[Water_news] 2. DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS: SUPPLY - 4/23/09

Department of Water Resources

California Water News

A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment 

 

April 23, 2009

 

2. Supply –

 

Study: Colorado won't be able to make 9 of 10 deliveries by 2050

The Palm Springs Desert Sun

 

Carneros growers OK water fee

The Napa Valley Register

 

Finally, some good news for Westlands Water District

The Hanford Sentinel

 

 

Study: Colorado won't be able to make 9 of 10 deliveries by 2050

The Palm Springs Desert Sun – 4/23/09

By Keith Matheny

 

Manmade climate change and a naturally occurring drought are combining to imperil one of the West's most vital water sources, the Colorado River, a new scientific study concludes.

 

Climate change is projected to reduce runoff from rain and snow melt in the Colorado River region by 10 percent to 30 percent, global climate models indicate.

 

If a 20 percent runoff reduction occurs, by 2050 nearly nine out of 10 scheduled deliveries of Colorado River water to those who rely on it wouldn't be possible, according to the study by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, based in La Jolla.

In a study last year, Scripps' modeling showed a 50 percent chance that Lake Mead in Arizona would go dry by 2021 if climate change occurs as expected and future water usage isn't curtailed.

 

Lake Mead is the major reservoir of Colorado River water for the southwestern United States.

 

“A reservoir going dry is sort of an abstraction, certainly for the average person,” said Tim Barnett, a research marine physicist with Scripps and the new study's lead author. “What we're talking about here now is the water that comes out of your tap.”

 

The study was published this month by The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

The Colorado River provides critical water supplies to 27 million people in seven U.S. states and Mexico. Its water irrigates more than 3 million acres of farmland, including in the Coachella and Imperial valleys.

 

The Coachella Valley Water District and Desert Water Agency use allotments of Colorado River water to help recharge the underground aquifer that keeps the valley wet and, in many cases, green.

 

The federal Bureau of Reclamation manages Colorado River water. Terry Fulp, deputy director of the bureau's Lower Colorado Region, said the agency's own climate modeling “shows very similar results” to the Scripps Institution's study.

 

But both Fulp and Coachella Valley Water District general manager Steve Robbins said the study leaves a false impression that water managers aren't already hard at work addressing the changing river realities.

 

“We've been talking about these things for the last five years,” Robbins said. “It's not anything we haven't been working on.”

 

Population growth

 

There are further worries.

 

The agreements that divided up Colorado River supplies between states and agencies in the 20th century were made during an unusually wet period — “the wettest century in 1,000 years” based on tree ring data, Barnett said.

 

More historically typical — and lower — river water levels mean less available supply.

 

“The system is definitely over-allocated,” Fulp said. “And the depressed flows due to climate change only exacerbate the problem.”

 

Scripps also is recomputing its models to factor in an expected influx of migration to the southwestern U.S.

 

“The census bureau says by 2030 we'll add 24 million people in the Colorado River drainage,” Barnett said.

 

That will increase the needed water supply by 3 million acre-feet, or about 20 percent of the river's current flow, he said.

 

States along the southern Colorado — Arizona, Nevada and California — already take the full apportionments of river water they are allowed, Fulp said.

 

The influx of new water users is “probably going to be as strong or stronger an effect as human-induced climate change or Mother Nature,” Barnett said. “We're going to be in deep trouble a lot sooner than we say in that paper. That's the bottom line.”

 

Taking action

 

Though not disputing Barnett's statistics, Fulp takes a less alarmed approach — because, he said, Colorado River water-users are already taking conservation measures and other actions to address the worsening situation.

 

Fulp pointed to the Las Vegas area seeking to pipe in water from groundwater supplies in northern Nevada.

 

And the Drop 2 Reservoir captures excess Colorado flows beyond what the U.S. is required by treaty to send to Mexico.

 

The $172 million reservoir along the U.S.-Mexican border in Southern California was largely paid for by the Southern Nevada Water Authority, in exchange for its ability to utilize a portion of the captured river water.

 

Closer to home, the San Diego County Water Authority paid for the concrete lining of the Coachella and All-American canals as part of a 2003 agreement.

 

The resulting conserved water saved from seeping into the ground is in turn shipped to San Diego.

 

“There's substantial flexibility if people can be innovative enough and if the solutions make sense financially, environmentally and politically,” Fulp said.

 

But Fulp added that some of the more serious potential impacts of drought and manmade climate change could be hard to swallow.

 

“If the mean flow decreases 20 percent, it's going to be really tough to find that much innovation,” he said.

Such a situation would require radical solutions, Robbins said.

 

“I think it's very, very probable that if things got really dire, Las Vegas would pay L.A. to desalinate ocean water and Las Vegas would take a similar share of Colorado River water,” he said.

 

“Those types of innovative ways of doing things would be economically and politically more viable.”

 

Barnett said cities may try to take water from farmers, as up to 80 percent of river water goes to agricultural uses.

 

That would almost certainly lead to protracted legal battles, as the Imperial Irrigation District's board steadfastly opposes any additional water transfers.

 

“We're really in sort of a perfect storm, water-wise, in the Southwest. And something's going to have to give,” Barnett said.#

 

http://www.mydesert.com/article/20090423/NEWS07/904230316/-1/RSS01

 

Carneros growers OK water fee

The Napa Valley Register – 4/21/09

By Bill Kisliuk

 

Carneros property owners last week voted overwhelmingly to fund a study to bring in recycled water to irrigate vineyard and ranches.

The vote means landholders in the Los Carneros Water District will pay $15 per acre this year to launch a study, and may pay similar assessments for the next five years.

 

More than 160 of the 260 property owners in the district — which is roughly the area south of Highway 121, west of Stanly Lane and east of the Napa-Sonoma county line — cast their votes by the April 14 deadline.

Sixty-six percent of the property owners voted yes to the assessment and 34 percent voted no. In the weighted results that count — those who own more acreage have more of a say — the owners of about 77 percent of the acres said yes to the property tax assessment, while the owners of 23 percent of the acres said no.

 

Rancher John Stewart, director of the Los Carneros Water District, said the money will go to studying the specifics of bringing water to Carneros: Where pipelines might go, who would want connections, how much it would cost to make those connections and how to route pipelines to minimize environmental or other problems.

John Ahmann, a rancher with 40 acres in Carneros who helped found the district more than 30 years ago, had a one-word response to the election results: “Yippee.”

Water options

Carneros is one of several parts of Napa County where concerns about groundwater are growing. The most troubled region may be the Milliken-Sarco-Tulocay watershed east of the Napa River, where studies have shown a decades-long decline in the water table.

Stewart noted that the situation in Carneros is different than the MST, but said Carneros groundwater supplies are very spotty, with several property owners seeing an annual drop in the amount and quality of water they can pump as summer drags on.

Ahmann said it is not unusual for wells that turn out 50 gallons a minute early in the year to produce only five gallons of more salty, sulfurous water by the end of the dry season.

“In Carneros there are parcels that have great difficulty with well water,” said Stewart. “There are a few isolated areas where you can find a relatively good (quantity of) ground water.

“What we’re looking at is whether various properties will be interested in receiving recycled water, where they would be and if they will be able to use it beneficially,” he said. “From that, you can determine what kind of infrastructure would be needed to supply the water and what would it cost.”

Ahmann said that there are two likely sources for the recycled water: The Napa Sanitation District and a pipeline coming from Marin and Sonoma counties through the North Bay Water Reuse Authority.

The Carneros water district and NSD have negotiated in the past for delivery of reclaimed water, but no pipeline has been built.

Michael Abramson, general manager of NSD, said NSD is willing to discuss providing water to Carneros, but said NSD could not be expected to bear the full cost of building a pipeline.

The North Bay Water Reuse Authority is an agency made up of four water treatment agencies — Napa Sanitation District, Sonoma Valley County Sanitation District, Novato Sanitation District and Las Gallinas Sanitary District near the former Hamilton Air Force Base. The authority is seeking to create a regional solution to water problems by piping reclaimed water to sites around San Pablo Bay. One project is to deliver water to the former Cargill salt ponds in Napa County. The water is needed to flush the ponds after years of industrial use, with a long-term goal of restoring the area to natural wetlands.

To do that, the authority would have to build a pipeline through Carneros.

Ahmann said the North Bay authority is “already going to use the pipeline until the ponds are cleaned up. But after that, here would sit the pipeline. If it is in our backyard and our district, we’d be remiss to not be working with them.”

NSD’s Abramson, whose agency is also part of the North Bay Water Reuse Authority, said pipelines could come from both the Napa and Sonoma sides of the bay and connect near the salt ponds.

In the wake of last week’s vote, Stewart said he hoped that preliminary studies in the Carneros water district could wind up in three to six months. Then the water board would know where and whether to proceed in working with potential providers.

“The board has been working on this for a long time and it seemed important to ask for the community’s support,” he said. “Now, I believe there is a great responsibility for the board to move this ahead.”#

 

http://www.napavalleyregister.com/articles/2009/04/21/news/local/doc49ed3f826f944073431940.txt

 

 

Finally, some good news for Westlands Water District

The Hanford Sentinel – 4/23/09

By Seth Nidever

Westlands Water District growers found out Tuesday they'll be getting 10 percent of their water delivered instead of 0 percent. The announcement came from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The Bureau runs the Central Valley Project, the massive federal system that brings water from Northern California and sends it to farmers and urban residents in the southern half of the state via massive pumps in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.

March storms allowed for the increase, a Bureau press release stated.

But the announcement means little in terms of planting decisions that were made months ago.

Most growers decided to let the majority of their ground lie fallow after hearing in January that Westlands would get no water.

The amount of unplanted ground in western Kings and Fresno counties is a sign of the times, with drought and endangered species cutbacks curtailing the delta pumps and drying up the huge stretch of Westlands acreage that drivers zoom past on Interstate 5 in the San Joaquin Valley.

 

The dwindling water supply has led to unemployment as high as 40 percent in some Valley communities on the Westside, a situation that spurred thousands of farmworkers, growers and agricultural advocates to join a "March for Water" last week from Mendota to San Luis Reservoir.

Over half of Westlands' 600,000 acres will remain barren despite the allocation increase, said Sarah Woolf, Westlands spokeswoman.

That translates into less than 2.5 inches of water per acre in the district's farmland, she said.

Most of the additional water will go to permanent crops like almond and pistachio trees.

This year represents an ongoing downward spiral for Westlands growers.

In the last wet year -- 2006 -- growers got 100 percent of their allocation. That number dropped to 65 percent in 2007 and 40 percent in 2008, Woolf said. The 2008 allocation dropped further in the summer months to 20 percent because of a lack of March and April precipitation.

The allocation would be 65 to 70 percent this year if not for a biological ruling protecting the delta smelt fish, Woolf said.

Grower Phil Brooks called Tuesday's announcement "nothing compared to what we should be getting."

"You have the (State Water Project) at 30 percent, and the wildlife refuges are at 100 percent. It's not right," Brooks said.

Grower Ted Sheely said he hopes that the announcement will put the pressure on for major changes to the system.

"This really shows the need for a comprehensive water plan in the state," Sheely said.

Sheely said the Westlands allocation had never dipped below 25 percent until this year. He said growers have already done what they can in terms of conservation by installing such things as permanent drip lines that deliver water to roots below the surface.

Sheely said he's banking his portion of this year's surface water in case the district gets another zero allocation next year.

"We can't cut back anymore," he said.#

 

http://www.hanfordsentinel.com/articles/2009/04/22/news/doc49ef59e46c396031321270.txt

 

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