Department of Water Resources
California Water News
A daily compilation for DWR personnel of significant news articles and comment
July 22, 2009
1. Top Items–
Teams race to industrial accident at Oroville Dam
Oroville Mercury-Register
MWD stops paying rebates for water-saving devices
L.A. Times
Climate change could put the heat on California crops
L.A. Times
Calif. budget plan includes new offshore oil
Hanford Sentinel
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Teams race to industrial accident at Oroville Dam
Oroville Mercury-Register-7/22/09
Rescue crews from as far away as Chico are racing to the powerplant at the base of Oroville Dam where five to six people have reportedly been injured in an industrial accident.
Just after 8 a.m. dispatchers with Cal Fire-Butte County started calling in technical rescue teams to the location.
Early reports say the people were in the bottom of the "river valve chamber" when "a wall blew out."
Dispatchers have advised responding emergency units that there is no water release associated with the wall collapse.#
http://www.orovillemr.com/search/ci_12890439?IADID=Search-www.orovillemr.com-www.orovillemr.com
MWD stops paying rebates for water-saving devices
L.A. Times-7/20/09
By Nicole Santa Cruz
A cash-strapped conservation credit program run by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California has stopped paying vendors and customers for installing water-saving toilets and appliances.
Though the program has been deemed highly successful, demand for the rebates has increased threefold over the last two years.
Utility reverts to the long ago and not-...In May, the water district moved to suspend the program, said Bob Muir, a spokesman for it.
The incentive program provides rebates to customers and vendors such as ReGreen Corp., a Los Angeles-based company that installs water-efficient devices, including toilets and washing machines, for clients.
The district sells water to 26 public agencies in Southern California.
"We weren't able to keep up with the demand that was coming in," Muir said.
By the time officials did catch up with a backlog of rebate requests -- after adding $20 million in funds to the program, suspending it, then auditing it -- they found that they had $14.2 million in outstanding payments to customers and vendors.
Debra Man, chief operating officer for the water district, said its intent is to pay outstanding debts within the next 30 days.
"We will make every effort to make sure they will be reimbursed," she said. "We recognize that it is important for us to pay the validated pending payments as soon as possible."
Muir said the water district is revamping the program to make sure the same mistakes don't happen again, and hopes to relaunch it sometime in the next month.
But it might be too late for some.
David Duel, one of the owners of ReGreen, said he had to lay off 45 of the company's 52 employees after the district failed to pay the company about $900,000.
"In every sense, we've had to downsize our company," Duel said. "We're just trying to survive."
Marie Ager, director for California Toilet Replacements, a company that installs high-efficiency toilets in multifamily apartments, said her family's business is owed $282,165 for installing high-efficiency toilets in Los Angeles, San Diego and Burbank.
"We pay for all the toilets. We paid the plumbers. We did the work," Ager said.
Ager said she was not doing business anymore because she can't afford to pay plumbers or buy the toilets from vendors.
"Our credit's been cut off," she said.
She said both she and her father have mortgaged their houses."I'm going to lose my house, and my father is going to lose his house if they don't pay us," she said.#
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/environment/la-me-water21-2009jul21,0,5742028.story?track=rss
Climate change could put the heat on California crops
L.A. Times-7/22/09
By Margot Roosevelt
The Lockes have tilled the rich soil along the Mokelumne River since 1850. Now Chris Locke, 57, looks forward to passing down his orchards of 40,000 walnut trees to his four sons.
But the threat of global warming has him worried. "I talk to my boys about climate change," he said. When he was young, frigid fogs rolled off the delta into Lockeford, the town named for his forebears. "We would go a week without seeing the sun. But we don't seem to get that weather anymore."
If San Joaquin Valley farmers such as Locke are fearful, so are the agricultural scientists who support California's $10-billion annual fruit and nut crop, the largest in the nation. A new study from UC Davis, to be published today, found that the number of winter chilling hours, essential to the flowering of orchards, has declined as much as 30% since 1950 in large swaths of the Central Valley, where most of the tree crops are grown.
Only 4% of the Central Valley is now suitable for apples, cherries and pears, all high-chill fruits that could once be grown in half the valley, according to the study. By the end of the century, it says, "areas where safe winter chill exists for growing walnuts, pistachios, peaches, apricots, plums and cherries are likely to almost completely disappear."
Winter chill hours could decrease 60% from 1950 levels by mid-century and by as much as 80% by the end of the century, according to the study.
"Climate change is not just about sea-level rise and polar bears," said UC Davis researcher Eike Luedeling, lead author of the study. "It is about our food security. Climate change may make conditions less favorable to grow the crops we need to feed ourselves."
The study comes amid a spate of reports predicting a decline in agriculture in California -- which produces half of the nation's domestic fruits, nuts and vegetables -- as climate change affects water supplies and growing seasons.
The UC Davis study, which is to appear in the journal PLoS One, builds on a 2007 paper by UC Berkeley scientists Dennis Baldocchi and Simon Wong that predicted dramatic drops in winter chilling hours. But it expands on that research using a variety of climate models, and maps the expected changes in detail.
"These maps directly communicate the devastating effects of climate change on tree crops in California," said co- author Minghua Zhang, a UC Davis professor of environmental and resource science.
Baldocchi endorsed the UC Davis study, remarking, "The irony is, just as the populace is getting more in tune with eating better, eating local, our wonderful fruit industry may be negatively affected."
Some experts assume that the state's agribusiness can adapt by breeding new varieties with lower chilling needs and by expanding the use of "rest breaking" chemicals that compensate for part of the trees' lost chilling hours.
"Adapting is part of the game in agriculture," said Jim Culbertson, head of the California Cherry Advisory Board, a marketing agency.
Scientists caution that adaptation could be expensive and difficult. "Orchards remain in production for decades," Zhang said. "Growers must consider whether there will be sufficient winter chill to support the same tree varieties throughout their lifetime."
Breeding new varieties requires genetic diversity, which is limited in some crops such as pistachios. In addition, low-chilling varieties of many fruits are vulnerable to frost, and rest-break chemicals raise safety issues, lead author Luedeling said.
To project winter chill, researchers used hourly and daily temperature records at 205 weather stations since 1950. They factored that data into 18 greenhouse gas emission scenarios for the 21st century, developed for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of the world's top climate scientists.
Traditionally, California farmers plant their crops by calculating the number of hours in which temperatures are expected to fall below 45 degrees Fahrenheit. The UC Davis researchers used that metric, as well as another model that measures a broader swath of temperatures. That second model shows a slower decrease in winter chill -- up to 60% from 1950 levels by the end of the century.
Some experts put little faith in predictions. "These chill models are so unsophisticated," said Steve Southwick, a former UC Davis fruit science professor who now works for OG Packing, a major cherry and walnut distributor. "The way a tree behaves doesn't much match what the models say, and the level of research on fruit trees is meager."
Luedeling is concerned by what he sees as "not much preparation for these changes" in the agricultural community. "There's not much breeding effort," he said. "The main walnut breeder at UC Davis is retiring and after that, funding will be short."
Meanwhile, Locke, the San Joaquin Valley farmer, figures his orchards' chill hours have gradually sunk from about 1,500 a few decades ago, to about 1,000 to 1,200 today. He has made up for the drop by planting trees closer together and using new varieties, but he worries he may have to switch to other crops.
Few of his farmer friends have focused on global warming, Locke said. "A lot are conservative and don't believe we are experiencing climate change. But we need to anticipate the future. I'm worried about the whole planet, not just our little ranch here."#
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-climate-farms22-2009jul22,0,7564338.story?track=rss
Calif. budget plan includes new offshore oil
Hanford Sentinel-7/22/09
By John Antczak (Associated Press)
The deal to close California's $26 billion budget deficit included a plan to drill for offshore oil, drawing allegations that the fiscal crisis was used for a backroom deal following rejection of the idea by state regulators earlier this year.
Democrats agreed to Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's request to expand drilling from an existing platform off Santa Barbara to generate a one-time $100 million advance royalty payment this fiscal year and an estimated $1.8 billion in royalties over 14 years.
It would be the first new offshore oil drilling on state lands in four decades since a blowout on a platform off Santa Barbara coated miles of ocean and shoreline and galvanized opposition.
Details of the agreement reached late Monday were scarce, but Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, chairman of the State Lands Commission, said Tuesday that the framework involved taking authority for approval of oil leases away from State Lands and giving it to a newly created panel.
"This is a play by the governor to have it his way," he said. "This is a sellout to the oil industry. They want to open the California coast to drilling, and this is the first step."
The lack of details on the agreement and the way it emerged in budget talks concerned Victoria Rome, deputy California advocacy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
"I think it should be very troubling to the public that a decision that was made through a public process in the light of day can be overturned by a few leaders behind closed doors," she said.
Schwarzenegger spokeswoman Lisa Page said the proposal would bring new revenues to the state, end oil drilling off Santa Barbara's coast and speed up the permanent removal of platforms there.
The governor's office said in a statement that the platform involved is already drilling in federal waters adjacent to state waters. It said the project maintains a moratorium on oil drilling "but takes advantage of a specific exemption that allows for new leases if oil is leaking from an existing state field into an actively producing federal field."
The drilling proposal has been percolating since 2008 when Plains Exploration & Production Co. of Houston announced a novel deal with three veteran environmental groups in Santa Barbara County.
The groups, including Get Oil Out!, agreed to promote the plan in exchange for money for the state, thousands of acres of land and Plains' commitment to cease operations countywide by 2022.
Garamendi said he opposed the plan in January because provisions for ending operations could not be enforced and because it would serve as a precedent for further drilling, encouraging the federal government to issue new leases off the California coast.
The $100 million would be a loan against royalties and would be repaid by deductions from future royalty payments to the state, he said.
Garamendi asserted that the sum was of minor usefulness in solving the budget problem.
"I think that this can easily be subtracted from the proposal without doing any harm to what is a terrible piece of work," he said.
Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, said that under the budget agreement, a panel made up the state attorney general, the secretary of resources and the secretary of environmental protection would make a final decision on the project.
Steinberg said the state had run out of options and had to make a choice between a project that would generate about $100 million annually for the next 14 years, or to make deeper welfare and social service cuts.
"And, you know, that's a choice," he said.
Michael Endicott, resource sustainability advocate for Sierra Club California, said environmental standards and statutes should not be rolled back as part of the budget process.
"Eventually we'll be rebuilding and we'll be operating again, and those standards should be implemented again _ that people worked long and hard to put in place in order to avoid problems," he said.
Endicott and Garamendi both said a better alternative would be an oil severance tax that other major producing states have. Their estimates of such a tax ranged from $800 million to $1 billion a year.
"California is the one large state that doesn't charge a fee for the extraction of oil," Endicott said.
Attorney Linda Krop, who represents the three Santa Barbara environmental groups, said they continue to support the agreement they negotiated with Plains but she had not yet consulted with them on the possibility of it being put before a new panel rather than State Lands.#
http://hanfordsentinel.com/articles/2009/07/22/ap/us/us_california_budget_offshore_oil.txt
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