Department of Water Resources
California Water News
A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
August 17, 2009
3. Watersheds –
Firefighters gaining upper hand on 11 California wildfires
L.A. Times
Tilapia, pelicans thrive at Salton Sea
The Desert Sun
Snails threaten Tomales Bay Olympia oysters
S.F. Chronicle
Any tinkering with Cosumnes must keep food, future in mind
Sacramento Bee
The River Watcher: Set adrift
Oroville Mercury-Register
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Firefighters gaining upper hand on 11 California wildfires
L.A. Times-8/17/09
Firefighters this morning were gaining the upper hand on 11 brush fires burning around California.
Firefighters were slowly getting the Lockheed Fire, north of Santa Cruz, under control. For days, the fire had threatened coastal communities, but most of the more than 2,000 residents evacuated last week were allowed to return to their homes.
The La Brea Fire in the Los Padres National Forest, which burned 87,000 acres, is now 64% contained.
A fire in Yuba County, which at one time was threatening a small town, is now moving away from populated areas, and evacuations there have been lifted.
But firefighters stressed that the danger is not over and a shift in wind or fire direction could threaten more homes.
Investigators said the fast-moving La Brea Fire was sparked by flames from a cooking fire near a remote, overgrown canyon in Los Padres National Forest.
The La Brea Fire in Santa Barbara County was started by an illegal marijuana operation, officials said, apparently making it the first major wildfire in the state caused by drug traffickers.
Officials with the county Sheriff's Department, which recently eradicated other nearby marijuana plots, said the site was run by a Mexican drug organization, but officials Sunday declined to say how investigators had reached that conclusion.
Narcotics agents say hidden marijuana gardens are increasingly being planted in California's mountainous regions, including its vast national forests. Federal agents say many of these pot farms are tied to Mexican drug cartels that use forest lands to camouflage large operations.
Even as firefighters battled the flames, authorities said those believed to be responsible were probably still in the forest trying to escape on foot. No suspects had been apprehended as of late Sunday, and law enforcement officials warned the public not to approach anyone who looked suspicious and to notify the Sheriff's Department.
Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department officials would not say whether the suspects were armed. But law enforcement officials with experience eradicating illicit pot operations say that is likely. U.S. Forest Service Fire Cmdr. Jeanne Pincha-Tulley said the agency's law enforcement units would be prepared if they came upon the fleeing growers.
"I doubt they would come near the firefighters," she said. "But considering how much we tramp through the woods, it's kind of scary."#
Tilapia, pelicans thrive at Salton Sea
The Desert Sun-8/17/09
Keith Matheny
Say this for tilapia at the Salton Sea: They're tenacious.
As salinity increases and other challenges threaten California's largest lake, the hardy fish continue to not only hold on but almost thrive.
State officials in November 2007 told The Desert Sun that the fish species was at the highest numbers they'd seen in five years.
Corresponding populations of fish-eating brown and white pelicans were also at their highest counts in years at the sea.
While government agencies haven't been as diligent in keeping track since, both tilapia and pelican populations remain strong, officials said.
Low lake levels have for nearly a year prevented the California Department of Fish and Game from getting boats onto the sea for gill-net catch studies of tilapia populations, department biologist Jack Crayon said.
“Although the water quality continues to degrade, and the size of the sea continues to shrink, we have seen indications that the tilapia population is as strong as ever,” he said.
LaVon Jaksch of Salton City, president of the West Shores Chamber of Commerce, said she sees anecdotal evidence of strong fish populations every day out her window.
“There are still quite a few people going out and fishing, which is wonderful,” she said.
“I think (the tilapia) have proven them wrong. They're still thriving.”
But how?
“Last year and so far this year, we haven't seen the mind-boggling levels of fish kills that we'd experienced several years ago,” Crayon said.
Fish kills typically occur when hydrogen sulfide gas and dissolved ammonia build up in the sea's depths, then are suddenly stirred to shallower waters by high winds, Crayon said.
Rather than fewer wind events, it could be that more frequent winds prevent the deadly gases from building up beneath the sea, he said.
Pelican counts in recent years have not been done “with the same rigor as in the past,” Crayon said, due to the federal and state governments' budget and personnel challenges.
But the sea birds “are still in the same ballpark” as the high numbers of a few years ago, he said.
Jaksch said she sees pelicans on the lake in the mornings and afternoons.
“They're absolutely gorgeous, and they're all over the place,” she said.
The Salton Sea's demise is an inevitability without a major intervention. The sea has been slowly dying for decades, as its water salinity increases.
The sea is expected to shrink significantly by 2018, when water transfers will reduce agricultural runoff, its primary source of water.
Fish and bird habitats could be severely affected, and an exposed dry lake bed could spew dust into the air for miles, even into the Coachella Valley.
A 75-year, nearly $9 billion proposal to restore the Salton Sea has stalled in the state legislature, though smaller habitat restoration and preservation projects continue.
“We're just trying to make sure we are not forgotten,” Jaksch said.
The sea's salinity remains at about 50 parts per thousand, Crayon said — significantly higher than ocean water but still far below the Great Salt Lake in Utah or the Dead Sea in Israel.
Biologists believe the full impacts of water transfers by 2018 will raise Salton Sea salinity to 60 parts per thousand, which could prevent tilapia from reproducing.
But they've beaten the odds, and the increasing saltiness of the water, so far.
“It's been surprising that (the tilapia) have handled that physiological trauma so well,” Crayon said.
“That they're not only holding on but still existing in fairly robust populations is somewhat surprising.”#
Snails threaten Tomales Bay Olympia oysters
S.F. Chronicle-8/14/09
By Peter Fimrite
The rare surviving Olympia oysters of Tomales Bay, once an integral part of the Indian diet and a staple during the San Francisco Gold Rush, are being wiped out by voracious alien snails.
Half of the oysters native to the pristine estuary along the Point Reyes National Seashore are being devoured by whelk snails, also known as Atlantic Oyster Drills, according to a new California Sea Grant study.
The gluttonous predators drill into the shells of oysters and suck out the insides.
"There are whole areas of Tomales Bay where there are very few adult oysters left," said Ted Grosholz, a marine ecology specialist at UC Davis and co-author of the study, which was published the journal Oecologia. "In some places, 80 to 90 percent have been eaten by these predators."
Although the area's farmed oysters are also threatened, those beds are in areas less susceptible to the snails. Also, the more-controlled growing environment makes it easier to limit the damage.
The uniquely destructive quality of the Atlantic Oyster Drill is crucial to scientists who have tried for years to reintroduce Olympia oysters to Tomales and San Francisco bays with little success. The Olympia is the only oyster native to California.
"We stopped fishing Olympia oysters 100 years ago, so they should have come back," Grosholz said. "Why didn't they come back? Part of the story we think are these drills."
The study found that the Atlantic invaders, unlike native snails, are able to handle the fresh water and silt that flows down from the creeks emptying into Tomales Bay. These nutrient-rich areas are the historic habitat of Olympia oysters.
Elsewhere in the estuary, native red rock crabs eat the alien whelk snails and efforts to introduce Olympias have met with some success. But the crabs do not go into the low salinity habitat near, for instance, Lagunitas Creek, where the oysters once thrived, Grosholz said. European green crabs, an introduced species that can handle the freshwater flows, do not prey on whelk snails.
"This means that nearly half the habitat is inhospitable to re-establishing native oysters," said David Kimbro, a postdoctoral associate at Florida State University who, as a Sea Grant trainee at UC Davis, was the project's lead author.
Olympia oysters once blanketed subtidal regions from Southern California to southeastern Alaska. The tangy delicacy was a crucial source of food for local Indians long before Europeans arrived in California.
Early pioneers described the flavor of the tiny mollusks, which are about the size of a 50-cent piece, as "coppery." They were a delicacy during the Gold Rush. The Hangtown Fry was created, according to one legend, by a condemned man who ordered the two most expensive items he knew of at the time - oysters and eggs - for his last meal.
Because they were so small, it took 1,600 to 2,000 shucked Olympias to make a gallon. So it didn't take long for the oyster beds in San Francisco Bay to be depleted.
Although some harvesting continued in some areas of California until the 1930s, wild oysters in the Bay Area were pretty much wiped out by 1911.
What was lost were the underwater shell beds that provided habitat for a wide variety of aquatic life. Meanwhile, the filter-feeding mollusks cleaned the water. Scientists believe water clarity was significantly better several hundred years ago because of the oysters.
"This underlines the consequences of introduced species," Grosholz said. "We've lost ecosystems that we may not be able to recover."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/14/BAIG1955JM.DTL
Any tinkering with Cosumnes must keep food, future in mind
Sacramento Bee-8/16/09
By Case van Steyn
Opinion
In the July 26 Viewpoint article "To save Delta: Ditch the groundwater myth," Mike Eaton paints a picture of the Cosumnes River that is largely inaccurate.
The Cosumnes River is the last wild and undammed river west of the Sierra.
It has always gone dry in the summer. I played in that river during my childhood in the mid-1950s, and I now farm along the river, producing food and fiber to feed and clothe the world. I and my fellow farmers along the Cosumnes know the river better than any other, and that it has never sustained year-round flows.
The river's headwaters travel approximately 80 miles from its starting point on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada range at over 6,000 feet elevation to eventually emptying into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
The river's vitality relies mostly on rain and winter snowpack, and without storage facilities to capture the runoff during the wet season, the river goes dry and always has. Without infrastructure, most of the rivers in California would also go dry, given the fact that California is an arid, desert state.
While Eaton claims extensive pumping of groundwater by nearby farmers causes the river to run dry, he fails to adequately recognize that agriculture pumps water on a seasonal basis, only pumping water four to five months out of the year to irrigate crops, as opposed to urban users who pump water year-round.
But most of all, what is never considered is that water is used to produce food and fiber, an essential element to life, and without irrigated crop lands you can expect to get your produce, milk and meat from other countries that are unable and unwilling to produce it as safely and abundantly as California farmers and ranchers.
Eaton draws an interesting conclusion when he asks the state government to regulate and create laws that will control water. The key is not more state regulation but rather responsible local land-use planning and prudent management of our water resources to maintain an intelligent balance among all uses.
If the goal is to have the Cosumnes River do something that it has never done before, be prepared to create upstream storage to contain water in wet years and improve the miles of levees along the river so it can handle water year round.
Case van Steyn has lived and farmed along the Cosumnes River since 1955.
http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/story/2111361.html?storylink=pd
The River Watcher: Set adrift
Oroville Mercury-Register-8/16/09
By Rex Burress
When the Lake Oroville water level sinks in the summer, you can look down those barren canyons at the Bidwell Marina and see nearly 1,000 houseboats moored to their buoys, squeezed tighter and tighter by the receding shoreline.
A dilemma may be resolved in 2009, as the departing marina operator ordered the evictions of the houseboats in a changeover. A lot of floating dreams face evacuation and some major hauling-hardships in storing their vessels on land. Anchoring a houseboat to a buoyed cable is big business for marinas capitalizing on the compulsion to live on the water — cool, cool water in a hot summer land —for those who can afford it.
Floating on the water has been a mankind obsession, almost as intense as wanting to fly, ever since the ancients watched birds do it so easily (float and fly). Initially, a raft helped the dream along, and eventually log boats and canoes were crafted. Water transportation evolved from dugout canoes to gigantic steel ocean liners, just like airplanes progressed from single-engine biplanes to supersonic jet status.
As a boy, I remember floating shingle boats on a little pool that I dammed on a farm ditch. Minute blocks of wood were tacked on the shingle-deck as cabins, and I would transfer myself down to an inch-sized voyager sailing across the 10-foot by 10-foot puddle to faraway places with strange-sounding names. Oh, what the boyhood imagination can contrive!
Like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn floating on a raft of boards on the Mississippi, there has always been a fascination in being on a boat afloat above the deadly dangers down under and traveling to the wonders on the other side.
Other than drowning, the danger is unlikely except in a boy's imagination. Those real dangers exist elsewhere, though, with crocodiles, piranhas, sharks, sea snakes, and jellyfish being the principal animals able to put you under for good.
Float trips down dancing streams is popular in many countries, especially in the clear water streams of the . Ozarks in the United States. Even local floaters on the Forebay and Feather River at Oroville thrill to the mastery of maneuvering a boat and enjoying the wildlife of the water world.
The feeling of elation is somewhat like the free feeling when rockhunting on the desert during spring wildflower time. The boundaries of roadways and cities disappear, and your spirits are elevated in space and sky. Imagine what an astronaut must feel! Or an ocean sailor!
If you don't own a houseboat, you can rent one for a floating vacation on many lakes. There is a privilege involved, but a price, too. "The water gets its price for what the water gives us!" (After Lowell)
One of the most remarkable "houseboat-of-sorts," called a keelboat, was used by the Lewis and Clark 1803-06 expedition up the Missouri River. The covered cabin gave shelter, and the boat had a sail, but erratic winds forced the 30 men to pull the load of supplies, using ropes from the shore, until they reached shallow streams and shifted to dugout canoes.
"If there is magic on planet Earth, it is contained in water."#
http://www.orovillemr.com/search/ci_13142183?IADID=Search-www.orovillemr.com-www.orovillemr.com
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