The snow that usually blankets the mountains surrounding the house – and feeds a thirsty California the rest of the year – is disappearing fast, and more (much more) is needed.

UPDATE: It’s Winter for Chrissakes, but look at what’s ahead:

Though nobody wants to say it out loud – and hope springs eternal in the California Water Project’s breast – but with precipitation already below normal and La Nina weather patterns suggesting a dry January and February, California could be facing a third consecutive year of drought.

That’s bad news for almost everyone – fish, fishermen, farmers, the Delta, and the whole of Southern California – and the only real winners might be newspaper editorial writers, who are guaranteed a steady supply of controversy.

What do fly fishermen have to look forward to?

One year of drought actually makes the Upper Sacramento more fishable, and without a lot of runoff, spring fishing can be unbelievably good. But after two years, it gets a little dicey. The Upper Sacramento and McCloud rivers stay in pretty good shape (they’re essentially tailwaters), but some of my favorite small streams get hammered by low flows and high water temperatures.

While trout have survived droughts in tiny streams for centuries before we arrived to “manage” their habitat and populations, even tiny trout struggle to reach late fall’s cooling temperatures and intermittent rain.

More importantly – with California’s water wars already raging – a third year of drought is the equivalent of driving a gas tanker into a flaming house; any hope of avoiding a full blown political conflagration simply goes up in flames.

Salmon populations may be recovering some due to better ocean conditions, but over-pumping of the Delta, water diversions and crashing native species populations will likely force more concessions from water users, who view a third year of drought with the same joy you’d view a meteor heading for your house.

Of course, the drought isn’t causing all these problems – it just is what it is. Water in the West is almost uniformly overpromised, and as a nation, we’re discovering that unbridled greed is perhaps not the best basis for operating your financial system, energy policy – or a state-wide water project.

And while a wet winter would stem the bleeding for a while, maybe it’s best if we just confront this mess now like adults instead of letting a few shadowy figures hammer something out when nobody’s looking.

See you looking skyward for snow, Tom Chandler.

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.

water wars, california water wars, delta, westlands irrigation district

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From Bacher’s compelling narrative:

Unfortunately, Snow failed to mention that the reason for the low carryover storage was because Shasta, Oroville, Folsom and other northern California reservoirs have been drained to alarmingly low water levels by the state and federal governments to send subsidized water to drainage impaired land in the Westlands Water District and to fill the Kern Water Bank, the Semi-Tropic Water Bank and reservoirs in Southern California.

Today’s articles in the S.F. Chronicle, Sacramento Bee and other newspapers about Snow’s announcement failed to mention the real reasons behind the alleged “drought.” Fortunately, Tom Stienstra, S.F. Chronicle outdoor columnist and author, wrote a superb piece, “Drought, or water heist?,” in the Chronicle on October 26, exposing this fraud by the Schwarzenegger administration. “This isn’t a drought. This is a created shortage,” Stienstra emphasized.

Stienstra cites Department of Water Resources data stating that the past two years are only the ninth driest two-year period in the past 88 years, and that California routinely experiences such periods once every 10 years.

“What happened last year is that water managers were betting on a wet spring,” said Stienstra. “When it didn’t happen, many lakes were drained down to nothing in order to send water to L.A. and farmers.”

“True droughts are measured by soil moisture, and in some cases, water levels at wilderness lakes. In a true drought, soil moisture is so low that plants go into artificial hibernation to protect themselves, as in 1992, and that has not happened. Up in the high country, most wilderness lakes – outside the reach of water-grabbers – are full,” he said.

If you missed the reference, I’ll point out that the “drainage impaired land in the Westlands Water District” is the same Westlands District that bought McCloud’s Private Bolle Boka club – a clear attempt to pave the way for the raising of Shasta Dam to a much higher level than is publicly discussed.

Later in the article, Bacher cites record levels of water extraction from the Delta and an utter lack of conservation as main contributors to the “drought” – which he considers largely manmade.

“The DWR didn’t call for water conservation this year – so the dry year situation wasn’t taken seriously,” said McIntyre. “This year we’re going into a potentially dry year without a buffer in the reservoirs, so the state and federal governments have managed themselves into a manmade drought.”

The state and federal governments in recent years have pumped record amounts of water out of the California Delta. Some of the largest annual water export levels in history occurred in 2003 (6.3 million acre-feet), 2004 (6.1 MAF), 2005 (6.5 MAF) and 2006 (6.3 MAF). Exports averaged 4.6 MAF annually between 1990 and 1999 and increased to an average of 6 MAF between 2000 and 2007, a rise of almost 30 percent, according to the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance.

The problem with California water supply won’t be addressed by building a peripheral canal or more dams, but by practicing better water management and increased water conservation, McIntyre contends. “This is more a failure of water policy and management than it is of infrastructure,” she said. “We will have a water crisis every year unless we find a way to decrease demand.”

Read the rest of the piece here.

water wars, california water, drought, state water project, westlands irrigation district

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The Reader’s Digest version? While Winter storms promised much, a dry spring means the Sierra snowpack has fallen far short of early expectations.

Faster than you can say "rationing," every major paper in the state jumped on the story.

From the Contra Costa Times:

California’s snowpack is low for the second year in a row, leaving water managers across the state grappling with the triple threat of a dry year, depleted reservoirs and new environmental restrictions on pumping from the Delta.

The whole scenario would be amusing if so much wasn’t at stake; a water-hungry state has largely maxed out its supplies — doing an unbelievable amount of environmental damage in the process — and yet somehow, water managers wanted to believe one good year would solve the problem.

Here at the Underground, we’ve got a bridge we’d like to sell to those same managers.

See you at the tap, Tom Chandler.