The San Joaquin River, which helps
drain California’s Central Valley, has been negatively impacted
by construction of dams, inadequate streamflows and poor water
quality. Efforts are now underway to restore the river and
continue providing agricultural lands with vital irrigation,
among other water demands.
After an 18-year lawsuit to restore water flows to a 60-mile dry
stretch of river and to boost the dwindling salmon populations,
the San Joaquin River Restoration Settlement is underway.
Water releases are now used to restore the San Joaquin River and
to provide habitat for naturally-reproducing populations of
self-sustaining Chinook salmon and other fish in the San Joaquin
River. Long-term efforts also include measures to reduce or avoid
adverse water supply impacts from the restoration flows.
Charlie Hamilton hasn’t irrigated his vineyards with water from
the Sacramento River since early May, even though it flows just
yards from his crop. Nearby to the south, the industrial
Bay Area city of Antioch has supplied its people with water
from the San Joaquin River for just 32 days this year, compared
to roughly 128 days by this time in a wet year. They may be
close by, but these two rivers, central arms
of California’s water system, have become too salty to use
in some places as the state’s punishing drought drags on.
The last leg of Nina Gordon-Kirsch’s monthlong hiking journey
was a 10-mile ascent up the western flank of the Sierra Nevada
to a pair of gleaming alpine lakes near Ebbetts Pass, about
equidistant between Lake Tahoe and Yosemite
National Park. … The moment capped a 33-day sojourn along the
length of the Mokelumne … She’s not alone: California’s
complicated relationship with water, strained by historic
drought, is driving all kinds of people to embark on “water
walks.” The practice involves tracing a river or waterway “from
sea to source,” or in reverse direction, under one’s own power,
in an effort to gain perspective on our complex water supply.
On a small scale, aquifers — subsurface natural basins — have
been recharged with flood waters from extreme storms for
decades. Now, a new Department of Water Resources (DWR)
assessment shows how Flood Managed Aquifer Recharge, or
Flood-MAR, can help reduce flood risk and boost groundwater
supplies across large areas of land…. In partnership with the
Merced Irrigation District, Sustainable Conservation, and
others, DWR experts analyzed how this would work in the Merced
River —a 145-mile-long tributary of the San Joaquin
River. The Merced River, which flows from the Sierra
Nevada to the San Joaquin Valley, could be much more vulnerable
to heavy flooding as storms intensify.
Here we go again. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration revived
the Delta tunnel project Wednesday, unveiling a downsized
version of the controversial, multibillion-dollar plan to
re-engineer the fragile estuary on Sacramento’s doorstep that
serves as the hub of California’s over-stressed water-delivery
network. After three years with little to no public activity,
the state released an environmental blueprint for what’s now
called the Delta Conveyance — a 45-mile tunnel that would
divert water from the Sacramento River and route it under the
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta so that it can be shipped to farms
and cities hundreds of miles away.
The California Department of Water Resources has announced
that it will be releasing their Draft Environmental Impact
Report (DEIR) early this week for the Delta Conveyance Project,
AKA the embattled Delta Tunnel. Documents for federal
review of the project will be released later this fall.
… The changes in the plans include changes to the
intakes, the tunnel itself, the power lines, the route and the
operations, according to DWR. Here are some of the highlights
of the proposed changes:
People often have strange ideas about how water works.
Even simple water systems can be confusing. When water
systems become large complex socio-physical-ecological systems
serving many users and uses, opportunities for confusion become
extreme, surpassing comprehension by our ancient Homo sapien
brains. When confused by conflicting rhetoric, using numbers to
“follow the water” can be helpful. The California Water
Plan has developed some such numbers. This essay presents
their net water use numbers for 2018, by California’s
agricultural, urban, and environmental uses by hydrologic
region.
There we were, 19 of us on the stony shore of the Tuolumne
River, feeling a bit stranded like the crew of Gilligan’s
Island. Our “Finding Common Water” rafting excursion was
planned around “no water Wednesday,” when river releases are
held back for water conservation and infrastructure
maintenance. The trip’s goal: Get off our desk chairs and onto
rafts, out of the ordinary and into an extraordinary setting —
a hot, highly regulated, wild and scenic river — to push
us out of our comfort zone and get to work on addressing real
water problems.
A new policy brief from the Public Policy Institute of
California is recommending cost-effective water storage
investments as the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is seeing less
inflow. It also offers a damning picture of the thirty-year
shift in how the Golden State divvied up water, largely pitting
fish species against millions of its residents. The institute –
a nonpartisan think tank – initially published the brief in
early spring, focuses on the Delta that supplies water to about
30 million residents and over six million acres of
farmland.
As water in the North Fork of the Kern River dwindles,
controversy over its diminished flows is ramping up. At least
some river watchers are accusing Southern California Edison of
misusing a portion of the flows by continuing to divert water,
ostensibly, for a state-owned fish hatchery that has been
closed since 2020. The state Department of Fish and Wildlife
(CDFW) even sent a letter to Edison in January 2022 directing
the utility to stop taking water out of the river for the
hatchery, saying the facility and its pipeline are
inoperable.
The lake at the Park at River Walk is fast disappearing, as are
the Truxtun Lakes and some other city-owned water features.
Blame the drought. The City of Bakersfield Water Resources
Department has cut off flows to city-owned recreation and water
recharge facilities to hold on to what little surface water
it’s receiving from the dwindling Kern River for drinking
water, according to Daniel Maldonado, a water planner with the
department. … Local resident Calletano Guiterrez understood
the city has to contend with the drought but hoped at least
some water could be set aside for what he said he and his
family have come to love about Bakersfield.
After completing degrees from Cornell University, University of
Michigan, and the University of New Mexico, Dr. Jon Rosenfield
returned to the Bay Area in 2002, where he worked as a
postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Dr. Peter
Moyle. He researches and is a tireless advocate for the
Central Valley’s native salmon, steelhead, and smelt species.
Dr. Rosenfield went on to The Bay Institute where he worked for
over ten years to protect fisheries, becoming one of the
region’s leading experts on the importance of freshwater flows
from the Delta for the sustainability of the Bay’s ecosystem
and fish populations.
At over 13,000 feet high, the Tuolumne River begins in Yosemite
National Park at Mount Lyell and Mount Dana, traveling 149
miles downstream before reaching its confluence with the San
Joaquin River, just 50 feet above sea-level. The Tuolumne is
designated as a Wild and Scenic River and is protected as such
under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. Throughout the US, this
Act protects over 14,000 miles of rivers selected for their
remarkable scenic, recreational, geologic, fish and wildlife,
historic, or other similar values. The Wild and Scenic
Tuolumne River feels just that – wild and scenic – and yet I
was surprised to learn that it is constrained on both sides by
two large scale reservoir systems.
Los Angeles County has 25 state parks, recreation areas,
historical sites and beaches. There are 24 more in Orange and
San Diego counties. But in the eight counties of the San
Joaquin Valley, which stretches from the Tehachapis to the
northern edge of San Joaquin County, there are only 15 state
sites, and only five of those are state parks. That is
about to change. In the budget just signed by Gov. Gavin
Newsom, enough money has been dedicated to start creating
California’s first new state park since Fort Ord Dunes in
Monterey County joined the system more than a decade ago. -Written by Julie Rentner, president of River
Partners, a nonprofit conservation organization; and
Assemblymember Adam Gray, a
Democrat representing Merced County and part of
Stanislaus County, including Dos Rios Ranch.
July is one of the most dangerous months of the year for water
rescues, according to Sacramento-area fire departments. Over
the last several days, multiple drownings across the region
have fire crews urging the community to wear life jackets,
especially as temperatures hit triple digits across Northern
California. The Sacramento Metropolitan Fire District
responded to 14 water rescues along the American River on
Saturday, 13 of the people who were rescued survived and one
person died.
California regulators have begun curtailing the water rights of
many farms and irrigation districts along the Sacramento River,
forcing growers to stop diverting water from the river and its
tributaries. The order, which took effect Thursday, puts a hold
on about 5,800 water rights across the Sacramento and San
Joaquin rivers’ watersheds, reflecting the severity of
California’s extreme drought. Together with a similar order in
June, the State Water Resources Control Board has now curtailed
9,842 water rights this year in the Sacramento and San Joaquin
watersheds, more than half of the nearly 16,700 existing
rights.
Berkeley native Nina Gordon-Kirsch departed Tuesday on a
240-mile walk from her home in Oakland’s Longfellow
neighborhood to the headwaters of the Mokelumne River, the
primary source of the East Bay’s drinking water. Gordon-Kirsch,
a 12th grade teacher, will be bringing a two-person film crew
and hopes her journey will inspire students to think about
issues of water conservation and reuse. The trek is her attempt
to show “all the steps it takes” for water to arrive at our
faucets.
Bakersfield City water managers learned from California’s last
“epic” drought – don’t wait to make a deal. In 2015, city
water managers scrambled to keep taps flowing for more than
20,000 Bakersfield residents as the Kern River ran so low the
city had zero water entitlement coming down the river. The
river is the only source for Bakersfield’s northeast water
treatment plant but at only 11% of normal, there just wasn’t
enough.
A California Court of Appeal held that the EIR for a public
water authority’s river diversion and water storage project
adequately described the unadjudicated waters to be diverted
and adequately analyzed impacts to water rights and groundwater
supply. Buena Vista Water Storage District v. Kern Water
Bank Authority 76 Cal. App. 5th 576 (2022). Until 2010,
the Kern River had been designated by the State Water Resources
Control Board as a fully appropriated stream, and only those
who held an appropriative water right could divert Kern River
water.
There’ll be an audit of California’s water supply forecast
after the state overestimated and prematurely released 700,000
acre-feet of water last year, officials announced Monday. A
news release from Assemblymember Adam Gray (D-Merced) announced
that Gray’s request for audit was approved. It aims to examine
the impacts of the flawed forecasts and the Department of Water
Resources (DWR) and State Water Board. … California’s
water operations overestimated the forecast by 68% for the
Sacramento River region, 45% for the San Joaquin River
region and 46% for the Tulare Lake region, according to a
state report. Those overestimations left the operators with
less stored water than was necessary, according to Gray’s news
release.
Travel along the San Joaquin River to learn firsthand about one
of the nation’s largest and most expensive river restoration
projects.
The San Joaquin River was the focus of one of the most
contentious legal battles in California water history,
ending in a 2006 settlement between the federal government,
Friant Water Users Authority and a coalition of environmental
groups.
