Department of Water Resources
California Water News
A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
September 1, 2009
2. Supply –
Parched state on track for bumper tomato crop
Sacramento Bee
Over-pressurized pipes cause water-main breaks in La Mesa
San Diego Union-Tribune
Solvang to hold second water workshop
Lompoc Record
Cloud seeding creates rain Northern Nevada needs, Las Vegas wants
Las Vegas Sun
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Parched state on track for bumper tomato crop
Sacramento Bee-9/1/09
Despite the water shortage, California farms are on target to produce a record-crushing crop of processing tomatoes, which are used to make everything from ketchup to tomato soup.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Monday estimated the 2009 crop at more than 27 billion pounds, beating by at least 2.5 billion pounds the record set in 1999.
Water scarcity drove reductions in tomato acreage in some parts of the Central Valley, such as western Fresno County. But record high prices drove comparatively water-rich farmers elsewhere in the state to increase plantings.
Tomato acreage in San Joaquin County, for instance, rose at least 38 percent this year, to more than 44,000 acres, according to the report. Statewide, processing tomato acreage increased by roughly 31,000 acres, to at least 308,000 acres.
California grows more than 95 percent of U.S. processing tomatoes, and about 30 percent of the world crop.#
http://www.sacbee.com/business/story/2151677.html
Over-pressurized pipes cause water-main breaks in La Mesa
San Diego Union-Tribune-8/31/09
By Jose Luis Jiménez and Susan Shroder
A test of the city's water system sent too much pressure through the pipes, causing three mains to rupture Monday afternoon in separate areas of the city, a Helix Water District spokeswoman said.
The breaks caused water to rush up from below the ground, closing several streets and leaving 46 customers without water. Repair crews plan to work through Monday night to have the streets open for the Tuesday morning commute, said spokeswoman Kate Breece.
Two of the breaks were reported about 1 p.m., said La Mesa police Lt. Carlos Medero. One occurred near the intersection of Yale and University avenues, and caused a sinkhole on Yale about 100 feet south of University.
“There was significant (street) damage,” Medero said.
The second break occurred a few minutes later in a residential area at Oxford Street and Purdue Avenue.
A third break occurred about 2:50 p.m. just south of the intersection of 73rd and Amherst streets.
On Yale, an area of the street about 50-to-70-feet wide buckled, Medero said, creating a sinkhole about 10 feet in diameter.
No one was injured and no vehicles were damaged, the lieutenant said.
Water officials are trying to determine what caused the spike in pressure during the test.
Another water main break on Sweetwater Road, near St. George Street, in Spring Valley temporarily left a shopping center without water, Breece said. Officials do not believe that rupture was related to those in La Mesa.#
http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/aug/31/bn31breaks-la-mesa/
Solvang to hold second water workshop
Lompoc Record-9/1/09
An updated version of Solvang’s master water plan, including projections of how much water the city will need and how it will get it, will be the topic of a public workshop at 7 p.m. Wednesday.
A Fresno consultant prepared the city’s master water plan in 2002, but “since that time, this document has become stale,” said City Manager Brad Vidro.
With the help of the Water Department, he has updated the plan with current data and will present it to the City Council at 7 p.m. Wednesday at City Hall, 1644 Oak St.
One result of the update is that city staff members think Solvang will now need less water at “buildout” — when the land inside the current city limits is fully developed — than the 2002 plan projected.
In 2002, the plan predicted an eventual demand for 2,200 acre-feet of water per year; the update expects the city to need 2,003 acre-feet. The city’s annual usage has been closer to1,600 acre-feet for the past decade.
The document also reviews some history of Solvang’s water use and recommends moving ahead with the drilling of six new wells in the bed of the Santa Ynez River, which the City Council has already approved.
“We actually used to use 2,100 acre-feet in the late ’80s,” Vidro said. “We had less population and used more water,” with a peak use of 2,153 acre-feet in 1988.
Since that time, however, a growing conservation ethic as well as higher water rates have led to a steady decrease in demand for water, he said.
However, the city has grown increasingly reliant on deliveries from the State Water Project, which have become unreliable as California is in its third year of drought.
River wells would provide more local control — if a pending plan by the federal operators of Lake Cachuma allows enough water to be released from the lake for Solvang and other users to take their permitted allotments, Vidro said.
Wednesday’s session is an opportunity for the staff to report to the City Council, get any further direction from the council and allow the public to ask questions and make comments, Vidro said.
The city has state approval to draw a maximum of 5 cubic feet per second of water from the river but would need the new wells to achieve that, and its rights to that amount need to be renewed soon.
The city will still pursue that permit, Vidro said, because “there are months in the summer when we’re still going to need that peak rate.”
At a workshop in May, the council invited public comment on a plan for the city to cooperate with Santa Ynez River Water Conservation District, ID1, to cooperate on the development of new water sources.
This workshop is not for the purpose of discussing that idea, Vidro added, but simply to talk about how much water the city might need in the future and the best ways to get the water.
The possibilities of working with ID1 will be the subject of a future meeting after Stetson Engineering consultants have finished a report on the potential compatibility of the two agencies’ water systems, Vidro said.#
http://www.lompocrecord.com/articles/2009/09/01/news/centralcoast/news10.txt
Cloud seeding creates rain Northern Nevada needs, Las Vegas wants
Las Vegas Sun-8/31/09
By Stephanie Tavares
When Southern Nevada Water Authority General Manager Pat Mulroy suggested the agency fund a shuttering Desert Research Institute cloud seeding program, it turned more than a few heads.
The project is vital to a stable water supply in Northern Nevada, but what does it have to do with Southern Nevada?
Well, not much — at least not right now.
The cloud-seeding program provided precipitation to some of the rural ground water basins from which the authority wants to eventually pump water for Las Vegas.
The authority has been involved in the institute’s cloud-seeding program for years — but not in Nevada. It has paid the research institute $121,000 over the past three years to conduct cloud-seeding research and spur precipitation in the mountains between Denver and Grand Junction, Colo. The bill went to the authority’s Enterprise Fund, which gets most of its money from wholesale delivery charges to municipal water agencies.
Because 90 percent of Las Vegas’ drinking water comes from the Colorado River, and because snowmelt from the upper basin has dropped amid the drought, paying for cloud seeding there made sense. In that case, the authority was effectively trying to create its own water.
Cloud seeding means adding chemicals to clouds to induce or increase precipitation. In Nevada that most often involves pumping silver iodide particles into clouds from a remote controlled mountaintop station when the right cloud patterns are present. The silver iodide changes the composition of ultracold water in the clouds, turning the liquid into snow or ice, which then falls to the ground.
Desert Research Institute has 23 cloud-seeding stations in Nevada and six in the Sierra Nevada range along the California-Nevada border. They create about 65,000 acre-feet of precipitation each year in Nevada, mostly in the form of snow, according to institute data.
The institute is a world leader in cloud-seeding research and technology dating to the 1970s. The program developed remote-controlled mountaintop cloud seeding stations used today in Nevada and around the world.
But in this year’s legislative session, funding for the program dried up. With the economy in a shambles and not enough new income, the Legislature made deep cuts in the higher education budget. Desert Research Institute gets only about 15 percent of its budget from the state, but the cuts were felt mainly by the institute’s service-oriented divisions, such as the cloud-seeding program, which get most or all of their funding from state coffers.
The cloud-seeding program is small and appears to have been relatively efficient, with, at most, five highly trained employees with years of experience. Its budget was $550,000 to $600,000 a year, depending on how much cloud seeding took place.
The program served the community in important ways but didn’t bring in many grants or closely align with the core mission of research, institute President Stephen Wells said.
“I don’t have any sources of money to go to keep these parts of DRI functional,” Wells said. “It was a terrible choice I was forced to make.”
How Southern Nevadans might benefit from manipulating precipitation above the Sierra Nevada range and in northeastern Nevada, from which we currently get no water, isn’t as clear.
Las Vegas Valley Water District spokesman J.C. Davis says it all comes down location and timing.
The seeding program increases snowpack by 2 percent to 10 percent, the higher percentages coming in drought years, according to the institute’s figures. When that snowpack melts, some of it recharges the aquifers in the valleys below.
The water authority owns water rights in four such aquifers between here and White Pine County. It has suspended an application for more water in the fifth, Snake Valley, a ranching community below Great Basin National Park on the Utah border.
Water authority staff members are examining whether it would be in Southern Nevada’s best interest to fund part of the core cloud-seeding program, which would make it possible for the institute to continue seeding above the Colorado River basin while supporting cloud seeding above the basins in which it owns water rights.
Keep the water coming in now, when the drought is at its height, they hypothesize, and you’ve got a better chance of pulling something out of the ground in the future.
Northern Nevada, though, is immediately dependent on that snow. It, like much of the rest of the West, has been hit hard by a multiyear drought. The additional tens of thousands of acre-feet of precipitation created each year by the seeding program has kept ski slopes open and stabilized the region’s aquifers, Washoe County Commissioner John Breternitz said.
“In Northern Nevada we’re hard pressed every winter to have enough water to get by,” he said. “The cloud seeding is an added insurance.”
That’s why Northern Nevada is trying to find ways to pay for it. Breternitz is building a coalition of business owners, politicians and residents to raise money to get the project back up and running.
The institute is preparing reports for the Truckee Meadows Water Authority, Washoe County and the Southern Nevada Water Authority on what it would take to resuscitate the program. It has also ordered its staff to stop dismantling the seeding stations.
“We’re in the ramping up mode where we’re trying to get the word out and see if we can find anyone who can fund it on the interim basis and then find a long-term funding mechanism,” Breternitz said. “The state needs to understand how important this program is to Nevada.”
The water authority’s entrance into the discussion, though, has changed the dialogue. The agency wants to pump tens of thousands of acre-feet of water each year from rural Nevada basins. Most rural Nevadans, including many in areas that depend on cloud seeding, oppose that prospect.
The Bureau of Land Management is expecting to complete its draft environmental impact statement on the pipeline in early 2010, but construction isn’t likely to begin for several years.
The project faces mounting opposition from ranchers, farmers, environmentalists, American Indians and national parks enthusiasts who say it will suck dry some of the most beautiful country in the state and ruin the lives of local residents.
The authority has acquired water rights in four of the five basins from which it wants water. In Spring Valley, it had to purchase and operate large ranches to get the water it wanted. And it has made deals with Lincoln County to exchange 3,000 acre-feet of water each year for support for its water rights applications there.
The agency recently agreed, as part of a water basin agreement between Nevada and Utah, to wait 10 years before pursuing the water rights it applied for in a final basin, Snake Valley.
Pipeline opponents see the cloud-seeding proposition as yet another way the water authority is trying to manipulate rural Nevadans into supporting the pipeline. For them and other pipeline foes, it serves as another “ah ha” moment.
“It appears that the SNWA is acknowledging that there just isn’t enough water in the basins they have targeted, at least if they are going to avoid widespread defoliation and environmental destruction,” said Launce Rake, spokesman for the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada.#
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2009/aug/31/budget-well-dry/
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