Climate Change, Runoff and the River

From the AZ Republic:

Warmer temperatures in the West's highest elevations could reduce winter runoff into the Colorado River by as much as 30 percent over the next 50 years, leaving more people to fight over less water.

Even a subtle shift in climate could further weaken a river already overburdened by growing cities and could lead to chronic water shortages, especially in Arizona, which suffers the most if the Colorado can't meet the full demands of all seven states it serves.

Those were among the findings of a new study that argues it's not a question of if, or even when, climate changes begin to affect water supplies, but how seriously those supplies will be affected.

Prudence

From SD Union Tribune, by way of today's Water News:

A wet winter has made a little more water available this year than last year to states that rely on the Colorado River, a Bureau of Reclamation official told water managers from seven states that draw from the river.

But fears of drought have the three states that rely on Lake Mead agreeing not to touch the surplus this year, said Terrence Fulp, area manager for the bureau's lower Colorado River regional operations office in Boulder City, Nev.

"The states are saying that at this time, they are not planning to take any additional water," Fulp said. "We don't know if the drought is over or not."

Balance?

Mercurcy News ran a nice AP piece today talking about how the CA Water Plan is a sort of middle ground between groups like ACWA who call for intense investment of resources to build more dams and reservoirs, and groups like the Pacific Institute who say that conservation is sufficient to head off the coming crisis.

As California's population climbs from 36 million to a projected 48 million by 2030, a lack of water particularly in arid Southern California may pose the biggest limit on growth.

Water agencies say billions of dollars worth of additional storage is needed, including reservoirs and dams that are anathema to many environmental groups. One environmental group countered this week that California can meet its needs by increasing conservation in a state that already helps lead the nation in water stinginess, per capita.

The state Department of Water Resources, which is developing a new state water plan to be released later this year, says both sides are right.

Each of the previous seven state water plans developed since the first in 1957 have treated the water balance like a math equation: Demand minus supply equals a gap that must somehow be filled.

The five-volume draft plan under final review for the first time offers a smorgasbord of recommendations for how to bridge the gap that could exist by 2030 - but says solutions may vary by region.

A new reservoir that might be politically palatable in one region might never stand a chance elsewhere, for instance, said Jerry Johns, the state's deputy director for water resource planning and management.

"Rather than throwing it out entirely, we think we ought to keep all the tools in our toolbox and see what works best for each region," he said.

Canal suggestions resurface

From the Ventura County Star, an article about a costly solution to the very real threat of levee failure in the Bay area. Below, a proposal for implementation was given by a Bay Area environmentalist to the Water Supply Subcommittee of the California Bay Delta Public Advisory Committee.

The most direct solution to these problems [in the event of a massive levee faliure] is to bypass the delta, shunting water from northern rivers -- which serve as natural aqueducts for water stored behind state and federal dams -- around the maze of sloughs and levees.

Such a structure was originally proposed in the 1950s as part of the State Water Project. By the time Gov. Pat Brown placed the gigantic project before voters in 1960, the delta bypass had been dropped because of cost. Political leaders planned to ask the voters later for more money to finish the project.

By the time they did, Pat Brown's son, Jerry, occupied the governor's office and the state's political culture had changed radically. The delta bypass proposal -- a "Peripheral Canal" authorized by state legislation in 1981 but subject to voter ratification in 1982 -- ignited a statewide firestorm that still influences California water politics.

One hurdle was cost: $11.6 billion in 1980 (an inflation-adjusted $29 billion today) for the canal and the giant storage facilities associated with it, which alarmed the Southland businesses and water customers who would have to pay the bill. But the project also stirred up opposition from other interests.

The canal would have made it possible to send more water from north to south, so it reactivated the state's oldest geographic political rivalry. In a bow to newly potent environmental organizations, the legislation would have protected North Coast rivers from being dammed, angering agribusiness giants that hoped someday to tap those sources.

The election campaign was expensive and bruising. Although Southern California voted 2-1 in favor, Northern California voted 9-1 against, and the canal received less than 40 percent of the statewide vote.

An article on CBS5 tells of a Bay Area environmentalist who is pushing this idea:

A Bay Area environmentalist today revived a controversial proposal that was rejected two decades ago: building a pipeline that would carry water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to Southern California.

Jerry Meral said his presentation in Sacramento to the Water Supply Subcommittee of the California Bay-Delta Public Advisory Committee "was fairly well-received but not massively attended."

Meral said the question now is whether there's enough traction for his proposal to get the attention of the state Legislature or CalFed, an environmental and water supply effort stemming from the state's severe drought in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

CalFed Criticized

From the ContraCosta Times:

The $3 billion-and-counting program to restore the Delta's health and improve water supplies throughout California is plagued with weak leadership and waning interest among key stakeholders, according to a state watchdog agency.

Participants in the CalFed program, a landmark environmental and water supply effort, no longer agree how it should go forward, and some even wonder whether it's worth staying involved at all.

That dysfunction is highlighted in an interim summary by the Little Hoover Commission, which was tapped by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in June to examine CalFed following drastic cuts to the program budget by state lawmakers who were growing alarmed about CalFed's direction.

Also in the works are a financial audit and a management audit of CalFed.

Although the commission's full report is not due until November, several people closely involved with the program say its work so far is on the mark.

"In general, they have identified all the serious problems, and there are serious ones," said Greg Gartrell, assistant manager of the Contra Costa Water District and chairman of a CalFed subcommittee on drinking water quality. "It's not a pretty picture."

Next week, Gartrell's boss, CCWD general manager Walter Bishop, plans to tell the commission that CalFed has spent too much money on research and not enough on projects that will improve drinking water quality.

"The continued degradation of Delta drinking water over the past 15 years as well as the 'crash' of the endangered Delta smelt and other fish populations have occurred despite $1 billion spent since 2000 on ecosystem restoration," according to a copy of his prepared testimony.

CalFed was formed primarily to improve the Delta ecosystem, enhance water quality, strengthen Delta levees and boost water supplies, the four areas that were contributing most to the legal and bureaucratic fights over Delta water.

But today, the effort has little to show in those areas. Instead, its successes come mostly in improvements in chinook salmon runs and various projects, such as increased groundwater storage, that are scattered throughout the state.

A further note of urgency can be heard when we remember the levees that protect the Delta area water supply:

"They've done a lot of good things, but they cannot say they have reduced conflicts in the Delta," said Steve Hall, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies.

Hall added, however, that CalFed should not be written off.

"(Hurricane) Katrina has illustrated very vividly the consequences of failing to maintain a levee system, and that's what the Delta is, a levee system," Hall said.

Indeed, a MercuryNews editorial called for this today:

Among the most important issues that must be addressed are the aging levees of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Their failure in a major earthquake is likely and would be devastating. As reporter Paul Rogers detailed in Thursday's Mercury News, the levees protect California's largest source of drinking water, providing half of Santa Clara County's and up to 60 percent of Southern California's drinking water.

The sentiment was echoed by yesterday's Ventura County Star editorial as well.

Efficiency could reduce CA use by one-fifth

From the MercuryNews:

California can reduce water use a staggering 20 percent over the next 25 years -- despite adding 11 million more residents -- without harming the economy, farms or quality of life, according to a new report released Tuesday.

The answer isn't brown lawns or shorter showers.

Instead, politicians and business leaders must relentlessly spread technology that is already in place, from low-flush toilets to drip irrigation on farms, said Peter Gleick, lead author of the report and president of the Pacific Institute, a non-partisan think tank in Oakland.

``We can do the things we want to do with much less water,'' said Gleick, who has a doctorate in hydrology. ``Efficiency doesn't mean deprivation.''

For example, California has 17 million toilets. Of those, 7 million are low-flush. If they all were low-flush, 420,000 acre-feet of water a year would be saved, Gleick said, as much as all 1.8 million people in Santa Clara County use each year.

Similarly, by using drip irrigation, farmers can cut vineyard water use up to 48 percent, and 23 percent on average for vegetables -- without reducing crop yields.

The piece also reminds us of the water use breakdown:

Farms account for 80 percent of California's water use. Residents and industry use the other 20 percent. By 2030, with more efficiency, farms can cut use 23 percent, and urban users can cut 5 percent, despite population growth, and without reducing acres farmed, Gleick said.

How will this be financed:

The Department of Water Resources hopes to create a new fund to pay for rebates for Californians who buy efficient appliances, offer incentives to farmers to purchase more efficient irrigation equipment and set up water education programs, said Deputy Director Jerry Johns.

Funding would come from future bond acts and user fees on farmers and cities, he said.

Claremont GW Storage Project

From Businesswire:

Sept. 13, 2005--A groundwater project that ultimately will store nearly 1 billion gallons for eastern Los Angeles County cities and communities to use during dry years today became the latest in a series of Southland projects to receive statewide bond funds granted to the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

Following the Metropolitan Board of Directors' approval, Chairman Wes Bannister and Chief Executive Officer Dennis Underwood joined officials from Claremont-based Three Valleys Municipal Water District in signing a 25-year agreement to store water in an aquifer underlying the north Claremont area.

Very interesting! Friends and professors have discussed this idea for some years...

The project will receive nearly $1.23 million of the $45 million Metropolitan was given by the state from 2000's Proposition 13 to help develop groundwater storage in Southern California. Three Valleys, which serves an area spanning the Pomona and Walnut valleys and the eastern portion of the San Gabriel Valley, will provide another $1.45 million to the $2.68 million project.

"This partnership demonstrates a fundamental enhancement in Metropolitan's resource management strategy by focusing on projects that store water when supplies are plentiful for times when they are not," Bannister said. "Every drop of water stored by this project frees up an additional drop of water for the rest of the region during dry times."

Underwood said groundwater storage plays an essential role in helping the region maintain dependable water supplies, particularly during dry years, and helps provide continued reliability over the next 20 years.

Hetch-Hetchy restoration resisted

From Boston.Com/News, more on the Hetch-Hetchy controversy:

When the naturalist John Muir came upon this valley of meadows, waterfalls, and granite peaks a century ago, he beheld a grand landscape he described as ''one of nature's rarest and most precious mountain temples." Muir, a founder of the Sierra Club, declared the Hetch Hetchy Valley as Yosemite's twin.

For generations, the floor of this narrow canyon has been submerged under 300 feet of water, behind a dam that stores the drinking supply of hundreds of thousands of San Francisco Bay Area residents and helps generate the electricity that powers San Francisco's famed cable cars, buses, street lights, schools, and one of the country's busiest airports.

Until his death in 1914, a year after Congress approved the dam's construction, Muir crusaded against flooding the Hetch Hetchy Valley, located within the wilderness of Yosemite National Park and 20 miles north of the heavily visited Yosemite Valley.

But a century after the first debates arose, another push has emerged seeking to drain the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, returning the valley floor to its natural state and allowing the upper Tuolomne River to again meander.

''All these rocks, everything John Muir saw, are just holding their breath, waiting to come back up to the surface, waiting to come back up for air. It was a beautiful valley, and it will be again," said Ron Good, a former staff counsel of the Sierra Club and now the executive director of Restore Hetch Hetchy, one of several groups seeking to bring back the valley.

Once considered a radical notion, the campaign to restore the Hetch Hetchy Valley gained further legitimacy last fall when Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered the state's Resources Agency to review the issue, after being prompted by requests from two Northern California legislators and a series of editorials by the Sacramento Bee on reclaiming the valley. The editorials later won the Pulitzer Prize.

Tough time to ask for the dismantling of a dam, given the recent call for more water development by ACWA.

With San Francisco poised to undertake a $4.3 billion overhaul of an antiquated water-delivery system that stretches 160 miles from the Sierra Nevada to the Silicon Valley, advocates for restoring the Hetch Hetchy argue that now is the perfect time for San Francisco to broach the topic of possibly breaching the dam.

City officials, however, have expressed little interest. Giving up the reservoir could mean the loss of the vital resources and valuable commodities, namely water and electricity, that helped transform San Francisco into one of the world's most robust economies.

Another assessment, another plan...

... regarding the future of the Golden State's water resources. From the North County Times:

California is perched on the brink of a water-supply disaster, state water agency leaders say, unless Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger puts his political muscle behind a 12-step plan created by water agencies across the state.

Leaders of the Association of California Water Agencies said since former Gov. Pat Brown spearheaded building the massive State Water Project more than 30 years ago, the state has abandoned its responsibility to help find, pay for and deliver water ---- leaving it instead to water agencies, ratepayers and voters.

Today, they said, the state's two main water supplies ---- the Colorado River and the State Water Project, which delivers water from water-rich Northern California to rain-poor Southern California and is threatened by eroding levees like the ones that flooded devastated New Orleans ---- are under siege and could suffer catastrophic cutbacks at any time.

And, they said, the state's regulatory roadblocks delay the development of alternative water supplies, such as using recycled wastewater for irrigation and building plants to turn seawater into drinking water.

Southern California's main water supplier, the massive Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, says it has enough water-supply storage to make sure the region has plenty of water.

But its stores still must be replenished by the Colorado River and State Water Project. If their supplies are slashed, Southern California could find itself facing mandatory water cutbacks and shortages that could threaten its economy.

What does the plan actually call for?

1) Build more storage, not only underground by way of injection wells, but more dams, pipelines and reservoirs.

2) Create an independent state commission to oversee how to fix the fragile Bay-Delta. Hall and others said the commission should look at all answers, even resurrecting the touchy peripheral canal idea.

3) Keep and politically support the state's Colorado River Board, which represents California's interests on the river and is fighting to make sure other Western states do not further cut California's already-diminished supply of river water.

4) End what Hall called "schizophrenic" mixed messages about whether local and regional water agencies should chase recycled water projects and building seawater desalination plants. Hall and Arant said state water officials provide grants to create recycling projects, but the state health department too tightly restricts where recycled water can be used.

I'm left wondering whether or to what extent ACWA agrees with the assessment of the future of CA water resources by DWR's Water Plan?