridge at Doney Creek, and near Antlers Resort, an old bridge for Highway 99 has reappeared. Same thing in Salt Creek, where an old Highway 99 Bridge from 1925 has emerged above the water. Near the dam, you can see this massive tower that juts straight up 50 feet out of the water. That tower is what is left of the facility that hoisted concrete when the dam was built. Note: At the end of the drought of 1976-77, Shasta was down 230 feet, the lowest since being built.

 

Lake Oroville, Butte County: Several deep canyons feed into an expansive lake body at Oroville. The lake is down 225 feet at the dam, 30 percent full, so the lake arms look like a series of miniature Grand Canyons. In turn, there have been a series of finds: one boat and a dozen vehicles. The record low from the 1978 drought year is only 34 feet away.

 

Lake Camanche, Amador County: At 35 percent full, Camanche has a ways to go before its underwater town is revealed, as it was in 1992, when the lake was drained to near empty. But history galore is being revealed up the Mokelumne River Canyon arm of the lake. Along the exposed lakebed, you can see cables, brackets and tailings that date back to the gold miners. In some cases, now high above the water line, you can spot the foundations on the canyon walls for historic bridges.

 

Lake Berryessa, Napa County: At Berryessa, everybody watches the water level at the Glory Hole. It is located near the dam, visible from Highway 128. The Glory Hole looks like a concrete cylinder that juts straight up from the water. When the lake fills, water spills over the top of cylinder and into a 72-foot opening, creating a spillway downstream to Putah Creek. It's an odd sight right now with 26 feet of the cylinder exposed. If the lake goes down another 5 feet, the underwater ghost town of Monticello will start to be revealed, including a concrete bridge and several building foundations. Capell Cove, a favorite fishing spot, looks like a dry canyon.#

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/26/SPTH13N9HB.DTL

 

Northern California wetlands are getting back to natural

Los Angeles Times – 10/26/08

By Julie Cart

 

 

 

 

Reporting from Point Reyes Station, Calif. -- Conservationists often speak of restoring landscapes as erasing the "hand of man." But sometimes the job of undoing decades of human manipulation requires wielding an even heavier hand.

It took eight years of planning, of which two were spent bulldozing and excavating to knock down levees and redirect creeks, to re-create the "naturalness" of the Giacomini Wetlands, one of the most extensive restoration projects of its kind undertaken by the National Park Service.

 

The project comes more than 60 years after one of the largest estuary systems on the Central Coast was obliterated to make way for dairy cattle providing milk and butter during World War II.

Today, after the last levee is breached and high high tide is restored to most of the 560 acres of former pasture, the Giacomini Wetlands at Point Reyes National Seashore will begin to perform their natural function: restoring the health of Tomales Bay.

The new estuary system is integral to a 200-square-mile watershed, where it filters pollutants. It also serves as a habitat and nursery for a menagerie of marine life and birds.

 

As some water has seeped in during the last months, park rangers have reported rare sightings: rays and leopard sharks gliding into the shallows of the former pasture.

"We couldn't get it back to what it looked like in 1860, and that's OK," said park service hydrologist Brannon Ketcham, standing atop an 8-foot-high berm that was about to be scraped away. "The idea is to return the natural hydraulics, and the habitat will come back. In a year, no one will know we did anything."

The new wetlands are at the south end of Tomales Bay, a shallow 12-mile-long finger slicing inland from the Pacific, much of it over the San Andreas fault. The wetlands were first squeezed at the turn of the century when a levee was built at the south end to allow a road. Then the system was blocked off from the bay and drained in 1946 to accommodate west Marin County's burgeoning dairy industry.

Over the years, farmers created a network of channels and ditches that redirected and managed the freshwater flow. Without the flushing action from the exchange of freshwater and saltwater, the bay stagnated, became heavy with sediment and ran afoul of the federal Clean Water Act. Much of the wildlife abandoned the site.

After the restoration began in 2000, cattle were gradually phased out of the property. By the beginning of last year, they were mostly gone.

Park biologists were amazed to discover an immediate bounty of rare species: Tidewater goby, small fish thought to be eliminated from the area, were found in Tomasini Creek, on the property's east side. Elsewhere, biologists found western pond turtles and California red-legged frogs.

To accommodate the protected species, project planners created separate refuges.

Birds already throng to Point Reyes, which is on the Pacific Flyway. Roughly 45% of North American bird species can be found in the area. But now in the wetlands, rarely seen shorebirds such as greater yellowlegs and the red-necked phalarope have made themselves at home, as have clapper rails, California black rails and northern harriers, also known as marsh hawks.

Otters and seals are becoming more common in Lagunitas Creek, a popular destination for kayakers. White sturgeon, steelhead, chinook and coho salmon thrive in the waters. In fact, the state's largest recorded coho, 22 pounds, was pulled from Lagunitas Creek in 1959. About 15% of California's coho are found in this watershed.

Restoring the wetlands will do more than help fish, said Lorraine Parsons, a wetlands ecologist with the park service. The project should help protect a small group of homes at the south end of the property that are regularly flooded.

"When they leveed this, they took out about 50% of the Tomales Bay watershed," she said. "It no longer served as a filtering tool for the water here; it didn't help in flood control."

The project was jump-started by $4 million from a California Department of Transportation mitigation fund that allowed the park service to acquire the land from the Giacomini familyin 2000.After that, the Point Reyes National Seashore Assn., a nonprofit group that funds park projects, scrounged to find $6 million to finance the complicated restoration.

"It's funny. You'd think that it would be easy to take down levees," Parsons said. "Just come in and mow them down. But actually it has to be given a lot of thought."

After barns, fences and irrigation material were removed, heavy-equipment operators followed precisely drawn plans to shave and reshape the berms over months. Lighter equipment with special treads was used in boggy areas, and many of the trucks removing soil operated on bio-diesel fuel.

Most federal projects of this size can be expected to draw opposition, but the Giacomini Wetlands effort has garnered surprisingly wide approval, in part because the public will have access to much of the site once it's fully restored.

The park, established in 1962, draws about 2.2 million visitors a year, many from the San Francisco Bay Area 40 miles to the south.

"Park service restoration projects often take place in wilderness or in backcountry," Parsons said. "No one sees them. This is a project that is happening in front of everyone.

"People are excited. A local woman called me and we talked about the project. She said her whole family was following it. Her 3-year-old was beginning to identify the yellow excavator and the orange one, and the bulldozers. Meanwhile, her 17-year-old was outside with a spotting scope identifying different birds. That's pretty cool."#

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-wetlands26-2008oct26,0,7474565.story