Posts tagged: california water wars

The Worst Legislation Of The Week (So Far): H.R. 1837 (or, Bye-Bye, Salmon & Steelhead)

February 28, 2012, by No comments yet

The insanity that is California’s Water Wars is playing out in legislation before that that most R.P. McMurphy-esque of institutions — the House of Representatives.

H.R. 1837 is a bill that would essentially strip away protections for salmon and steelhead in the California Delta, reversing California Water law and creating what amounts to a giant giveaway for big agribusiness (including Axis of Evil Members Westland’s Irrigation District).

Unamusingly, it might be up for a vote this week.

CalTrout’s written a letter damming this bad bill (read it here).

Seen enough? You can simply kick some congressional butt here.

See you online, Tom Chandler.

Mammoth Learns What LA’s Water Thirst Feels Like

February 4, 2012, by 4 comments

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is not on the Christmas Card list of a lot of Sierra towns, who struggle with the agency’s predatory approach to water.

Mammoth wants to reposition the water gage it uses to measure flows in Mammoth Creek, and LADWP has filed suit challenging their right to do so. This quote doesn’t spell out the details (you can get those here), but you can definitely feel the love:

Norby accuses the enormous L.A. agency of deafness and bad science. “It’s fundamentally false and without merit,” he said. “Less than 1 percent of their water is exported from here. We’ve told them the amount is immeasurable, but they won’t listen.”

A host of environmental agencies signed off on the proposal to change the measuring point for bypass flow, a point emphasized by the local water district’s director.

“These are the experts, the people who really serve the public interest,” he said.

“Their endorsement stands in clear rebuttal to the statements made by the LADWP, which are indicative of the quality of the facts they’re working with,” he added.

“They have no grasp on the basics.”

Norby believes that Los Angeles is simply continuing its 100-year-old campaign of expansion and take over. “They are trying to take away rights that Mammoth Community has exercised for half a century,” he said.

And this love letter:

Calls to the L.A. water agency were met with silence or revealed a lack of knowledge of journalistic practice. Jana Sidley, the Deputy City Attorney on the case, directed calls Chris Plakos, who said he could not comment on the case because the matter was in litigation.

“A reporter for a courthouse news service should have known that,” Plakos added despite the fact that lawyers are regularly televised commenting on ongoing litigation from the courthouse steps, and that Courthouse News regularly includes quotes from lawyers about ongoing litigation.

Norby suggested that obduracy and inpenetrability are the agency’s stock in trade.

“It took six months of effort just for us to get a meeting with them,” he said. “It will likely take many more years of litigation and cost the rate payers millions in legal and consulting fees before anything gets done,” he added. “They’re impenetrable.”

See you remaking Chinatown, Tom Chandler.

The California Water Wars: Ag Posts Record Revenues in 2008, 2009 – Even As They Predicted Ruin

June 17, 2011, by 1 comment

Remember the stories about the rampant unemployment in the agricultural sector when a judge temporarily stopped the Delta pumps from removing record amounts of water from California’s Sacramento Delta?

How the drought in California was decimating agriculture, and that if you didn’t support essentially open-ended pumping of water from the Delta, you were a smelt-hugging terrorist who favored fish over people?

Remember the appearance of famous blowhard Sean Hannity, who may have set a record by not getting a single fact right in his televised report about the water crisis?

Turns out the truth was rather different than we were told. From the NY Times comes an article about a new Pacific Institute study:

Farmers and most other residents in the state’s breadbasket blame environmentalism run amok for forcing them to leave fields unplanted when the water they hoped for was diverted to benefit the endangered ecosystem of the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta. But the institute’s report, based on an extensive analysis of federal and state data as well as the records of water districts, argues that environmental constraints played at best a minor role in water shortages and rural unemployment.

If any single factor is to blame for rural unemployment, the analysis concludes, it is the collapse of the construction industry, which was crucial to the state’s booming growth in the early 2000s. The report noted that “strong demand for California farm products on national and global markets also kept both crop prices and revenue high throughout the drought.” The industries that suffered disproportionate harm from the drought, the report said, were hydropower and salmon fishing, not agriculture.

That’s not the explanation that the Fox News commentator Sean Hannity offered for the Central Valley’s troubles two years ago, when the photograph above was taken. In 2009, fallow fields sprouted signs reading “Congress-Created Dust Bowl” — an apparent reference to congressional support for the Endangered Species Act, one of the laws involved in curtailing water supplies from the federal Central Valley Project.

But the report notes that in two of the drought years, 2008 and 2009, California’s crops brought record high revenues. And while some Central Valley counties, particularly in the southern portions of the valley, suffered significant declines in crops like citrus fruits, overall unemployment in the agricultural sector rose in lockstep with — or even a bit more slowly than — unemployment in other sectors.

Record revenues and unemployment on a par with other sectors aren’t exactly what was promised.

Not by a long shot.

It’s always easy to blame environmental restrictions when people don’t get all the water they want, though it’s pretty clear that farmers–on the whole–did a hell of a lot better than salmon fishermen (commercial and sport), both of whom essentially took a couple years off.

Rather than face the reality that California’s water is badly overpromised–and then get on with solving the issue in a way that doesn’t decimate the Delta, salmon and their related industries–some agricultural concerns feel free to point fingers, misinform, and then file lawsuits in an attempt to remove even more water from the Delta.

In fact, Underground Fave Whipping Boys Westlands Water District–the wholly untrustworthy-but-politically-connected district that wanted to annex the McCloud River into their water district (located hundreds of miles south), were recently caught in yet another bald-faced lie about the amount of water used by agriculture in the state.

The drought wasn’t kind to California agriculture–droughts are generally hard on everyone–but it’s also clear it was a hell of a lot harder on salmon and the Delta Smelt than it was on farmers, and that some reasonable compromises better be found before the wet years play out, and we’re facing another drought–and the flood of emotionally driven misinformation that accompanies them.

See you reading the papers, Tom Chandler

Yet Another (Cynical) Attempt to Kill Off California Steelhead Protections is Squashed by Courts

August 21, 2010, by 5 comments

Several Central California irrigators wanted to strip ESA protections from California’s steelhead populations by arguing that rainbow trout and steelhead are essentially the same fish – and that rainbow trout populations could revitalize steelhead populations through interbreeding.

Yeah, right. From Yubanet:

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected an attempt to strip protected status from wild steelhead trout in California’s Central Valley. A group of Central Valley irrigators had argued that ocean-going Central Valley steelhead population should be removed from the endangered species list based on their opinion that freshwater rainbow trout – which never go to sea – might someday replace extinct steelhead populations.

It was yet another cynical, bald-faced attempt by Central Valley water users to avoid the shitstorm that’s been coming for a long, long time.

And all this comes on the heels of a long-awaited report which found that way too much fresh water was being diverted from the California Delta- at least if we wanted the salmon and steelhead to survive. (From the Sacramento Bee):

This is hardly a shocker. Over the last several decades, cities and farms have diverted about 50 percent of the flow of the Sacramento River and nearly two-thirds of the San Joaquin River.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (or a fish scientist) to tell you that fish need water – preferably cool, unpolluted water. If you take that water away, or return it to the river laden with fertilizers, pesticides and higher temperatures, fish suffer. It is that simple.

Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2010/07/31/2926767/finally-deltas-flows-get-needed.html#ixzz0xFPN2gVV

Will we see the restoration of even a small portion of historical salmon & steelhead runs in our lifetime? Or the complete loss of them all?

Stay tuned, Undergrounders.

Something Stinks In California, and It’s Not Singlebarbed’s Essay About Dewatered Rivers

September 7, 2009, by 4 comments

A week ago I wrote about fly fishing a little alpine creek that was glorious in the spring, but threadbare and fly-ridden at the end of summer – courtesy the cattle that had grazed it bare.

At least Stream Y had only been denuded of its greenery; Singlebarbed’s now-famous “Little Stinkin’” river has been stripped of its water(courtesy an irrigation district), and yesterday he visited it again in the hopes of finding a little wet stuff in the streambed.

What he found instead would make any fishermen throw back his head and howl at the moon:

Dead and desiccated beaver were scattered near their burrows. While agile underwater they’re clumsy prey on dry land, easy pickings for coyotes or someone’s Rottweiler.

The pelts were too far gone for my road kill honed reflexes, and I left them for the buzzards.

Even the deep stretches were dry, at best with a bit of dampened mud at the bottom. No fish carcasses were evident but they would’ve been picked clean and skeletal.

It’s a complete wipe. Bugs dead, fish dead, and the wildlife in the area foraging for water as best they can. I found a couple muddy traces that had an inch of water remaining, and the volume of animal tracks nearby were moot testimony to the deer, coyotes, and birds having to make do.

It’s a riveting post, thought not a manifestly happy one. It’s tempting to shrug it off as an isolated incident, but it’s not.

In fact, it’s potentially more a model of California’s water future than elegant-yet-ugly essay.

With Big Ag drumming up support on the back of a string of lies about unemployment, what’s causing that unemployment, and the negligible effects of a short-term halt in pumping from the Delta, it appears that California’s prevailing sentiment about water has swung toward the “dry ‘em up” side of the pendelum.

California – one of the most hyrdologically altered landscapes on the planet – is now in the grip of a drought, but it’s also witness to a war being waged for the stuff that runs in its veins.

While the media largely buys the spin offered up by those profiting from the taxpayer’s largess, the California Delta’s ecology remains in free fall, and politicos seemingly can’t hand out the corporate welfare checks fast enough.

Now – with new water “storage” and “conveyances” planned (at taxpayer expense), and a growing sense that any trickle of water that makes it to the ocean is wasted – we’re witness to what may be the last call for any sizable populations of salmon & steelhead in this state.

It’s grim and getting grimmer, and because he sums it up better than I can, I’ll let Singlebarbed wrap it up for us:

Something stinks, and it’s not the corpse of my creek. She smells of hot rock and a few posies … all that remains.

Salmon Recovery in Upper Sacramento Facing Huge Barriers (Like 602′ Shasta Dam)

June 23, 2009, by 4 comments

The announcement that salmon restoration in California could lead to salmon and steelhead once again swimming the Upper Sacramento River above Lake Shasta caught pretty much everyone by surprise.

And while the idea is an interesting one, actual implementation faces a lot of hurdles – not the least of which is the 602′ high Shasta Dam. In fact, transporting fish over the dam and then back down (of the two, back down might be harder) could relegate this project to has-been status – except that the fisheries people don’t see many alternatives.

Underground Fave water journalist Matt Weiser wrote this article about the project, where he notes the issues, but also pens several telling passages (both key passages bolded below):

Restoring fisheries above Folsom, Shasta dams faces high hurdles | Sacramento Bee

The Sacramento was the only river in western North America with four salmon runs. They numbered in the millions – so numerous that American Indians and settlers could catch a salmon dinner with their bare hands. Now one run is gone, and two are endangered. The fourth could join them soon.

Restoring a fragment of that spectacle to the Central Valley is the goal of rules proposed by the National Marine Fisheries Service. The service wants, among other things, restoration of winter- and spring-run salmon above Shasta Dam on the Sacramento River, and steelhead above Folsom Dam on the American River.

Combined, the fish transit order is considered the biggest of its kind in U.S. history.

…

“It’s pretty substantial, the amount of work that’s required,” said Mike Chotkowski, regional environmental officer at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the dams. “We still haven’t even determined whether it’s feasible.”

The fisheries service says that without restoring access upstream, it’s likely the three fish species will go extinct. Climate change means it will be harder to maintain cold-water habitat below the dams, so they must have access to better habitat.

“The fish are at that jeopardy point where it’s important for us to take immediate steps,” said Howard Brown, Sacramento River basin chief for the fisheries service.

Wow. Frankly, this is an idea I hadn’t even heard proposed before, and now some consider it essential. Is it a desperate throw of the dice, or simply a recognition that the hatchery mitigation model has totally let us down, and that habitat destruction in the central valley is largely irreversible?

Some have already suggested it’s far most cost-effective to simply restore small creeks below the dams:

Rabe said 600 small creeks between Modesto and Redding also could be restored – at far less cost than fixing the big dams.

“Don’t
waste time and money on the dams. Spend it on the creeks,” he said.
“That would open literally thousands of miles of spawning, which would
make a huge, huge difference.”

Still – as we learned from the destruction-by-irrigator of Singlebarbed’s home waters – most of the Central Valley’s waterways are tied up by the West’s arcane water laws, and restoring cool, clean, sustainable flows to them might be even more involved than figuring out how to move fish around big dams.

In other words, it appears we’ve pumped all our easy options into oblivion, and all that’s left are the hard choices that nobody wants to make (so they probably won’t get made). 

See you on the dam, Tom Chandler.

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Will Salmon One Day Spawn Again… In The Upper Sacramento River??

June 5, 2009, by 4 comments

Salmon swimming in the Upper Sacramento once again??

You could say the news caught my eye.

The court-ordered biological opinion on restoring salmon to California’s largely salmon-free waters was just released, and this tidbit from the Redding Record Searchlight suggests salmon could be restored to the Upper Sacramento River above Lake Shasta?

A federal plan to revive salmon in the Sacramento River could put the fish upstream of Shasta Dam for the first time in seven decades and would mean the end of Lake Red Bluff.

The National Marine Fisheries Service made the two recommendations in its 800-page biological opinion for the Central Valley Project released Thursday. The Bureau of Reclamation, which operates Shasta Dam and the Red Bluff Diversion Dam, has tentatively approved the federal court-ordered plan while it reviews the lengthy document.

The Keswick and Shasta dams have blocked spawning beds on the Upper Sacramento and McCloud rivers north of Shasta Dam since the bureau began construction on the dams in the 1930s.

Federal and state scientists will develop a pilot project to truck fish trapped in the lower Sacramento around the dam by 2011, said Maria Rea, supervisor of the fisheries service’s Sacramento office. A permanent plan for moving the fish past the two dams should be created between 2012 and 2015, she said.

What? I thought – frankly – that it was just a mixup due to terminology (some call the Sacramento River near Redding the “upper” part of the river).

Then we went digging around the Sacramento Bee’s should-be-award-winning California water wars coverage, and found this:

The rules require the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to restore access for fish to waters above Nimbus and Folsom dams on the American River, Shasta Dam on the Sacramento, and New Melones Dam on the Stanislaus.

Those dams were built decades ago without fish ladders and have blocked access to hundreds of miles of historic spawning grounds.

The Bee’s Matt Weiser is not the kind of writer to get this stuff wrong, so I’d suggest moving salmon around Shasta Dam is at least a consideration.

Frankly, I’m not all that sanguine about the potential for trapping and trucking salmon – it hasn’t exactly been a raging success in the Columbia basin. And the mechanism for doing so – or returning the salmon smolts to the ocean – isn’t at all clear.

Then again, I’ve also long heard that Shasta Dam effectively blocked access to better than 80% of California’s salmon and steelhead spawning habitat.

One Thing Is Clear

With many of California’s native and anadramous fish populations in a state of collapse, the water wars are firing on all cylinders – including a broadside from Arnold “Fish Terminator” Schwarzenegger, who has consistently cast this as an issue of “fish vs people” – an idiotic stance, especially given the clearly unsustainable nature of current water projects, and the fact a lot of commercial and recreational fishing dollars are also being lost (I’m waiting for someone to ask Ahhnold why he  favors Alfalfa over People).

Still, salmon swimming again in the McCloud, Upper Sacramento, and Pit Rivers?

I’d be surprised. Still, we’re all about news here at the Trout Underground. I bet there’s plenty more of it to come.

UPDATE: Note from Underground Fave Reporter Matt Weiser in response to my question about whether the plan really provided for Upper Sacramento salmon passage: “Yes it does, in great detail, starting with trial reintroductions, then full permanent fish passage by 2020.”

For now, I’m going fishing. See you on a stream, Tom Chandler.

McCloud River Could be “Annexed” By Westlands Irrigation District??

April 3, 2009, by 4 comments

Longtime Undergrounders will know of my love for the Westlands Irrigation District – that wacky, never-should-have-been-formed water entity that pretty much bled the Trinity dry, and now – in the face of the collapse of the California Delta – is looking for new water sources.

Their purchase of the exclusive, private Bollibokka Club on the lower McCloud was first cast in terms of removing barriers to raising Shasta Dam (another bad idea).

Now another possibility has surfaced (courtesy of Westlands itself): They’d attempt to annex the 3000 acres of the Bollibokka Club into their irrigation district, then claim water rights for their hundreds-of-miles south irrigation district. This from the Redding Record Searchlight:

Some Shasta County officials are worried that a Fresno-area water district may ask to annex almost 3,000 acres it owns along the McCloud River — a possible move to shift the water rights hundreds of miles south.

The issue will be discussed this morning at the Shasta Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO) meeting.

So far, no annexation proposal has been filed by the Westlands Water District, Shasta LAFCO Executive Officer Amy Mickelson said. Westlands, the largest water district in the nation, includes farmland in western Fresno County and Kings County.

While it appears nothing is imminent, Westlands did make a pair of phone calls – one to the Shasta LAFCO cited above, and one to the Fresno LAFCO, which feels suspiciously like they’re shopping for the most agreeable entity.

Shasta LAFCO’s Mickelson said she took a brief call in January from a Westlands representative about possible annexation of the land, but like hundreds of calls the district takes each year, nothing has come of it since, nor does she think anything ever will develop.

“I truly think this was just a stab in the dark, (to ask) how easy would it be?” she said of Westland’s inquiry. “I think we’re quite a ways from seeing anything formally filed, if and when they opt to do that.”

Mickelson mentioned the call in a staff report to Shasta’s commissioners to keep them informed, and she’s watching Westland’s agendas to see if the water district takes further action, she said.

After its call to Shasta LAFCO, the water district called Fresno LAFCO to see if it could decide an annexation request of the Shasta County land, Mickelson said. Shasta’s commission opposes that move and Mickelson has sent an e-mail to the Fresno agency saying so, she said.

When asked directly by the Record-Searchlight reporter, the Westlands spokesperson delivered what we’d call a weasly non-denial:

Woolf sidestepped a question about why Westlands might also be interested in annexing that land into its water district, hundreds of miles to the south, however. She stressed that no decision had been made.

“I honestly don’t know if we would be pursuing that or not. It hasn’t been done at this point in time,” she said of annexation.

None of this means anything’s going to happen. None of means something won’t happen. It does, however, offer up visions of Owens Valley North.

What it does mean is that the Westlands Irrigation District is pretty much running at normal speed, which is to say looking for any angle that profits them – regardless of the economic and envionmental harm done to others.

It’s hard not to feel sympathy for some members of the district, who are facing severe cutbacks in water deliveries. Westlands is an irrigation project that should never have been built in the first place (the salt-and-selenium tainted soil creates huge problems), but at this point, I’d suggest the best route isn’t to let them environmentally (and economically) devastate yet another river.

In our third year of drought (I saw a statewide survey figure suggesting about 81% of normal snowpack), the California Water Wars are in full bloom, and if you don’t believe me, spend a few minutes on the unbelievably complete (and neutral) Aquafornia.com blog.

Everyone’s going at everyone else hammer and tongs, with seemingly the only winners being attorneys.

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California Plan Wants Peripheral Canal, but Removes Guarantees/Protections for Delta

January 3, 2009, by 2 comments

It’s not a great day for fans of the California Delta – at least those who’d like to see it become something other than a salt marsh (from the SF Chronicle).

An influential Cabinet-level group Friday released its prescription for the sickly Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, including a 2011 goal to break ground on a new canal system – without the approval of the California Legislature.

The panel backed away from creating a new governing body to oversee the delta or altering the California Constitution to say that the delta’s health is as important as supplying water to 25 million Californians. That differed from another governor-appointed task force that contended that new leadership and a constitutional amendment were needed to fix a fragile ecosystem that also serves as the hub of the state’s water supply.

In other words, the executive group adopted pretty much every recommendation of the Delta Vision group save those that offered any real protection for beleaguered waterway.

The walking-on-water Aquafornia blog posted excerpted reactions from multiple newspapers, including this from Phil Isenberg in the Sacramento Bee:

Isenberg had not seen the committee’s final report. But it adopted every proposal from his task force except one.

The task force recommended a new policymaking council to bring
cohesion to the more than 200 agencies that manage the 740,000-acre
estuary in a haphazard fashion. It viewed this as a key initial step
before starting major waterworks and habitat projects.

But the committee opted to delay the governance question while starting work in other areas, including canal planning.

“I think it’s too bad they didn’t make a recommendation on that,”
Isenberg said. “I’m not shocked, but it’s too bad because everyone in
the puzzle knows you can’t fit the pieces together without a governance
solution.”

I’m on my way out the door right now, but it’s hard to support any water solution that doesn’t involve specific guarantees for the California Delta, which the state’s water users have treated roughly the same way a baby treats a diaper.

Update: Dan Bacher (Fish Sniffer editor) weighs in on the plan, and it’s not pretty. Here’s only one passage from his editorial:

The plan includes a timeline of proposed actions and associated events for the destruction of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the largest and most significant estuary on the West Coast of the Americas. One of the amazing things about the plan is the sequence of events and actions it includes. While the plan’s goal is to “break ground” for “new conveyance in 2011, the timeline doesn’t require the Department of Fish and Game to “recommend in stream flows” for the Delta until 2012!

Wouldn’t it be more logical to only begin infrastructure construction after in stream flows for fish are recommended and secured? This prioritization of the canal over the needs of fish clearly demonstrates that the plans “eco language” of restoring the Delta is nothing other than green washing of the most environmentally destructive project in California history.

See you on the Delta, Tom Chandler.

ps – you can follow this issue on the Aquafornia blog, and via the Sac Bee’s Twitter Feed.

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CA Water Wars: Lawsuit Contests Delta Pumping Until Impaired Farmland “Retired”

December 2, 2008, by 3 comments

A California water group poured gasoline on the already-blazing California Water Wars with a lawsuit calling for an end to pumping on the California Delta until “certain” drainage-impaired farmland is retired.

Longtime Underground readers will realize most the “certain” lands referenced in the lawsuit belong to Westlands Irrigation District – the politically connected irrigation group (and Underground whipping boys) who bought some hugely expensive private property on the McCloud River so there’d be one less obstacle standing in the way of raising Shasta Dam (and flooding miles of the Upper Sac, McCloud, and Pit Rivers).

From the SF Chronicle: Group wants chemical-filled farmland retired:

The giant state and federal pumps in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta that funnel water to 25 million Californians should be shut down until certain Central Valley farmers retire hundreds of thousands of acres of chemical-laden farmland, according to a lawsuit filed today by a state water watchdog.

Irrigating agricultural land in the western San Joaquin Valley tainted with selenium, mercury, boron and other toxic substances constitutes an unreasonable use of a public resource protected by state laws and has contributed to the sharp decline of endangered fish species, said the California Water Impact Network.

“We think there is a simple solution to California’s water problems – to retire all of the drainage-impaired lands in the Central Valley. A second is water conservation – agriculture uses 80 percent of the developed surface water,” said Carolee Krieger, president and founder C-WIN.

The always-excellent Aquafornia blog offers multiple perspectives on the lawsuit, including this unique angle from the Stockton Record:

State and federal water managers have increased exports to farms and cities south of the Delta even as fish populations plummet, says the lawsuit, filed in Sacramento County Superior Court. Northern California reservoirs have been “cannibalized” for the sake of Southern California, and irrigation of drainage-impaired lands in the western San Joaquin Valley is a waste of water, the groups say.

I guarantee this lawsuit won’t find favor in Sacramento, where the Governator (recently picked for Environmental Villan of the Year by Field & Stream) is desperately trying to build a peripheral canal and add more storage to the state’s reservoirs.

A complete halt to pumping from the Delta is an unlikely result, but even the threat of it should, uh…. galvanize the discussion.

See you at the Delta, Tom Chandler.

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