The San Joaquin Valley stretches from across mid-California
between coastal ranges in west and the Sierras on the east. The
region includes large cities such as Fresno and Bakersfield,
national parks such as Yosemite and Kings and fertile farmland
and multi-billion dollar agriculture industry.
The federal Central Valley Project and State Water Project (about
30 percent of SWP water is used for irrigation) helped
deliver water to the valley. Today, San Joaquin Valley crops
include grapes, tomatoes, hay, sugar beets, nuts, cotton and a
multitude of other fruits and vegetables. At the same time, water
used to grow these crops has led to the need for agricultural
drainage.
With California enduring record-breaking rain and snow and Gov.
Gavin Newsom recently easing restrictions on
groundwater recharge, interest in “managed aquifer recharge”
has never been higher. This process – by which floodwater is
routed to sites such as farm fields so that it percolates into
the aquifer – holds great promise as a tool to replenish
depleted groundwater stores across the state. But one concern,
in the agricultural context, is how recharge might push
nitrates from fertilizer into the groundwater supply.
Consumption of well water contaminated with nitrates has been
linked to increased risk of cancers, birth defects and other
health impacts.
Our water managers have been investing in groundwater
infrastructure for the past two decades, and with consistent
investments, we’re now seeing the fruits of our labor. During
the recent severe weather conditions, we replenished the
groundwater basin and stored surface water for future use,
thanks to our Aquifer Storage and Recovery investments. In just
the first week of March, we banked 44 million gallons of water
and doubled that amount this week. With 88 million gallons of
banked water, it can supply about 732 homes annually. We’ve
been saving water like this for a while now. In fact, this past
January, we saved enough water to supply 1,000 homes annually.
And a year ago, we had surplus surface water and stored a
significant amount, equivalent to 160 Olympic-sized
pools.
Tim Prado … lives in Lamont, a community nestled among the
oil wells and almond orchards of eastern Kern County. This
region has struggled with arsenic and other contaminants in its
groundwater. But recently, a $25 million dollar grant from the
state’s Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund gave Prado a
tool in his fight for drinking water, since he is also the
chair of Lamont Public Utility District. … Joaquin
Esquivel is the chair of the State Water Resources Control
Board and a son of immigrant farm workers himself. He was
recently at a site where a water well will be built in Lamont.
He spoke about the drinking water challenges facing rural
California. … Esquivel says the agency is making strides
in its quest to ensure water access for everyone.
The Bureau of Reclamation said Tuesday water allocations to the
Central Valley Project will increase thanks to the incredible
amount of rain and snow the state has received. The initial
allocation issued Feb. 22 was conservative due to below-average
precipitation in February, according to the Bureau of
Reclamation. The increase is due to the persistent wet
weather that dominated the end of February and almost all of
March. The atmospheric river events have greatly boosted
reservoir levels, including the two main reservoirs in the
state north and south of the delta – Shasta and San Luis,
respectively. … The latest allocations raised
irrigation water service to 80% from 35% of their contract
total, and municipal and industrial water service to 100% from
75% of their historic use.
In a move that upset and baffled conservationists and
floodplain advocates, Gov. Gavin Newsom, in his 2023-24 budget
proposal, eliminated all $40 million that had been allocated
for San Joaquin Valley floodplain restoration. This
year’s floods have highlighted the need for improved — and more
equitably distributed — flood protection efforts throughout
California. Restoring floodplains, many experts agree, is one
of the most cost-effective ways to protect communities from
flooding. San Joaquin Valley lawmakers of both parties
and local leaders say Newsom’s budget cut could endanger their
communities, and that it signals a disparity in how the state
distributes funding for flood protection. San Joaquin Valley
communities vulnerable to flooding are largely home to
underserved, low-income Latinos.
[A]gricultural practices, especially in California, must be
updated to survive the future. One powerful change that is
growing momentum is strategic cropland repurposing. Doing
cropland repurposing right can benefit many, including
landowners. … Cropland retirement has direct
negative effects on agricultural revenues and farmworker
employment, with ripple effects in other sectors that depend on
agriculture (such as transportation and agricultural services).
But cropland retirement also means a decrease in pesticide,
synthetic fertilizers, and water use that can bring significant
environmental and local public health benefits. How do we
weigh these scenarios and decide if cropland repurposing makes
sense?
A field that has long grown tomatoes, peppers and onions now
looks like a wind-whipped ocean as farmer Don Cameron seeks to
capture the runoff from a freakishly wet year in California to
replenish the groundwater basin that is his only source to
water his crops. Taking some tomatoes out of production for a
year is an easy choice if it means boosting future water
supplies for his farm about 35 miles (56 kilometers) southwest
of Fresno. He’s pumping 300 acre-feet a day — enough to supply
hundreds of households for a year — from the gushing North Fork
of the Kings River onto former vegetable fields and others
dotted with pistachio trees, which can withstand heavy
flooding.
In little pockets in the state, people like [Matt Kaminski, a
biologist from Ducks Unlimited] are reworking the land yet
again to bring back a version of California’s past, in service
of the future. By allowing rivers to spread out, flows are
diverted from downstream communities, replenishing groundwater
and staving off unwanted floods. “These wetlands,” Kaminski
likes to say, “act as a sponge.” And the state agreed. In
September, the California Wildlife Conservation Board earmarked
$40 million for the nonprofit River Partners to spend on
similar projects in the San Joaquin Valley. But in the
governor’s proposed budget released in January, that funding
was axed.
When Don Cameron first intentionally flooded his central
California farm in 2011, pumping excess stormwater onto his
fields, fellow growers told him he was crazy. Today, California
water experts see Cameron as a pioneer. His experiment to
control flooding and replenish the ground water has become a
model that policy makers say others should emulate. With the
drought-stricken state suddenly inundated by a series of
rainstorms, California’s outdated infrastructure has let much
of the stormwater drain into the Pacific Ocean. Cameron
estimated his operation is returning 8,000 to 9,000 acre-feet
of water back to the ground monthly during this exceptionally
wet year, from both rainwater and melted snowpack. That would
be enough water for 16,000 to 18,000 urban households in a
year.
For the first time in more than two years, much of the
southwest portion of California is free of both drought and
“abnormally dry” conditions. According to the U.S. Drought
Monitor, Santa Barbara, Ventura and Orange counties are
drought-free. San Diego and Los Angeles counties, although they
show improvement in the last seven days, haven’t completely
shaken “abnormal dry” and “moderate drought” statuses. The
bird’s eye view: Every week, California moves further away from
its once drought-stricken conditions. Most of the central
Sierra, foothills, Central Valley and the entire coast have
exited drought conditions. Roughly 64% of the state is
drought-free.
Floating solar panels placed on reservoirs around the world
could generate enough energy to power thousands of cities,
according to a study published last week in the journal Nature
Sustainability. Called floating photovoltaic systems, or
“floatovoltaics,” these solar arrays function the same way as
panels on land, capturing sunlight to generate electricity.
… The new research shows this buoyant technology has the
potential to create vast amounts of power and conserve
water—without taking up precious space on land. … A
handful of countries are already answering that question by
using floating solar panels in a limited capacity… California
plans to test a similar idea in which solar panels will
be placed above irrigation canals.
The city of Linsday in eastern Tulare County is one of several
in the region to experience extreme flooding during the recent
storms this month. In the brief pause in rain, the city
declared a state of emergency to prepare for a new storm this
week. But for some residents, the damage is already done. In
this interview, KVPR’s Esther Quintanilla spoke with Lindsay
City Mayor Hipolito Cerros to hear how he’s leading his
community through this time.
The feast or famine nature of California water has never been
more apparent than now. After three years of punishing drought,
the state has been slammed by a dozen atmospheric rivers. On
our Central
Valley Tour next month, you will see the
ramifications of this nature in action. Focusing on the San
Joaquin Valley, the tour will bring you up close to farmers,
cities and disadvantaged communities as well
as managers trying to capture flood waters to augment
overpumped groundwater basins while also protecting communities
from damaging flood impacts. Despite the recent rains, the San
Joaquin Valley most years deals with little to no water
deliveries for agricultural irrigation and wetland habitat
management.
During a winter of blizzards, floods and drought-ending
downpours, it’s easy to forget that California suffers
from chronic water scarcity — the long-term decline
of the state’s total available fresh water. This rainy season’s
inundation isn’t going to change that. … It’s all about
groundwater. It is the long-term disappearance of
groundwater that is the major driver behind the state’s steady
decline in total available fresh water, which hydrologists
define as snowpack, surface water, soil moisture and
groundwater combined. … The gains made during wet years
simply can’t offset the over-pumping during the dry years in
between. In fact, the state’s groundwater deficit is now so
large that it will never be fully replenished. -Written by Jay Famiglietti, a global futures
professor at Arizona State University.
You may have heard it repeatedly through local and national
news outlets or from organizations critical of California’s
agricultural water use. At the height of a historic drought in
2015, for example, The Washington Post published a report
titled “Agriculture is 80% of water use in California.” And a
2022 report by Food and Water Watch, titled “These industries
are sucking up California’s water and worsening drought,” again
noted that, “in California, 80% of our water goes toward
agriculture.” Really? Before we explain just how much that 80%
figure is taken out of context, this fact is worth noting:
Water for farmers in California produces by far America’s
largest food supply, including staples that are affordable,
safe, nutritious and essential for our daily lives.
The Westlands Water District board of directors has elected its
newest general manager — also the organization’s first woman to
serve in the role. Allison Febbo comes to Westlands by way of
the Mojave Water Agency north of San Bernardino, where she is
currently general manager. Before that, she was the deputy
operations manager for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Central
Valley operations office. She has nearly 25 years of experience
in natural resources, hydrology and water operations. Febbo
took the position with Mojave Water Agency on Dec. 1, 2021,
according to the Victorville Daily Press.
Not long ago, California dairy producer Ryan Junio prayed for
rain. The ongoing water scarcity challenges that faced the
Golden State was the No. 1 concern for this Tulare County dairy
farmer. “As a dairy producer, water scarcity is an
ever-growing challenge and is my top concern,” Junio said last
summer. Junio wouldn’t have thought that nine months later he
would be dealing with a different water crisis, as massive
flooding has wreaked havoc on California’s largest dairy hub,
Tulare County, home to 330,000-plus dairy cows. Recently
Junio’s farm, Four J Jerseys, which consists of two dairies
located in Pixley and home to 4,200 cows, had to evacuate one
dairy that sits south of the Tule River.
Thousands of people in the rural San Joaquin Valley have been
forced to leave their homes as rivers and creeks have swelled
from recent storms, putting neighborhoods and farms under water
— and more wet weather looms. The flooding was most severe
in Tulare County, where over the weekend scenes played out of
residents being plucked from high water by rescuers in boats,
dairy workers rustling cattle out of swampy fields, and
backhoes pouring dirt to repair storm-damaged
levees…. The widespread flooding comes as severe storms
continue to pound the region while huge volumes of water from
California’s highest peaks pour out of the nearby Sierra
Nevada. The river channels and extensive berms and levees
designed to corral floodwaters have been overwhelmed.
The drama was high on the Tulare Lake bed Saturday as flood
waters pushed some landowners to resort to heavy handed and, in
one instance, illegal tactics, to try and keep their farm
ground dry — even at the expense of other farmers and some
small communities. Someone illegally cut the banks of Deer
Creek in the middle of the night causing water to rush toward
the tiny town of Allensworth. The levee protecting Corcoran had
its own protection as an armed guard patrolled the structure to
keep it safe. At the south end of the old lake bed, the
J.G. Boswell Company had workers drag a piece of heavy
equipment onto the banks of its Homeland Canal to prevent any
cuts that would drain Poso Creek water onto Boswell land.
Though California may be ending its winter with quenched
reservoirs and near record snowpack, meteorologists are warning
that the state will face increased flooding risk in the coming
months as Sierra Nevada snowmelt fills rivers and streams. On
Thursday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s
spring flood outlook reported that drought conditions will
continue to improve in much of the state, but the potential for
flooding will worsen in the face of heavy snowpack and elevated
soil moisture. … The severity of that flooding remains
to be seen, however, and depends on a variety of weather
factors, experts say. … Potential triggers for rapid
snowmelt could be an early season heat wave or another series
of warm storms, Swain said …
The State Water Resources Control Board has approved a request
by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to divert floodwaters from
the San Joaquin River so they can percolate down to aquifers.
The plan would divert 600,000 acre feet of water — or more than
the 191 billion gallons supplied to the city of Los Angeles
each year. … Newsom also has signed an executive
order temporarily lifting regulations and setting clear
conditions for diverting floodwater without permits to recharge
groundwater storage. Groundwater accounts for as much as
60% of California’s water supply during dry times. The aquifers
usually refill when rain and floodwater percolates through the
soil and into the basins. As California’s drought lingered, the
basins weren’t recharging.
Last summer Governor Newsom released California’s Water Supply
Strategy–which calls for the modernization of our water
management system. We know that the Sacramento Valley continues
to modernize everything we do, from our farms, communities and
businesses, to the way we approach water. These improvements
include adopting improved water efficiency, irrigation systems,
and tools to measure water use. We are planting new varieties
that are more productive and produce more crop per drop. We are
investing millions to improve water delivery systems for the
environment as well as for farms, cities, and disadvantaged
communities.
The southern Sierra Nevada is covered with the deepest snowpack
in recorded history, and the rest of the range is not far
behind. When all that snow melts, where will it go? You
can read the answer in the landscape of the Central Valley. To
the eye it is nearly flat, covered by layers of gravel, silt
and clay washed from the mountains over the eons by rain and
melting snow. … The solution is shockingly simple,
relatively cheap — compared with the cost of cataclysmic floods
— and surprisingly non-controversial. We just haven’t yet done
it on the scale that’s needed. California needs to restore its
floodplains. Not the whole valley floors, and not as they were
in the pre-development era. But it needs to have many more
acres of land reserved for floodwater.
The 11th atmospheric river storm of the season left a trail of
soggy misery in California as it broke decades-old rainfall
records and breached levees this week. In the Tulare County
city of Porterville, residents on both sides of the Tule River
were ordered to evacuate Wednesday morning as levels rose at
Lake Success, sending water running over the spillway at
Schafer Dam. … Lake Success saw a significant increase
in inflows overnight, peaking at nearly 19,800 cubic feet of
water rushing in per second Wednesday morning, according
to state data. Visalia and Porterville have declared a
state of emergency. The increased flow from the spillway
is adding more water to the river and tributaries below, both
of which are already full from the last storm, Monteiro said,
adding that there is “flood concern.”
California’s latest atmospheric rivers are sending rainfall
higher into the mountains and onto the state’s crucial
snowpack. The rain alone is a problem for low-lying areas
already dealing with destructive flooding, but the prospect of
rain on the deep mountain snow has triggered widespread flood
warnings. When rain falls on snow, it creates complex flood
risks that are hard to forecast. Those risks are also rising
with climate change. For much of the United States, storms with
heavy rainfall can coincide with seasonal snow cover. When that
happens, the resulting runoff of water can be much greater than
what is produced from rain or snowmelt alone. The combination
has resulted in some of the nation’s most destructive and
costly floods, including the 1996 Midwest floods and the 2017
flood that damaged California’s Oroville Dam. -Written by Keith Musselman, an assistant professor in
geography, mountain hydrology and climate change at the
University of Colorado Boulder.
The San Joaquin Valley in California (southern Central Valley)
is the most profitable agricultural region in the United States
by far with a revenue of $37.1 billion in 2020. The San
Joaquin Valley itself generates more agricultural revenue than
any other state, and more than countries like Canada,
Germany, or Peru. Other agricultural regions of California are
also very profitable, such as the Sacramento Valley (northern
Central Valley), the Salinas Valley, and the Imperial
Valley. However, this economic profit has a steep health
and environmental toll, and that toll is paid for by the
residents of rural communities in California. The three regions
with the worst air quality (by year-round particle
pollution) in the United States are in the San Joaquin Valley,
corresponding to five of its eight counties.
Fresno County’s newest large-scale water storage project is
happening below ground. With California inundated by rain and
snow, state and federal water regulators hatched a plan to help
replenish underground aquifers further depleted by heavy
agriculture pumping during the recent drought. In an agreement
announced last week, more than 600,000 acre-feet of floodwater
from the San Joaquin River system will be diverted and allowed
to soak back into the earth in areas with permeable soils and
wildlife refuges. How much water is 600,000 acre-feet? Enough
to overflow Millerton Lake, which stores 520,000 acre-feet at
capacity. Or enough to meet the annual needs of more than 1
million average households.
Spanish soldier and California explorer Pedro Fages was chasing
deserters in 1772 when he came across a vast marshy lake and
named it Los Tules for the reeds and rushes that lined its
shore. Situated between the later cities of Fresno and
Bakersfield, Tulare Lake, as it was named in English, was the
nation’s largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River.
It spread out to as much as 1,000 square miles as snow in the
Sierra melted each spring, feeding five rivers flowing into the
lake. Its abundance of fish and other wildlife supported
several Native American tribes, who built boats from the lake’s
reeds to gather its bounty. -Written by Dan Walters, a CalMatters columnist.
An unfinished section of the new Friant-Kern Canal suffered a
“severe breach” at Deer Creek in Tulare County Friday night as
the normally dry creek swelled with rain and snowmelt and
overran its banks into the construction zone. “This was worse
than the one before,” said Johnny Amaral, Chief Operating
Officer of the Friant Water Authority, at the authority’s
executive committee meeting on Monday. “We haven’t gotten a
handle on it yet but it’s tough to do anything out there right
now with what we’re expecting tomorrow.”
The atmospheric rivers that flowed over California in January
dumped about a foot of rain — equal to an entire year’s average
— in many parts of the state’s parched Central Valley, which
encompasses only 1% of U.S. farmland but produces 40% of the
nation’s table fruits, vegetables, and nuts. With February,
ordinarily the second wettest month, still to be counted, talks
of all the land that will have to fallowed as a result of the
drought have quieted for now. But most Golden State growers
have come to realize that droughts will simply be a part of
farming going forward, and the safety net is gone. That
safety net was groundwater pumping. For more than a
half-century, farmers in the Central Valley, the multi-faceted
state’s chief production area, have been pumping more water
from aquifers than can be replenished, causing wells to be
drilled deeper and deeper.
Solano County supervisors are scheduled Tuesday to receive an
update on the latest Delta tunnel project. “The Delta
Conveyance Project is the latest iteration of an isolated
conveyance by the state Department of Water Resources to remove
freshwater flows from the Delta for use in central and Southern
California,” the staff report to the board states. “The (Delta
Conveyance Project) includes constructing a 45-mile long,
39-foot diameter tunnel under the Delta with new diversions in
the North Delta that have a capacity to divert up to 6,000
cubic feet (of water) per second and operating new conveyance
facilities that would add to the existing State Water Project
infrastructure.”
Water policy wonks like us at PPIC spend an extraordinary
amount of time analyzing information from the past, trying to
understand the present, and modeling or speculating about the
future. All this work goes toward identifying policy changes
that might help California better manage its water. But
for all our efforts, nothing improves our understanding of
water like a “stress test,” whether that test is severe drought
or extreme wet. And it is starting to look like we are
going to get one of those stress tests this spring in the San
Joaquin Valley. As news outlets have been reporting for some
time, there is an “epic” snowpack in the central and southern
Sierra Nevada… And while Californians have been laser focused
on managing drought over the past decade, it’s now time to
start thinking about what to do with too much water, at least
in the San Joaquin River and Tulare Lake basins.
The Biden administration’s move to throw out the Trump-era
biological opinions that govern California’s water flow is
nothing more than a political move to Rep. David Valadao
(R–Hanford). In an upcoming interview on Sunrise FM,
Valadao discussed the history of the biological opinions and
the Congressional investigation into the Biden administration’s
decision. The backstory: The latest biological opinions
which govern the State Water Project and the Central Valley
Project were signed by President Donald Trump in 2019, capping
the process of formulating the new opinions that started under
President Barack Obama. When President Joe Biden took
office two years ago, his administration quickly began the
process of removing the 2019 biological opinions to revert back
to the previous opinions issued in 2008 and 2009.
California’s severely depleted groundwater basins could get a
boost this spring, after Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive
order waiving permits to recharge them. State water leaders
hope to encourage local agencies and agricultural districts to
capture water from newly engorged rivers and spread it onto
fields, letting it seep into aquifers after decades of heavy
agricultural pumping. … To pull water from the state’s
network of rivers and canals for groundwater recharge, state
law requires a permit from the State Water Resources Control
Board and Department of Fish and Wildlife. Many local agencies
lacked the permitting during January storms, but this month’s
atmospheric rivers and near record snowpack promises new
opportunities to put water underground.
To capitalize on strong flows resulting from
higher-than-average snowpack, the State Water Resources Control
Board approved a petition by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to
divert over 600,000 acre-feet of San Joaquin River flood waters
for wildlife refuges, underground storage and recharge. With
this approval, the State Water Board has authorized nearly
790,000 acre-feet in diversions for groundwater recharge and
other purposes since late December 2022 – the amount of water
used by at least 1.5 million households in a single year.
In Sarge Green’s 40-plus year career, he’s worn an astonishing
number of hats. Now a water management specialist with
California State University, Fresno, Sarge has worked on water
quality issues at the regional water board, served as general
manager of an irrigation district, and managed two resource
conservation districts (RCDs). He’s also a director for the
Tule Basin Land and Water Conservation Trust and the Fresno
Metropolitan Flood Control District. He’s been a long-time
partner with the PPIC Water Policy Center in our San Joaquin
Valley work as a trusted member of our research network. Sarge
remains deeply involved in efforts to help San Joaquin Valley
farms and communities cope with the challenges of implementing
the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. We spoke with him
about a pressing issue in the valley: how to manage farmland
that will be transitioning out of intensive irrigation.
In light of last week’s decisions regarding the groundwater
sustainability plans, groundwater managers in Fresno County are
celebrating. The backstory: The California Department of
Water Resources announced its decisions for the groundwater
sustainability plans for 10 basins in the Central Valley,
giving the green light to the Kings Subbasin and Westside
Subbasin, both of which are anchored in Fresno
County. Groundwater sustainability plans are required by
2014’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act and govern how
agencies in critically overdrafted areas achieve groundwater
sustainability. The big picture: The basins that received
approval from the state will move forward to the implementation
phase while those that were deemed inadequate will face direct
oversight from the State Water Board.
The Western United States is currently battling the most severe
drought in thousands of years. A mix of bad water management
policies and manmade climate change has created a situation
where water supplies in Western reservoirs are so low, states
are being forced to cut their water use. It’s not hard to
find media coverage that focuses on the excesses of residential
water use: long showers, swimming pools, lawn watering, at-home
car washes. Or in the business sector, like irrigating golf
courses or pumping water into hotel fountains in Las
Vegas. But when a team of researchers looked at water
use in the West, they uncovered a very different
story about where most Western water goes. Only 14 percent
of all water consumption in the Western US goes to residential,
commercial, and industrial water use.
In 1910, the Los Angeles real estate developer J. Harvey
McCarthy decided that this small agricultural town in the
Central Valley would be his “city beautiful,” a model community
and an automobile stop along the road to Yosemite. An infusion
of money brought Planada a bank, hotel, school, church and its
own newspaper, the Planada Enterprise, by the following year. A
celebration for the town’s first anniversary drew an estimated
10,000 people (though Planada had only several hundred
residents) as the city had become the best-known place in
Merced County. But McCarthy eventually abandoned the community,
located nine miles east of Merced, leaving its settlers to pick
up the pieces. It remained a farming town and is now home to
4,000 mostly low-income and Spanish-speaking residents who work
at nearby orchards.
The Department of Water Resources (DWR) today kicked
off National Groundwater Awareness Week 2023 with an
engaging educational event held at the California Natural
Resources Agency headquarters in Sacramento. The event featured
an array of groundwater partners who
provided presentations describing their work in
groundwater and why groundwater is such an important water
resource in California. After the presentations, the in-person
audience visited educational stations where they engaged with
the day’s speakers and other groundwater professionals.
Jennifer Peters signed on to have her Madera ranch become the
site of an experiment in replenishing groundwater in
California’s Central Valley. Though this pilot program led by a
subdivision of the United States Department of Agriculture is
far from the first effort to address the depletion of
groundwater stores, it offers farmers like Peters hope for the
future of agriculture in the region. … Peters is a
fourth-generation farmer who operates Markarian Family LP with
her father and son. They cultivate wine grapes and almonds,
crops that require irrigation to grow in the Central Valley.
… The search for water has led growers to dig deep into
underground water supplies. Many aquifers, geological
structures that hold groundwater, are so depleted in the
Central Valley that they are considered at an “all time low” or
“much below normal,” …
The western Fresno County community, where nearly half the
residents live in poverty, is already carrying a water debt
of $400,000. That debt has been incurred over the last
few years as El Porvenir has had to buy surface water on the
open market and pay for expensive treatment. The town, along
with nearby Cantua Creek, was supposed to be getting water from
two new groundwater wells by this time. But the well project,
which began in 2018 and was supposed to be completed in 2021,
was delayed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. So,
residents have had to continue relying on the expensive surface
water. Fresno County buys about 100 acre feet of water
each year for the towns from Westlands Water District at $432
per acre foot.
State water officials on Thursday rejected six local
groundwater plans for the San Joaquin Valley, where basins
providing drinking and irrigation water are severely depleted
from decades of intensive pumping by farms. The plans —
submitted by local agencies tasked with the job of protecting
underground supplies — outline strategies for complying with a
state law requiring sustainable groundwater
management. The Department of Water Resources deemed the
plans inadequate … Groundwater depletion has hurt the San
Joaquin Valley’s small, rural communities, home to many
low-income Latino residents who have been forced to live on
bottled water and drill deeper wells, which can cost tens of
thousands of dollars.
Crews with the El Dorado Irrigation District are working to
clear snow and debris from the flumes and canals that deliver
water to its customers throughout the latest round of winter
weather. Matt Heape, a hydro operations and maintenance
supervisor for the district, said the focus Tuesday was taking
care of a 22-mile canal system. … To do that, he
explained, crews used snowcats to get to remote, wooden
locations, sometimes having to snowshoe in further to reach the
canals and the surrounding walkways. Much of the day
included clearing walkways, plowing snow and keeping systems
clear, Heap said.
Winter storms that bolstered the Sierra Nevada snowpack and
added to California reservoirs prompted federal and state water
managers to announce increases in anticipated water allocations
for the 2023 growing season. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
last week announced an initial allocation of 35% of contracted
water supplies for agricultural customers south of the
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The announcement brought a
measure of certainty for farmers, ranchers and agricultural
water contractors, after officials provided zero water
allocations for agriculture from the federal Central Valley
Project in 2021 and 2022.
Despite the continued heavy winter rain and snow throughout
California, Gov. Gavin Newsom recently extended his executive
orders from 2022 that declared a drought emergency statewide.
He also asked the state water board to waive water flow
regulations intended to protect salmon and other endangered
fish species, as well as San Francisco Bay and Delta estuary
overall. Some viewed these moves as pragmatic steps to
avoid “wasting” the bounty of California’s rains out to
sea. Others saw them as a declaration of war against
the health of the bay. In fact, a war against the bay has
been going on for decades. Newsom’s order was merely the latest
skirmish. The war’s primary aggressors are agricultural
interests in the Central Valley. -Written by Howard V. Hendrix, the author of six
novels as well as many essays, poems and short
stories.
More state money is flowing to the valley to take land out of
production in an attempt to ease demand on groundwater. The
state Department of Water Resources (DWR) is starting a new
program called LandFlex which will pay up to $25 million in
incentives to farmers to fallow crops. On February 23,
DWR announced three grants from the program, all of which are
going to San Joaquin Valley groundwater agencies. Madera
County groundwater sustainability agency (GSA) will receive
$9.3 million, Greater Kaweah GSA will receive $7 million and
Eastern Tule GSA will receive $7 million.
As drought-weary Californians watched trillions of gallons of
runoff wash into the Pacific Ocean during recent storms, it
underscored a nagging question: Why can’t we save more of that
water for not-so-rainy days to come? But even the rare
opportunity to stock up on the precious resource isn’t proving
enough to unite a state divided on a contentious idea to siphon
water from the north and tunnel it southward, an attempt to
combat the Southwest’s worst drought in more than a millennium.
The California Department of Water Resources said such a tunnel
could have captured a year’s supply of water for more than 2
million people. The proposal from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s
administration — one that would cost $16 billion to help 27
million water customers in central and southern California — is
spurring fresh outrage from communities that have fended off
similar plans over four decades, including suggestions to build
other tunnels or a massive canal.
Generations of Californians have taken for granted how water is
engineered to enable the grand agricultural nature of this
state. Now our water system suffers from severe drought and
reduced snowpacks. The Colorado River is in peril. Wells are
going dry. Water is getting contaminated. Land is losing value.
People are losing livelihoods. Such dilemmas are exacerbated in
disadvantaged communities. Large Central Valley growers
overpump water from wells in direct violation of the state’s
Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. Meanwhile, families in
farmworker towns go without clean and affordable water. They
still pay high water bills while resorting to bottled water to
cook, bathe and drink provided by government, nonprofits and
labor unions. -Written by Victor Griego, founder of Water Education
for Latino Leaders.
An updated report on the San Joaquin Valley’s water crisis
shows the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act is not enough
and additional water trading measures will need to be taken in
order to stabilize local agricultural economies. The Public
Policy Institute of California put out a policy brief on the
future of agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley. Its analysis
of the next 20 years indicates that annual water supplies for
the Valley could decline by 10 to 20%. The Valley has been long
understood to be the breadbasket of the United States and is
home to the nation’s top three agricultural counties. However,
without more innovative solutions, the Valley will likely have
to fallow 900,000 acres of farmland and and cost 50,000 jobs
leading to a major loss in the local economies The report
indicates that the loss of almost a million acres is
unavoidable…
Last century, California built dozens of large dams, creating
the elaborate reservoir system that supplies the bulk of the
state’s drinking and irrigation water. Now state officials and
supporters are ready to build the next one. The Sites Reservoir
— planned in a remote corner of the western Sacramento Valley
for at least 40 years — has been gaining steam and support
since 2014, when voters approved Prop. 1, a water bond that
authorized $2.7 billion for new storage projects. Still,
Sites Reservoir remains almost a decade away: Acquisition of
water rights, permitting and environmental review are still in
the works. Kickoff of construction, which includes two large
dams, had been scheduled for 2024, but likely will be delayed
another year. Completion is expected in 2030 or 2031.
Gov. Gavin Newsom bills himself as a protector of wildlife, so
you wouldn’t think he’d take water from baby salmon and give it
to almonds. Or to pistachios, or cotton or alfalfa. Especially
when California was just drenched with the wettest three-week
series of storms on record and was headed into another powerful
soaking of snow and rain. But Newsom and his water officials
still contend we’re suffering a drought — apparently it’s a
never-ending drought. So, they used that as a reason last week
to drastically cut river flows needed by migrating little
salmon in case the water is needed to irrigate San Joaquin
Valley crops in summer. -Written by columnist George Skelton.
State and federal water managers announced Wednesday increased
deliveries for millions of Californians in response to hopeful
hydrologic conditions that materialized over the past several
weeks. After a series of powerful storms brought rain and snow
to much of California in December and January, increased
reservoir levels led the state’s Department of Water Resources
to set its delivery forecast at 30 percent of requested water
supplies for the 29 public water agencies that draw from the
State Water Project to serve 27 million people and 750,000
acres of farmland.
You see them all over the San Joaquin Valley: Sparkling new
housing developments promising luxury living outside the big
cities. But a recent investigation from our non-profit
reporting partners shows the risks of building communities in
areas with unreliable access to drinking water. Back in the
1980s, county officials knew the risks of building homes in the
Mira Bella development near Millerton Lake in the foothills of
Fresno County, but they greenlit the project anyway—and now
residents and taxpayers are paying the price. In this
interview, KVPR’s Kerry Klein talks with the reporters who
produced this story, Jesse Vad of SJV Water and Gregory Weaver
of Fresnoland, about the lengths Mira Bella residents are going
to to solve their water problems, and what it demonstrates
about who does and does not have access to drinking water in
California.
An effort that has lasted more than 50 years to secure water
rights for the Tule River Indian Reservation continues. And
it’s hoped the passage of a bill that has been reintroduced can
prevent litigation happening between the Tribe and the U.S.
Government. U.S. Senators Alex Padilla and Dianne Feinstein
both of California have re-introduced legislation to formally
recognize the Tule River Tribe’s reserved water rights to 5,828
acre-feet/year of surface water from the South Fork of the Tule
River, the Tule River Water Rights Settlement Act. For decades,
the Tule River Tribe has worked with the federal government and
downstream water users to enact the settlement agreement. In
introducing the bill, Padilla’s office stated the legislation
would avoid costly and adversarial litigation for the tribe and
the U.S. government.
The Bakersfield City Council at its meeting Wednesday will
likely approve a $288,350 contract to conduct a detailed study
of the city’s water supplies and demands with a strong focus on
Kern River operations. Though the proposed study, on the
consent agenda, isn’t in direct response to a lawsuit filed
last year against the city by Water Audit of California over
the river, the study could answer some questions posed in the
lawsuit. The Water Audit suit alleges the city has been
derelict by not considering the public in how it operates the
river. The lawsuit doesn’t demand money. Rather it seeks to
stop water diversions from the river temporarily while the
court orders the city to study how river operations have
affected fisheries, the environment and recreational uses.
Downpours or drought, California’s farm belt will need to
tighten up in the next two decades and grow fewer crops. There
simply won’t be enough water to sustain present irrigation in
the San Joaquin Valley. Groundwater is dangerously depleted.
Wells are drying up and the land is sinking in many places,
cracking canals. Surface water supplies have been cut back
because of drought, and future deliveries are uncertain due to
climate change and environmental
regulations. … Agriculture is water intensive. And
water is becoming increasingly worrisome in the West,
particularly with overuse of the Colorado River. There’s plenty
of water off our coast, but we’ve only begun to dip our toe
into desalination. -Written by columnist George Skelton.
It sounds like an obvious fix for California’s whipsawing
cycles of deluge and drought: Capture the water from downpours
so it can be used during dry spells. Pump it out of
flood-engorged rivers and spread it in fields or sandy basins,
where it can seep into the ground and replenish the region’s
huge, badly depleted aquifers. … Yet even this winter, when
the skies delivered bounties of water not seen in half a
decade, large amounts of it surged down rivers and out into the
ocean. Water agencies and experts say California
bureaucracy is increasingly to blame — the state tightly
regulates who gets to take water from streams and creeks to
protect the rights of people downriver, and its rules don’t
adjust nimbly even when storms are delivering a torrent of new
supply.
Extracting fossil fuels from underground reservoirs requires so
much water a Chevron scientist once referred to its operations
in California’s Kern River Oilfield “as a water company that
skims oil.” Fracking operations use roughly 1.5 million to 16
million gallons per well to release oil and gas from shale,
according to the U.S. Geological Survey. All that water returns
to the surface as wastewater called flowback and produced
water, or PFW, contaminated by a complex jumble of hazardous
substances in fluids injected to enhance production, salts,
metals and other harmful elements once sequestered deep
underground, along with their toxic breakdown products.
It was exactly the sort of deluge California groundwater
agencies have been counting on to replenish their overworked
aquifers. The start of 2023 brought a parade of torrential
Pacific storms to bone dry California. Snow piled up across the
Sierra Nevada at a near-record pace while runoff from the
foothills gushed into the Central Valley, swelling rivers over
their banks and filling seasonal creeks for the first time in
half a decade. Suddenly, water managers and farmers toiling in
one of the state’s most groundwater-depleted regions had an
opportunity to capture stormwater and bank it underground.
… The barrage of water was in many ways the first real
test of groundwater sustainability agencies’ plans to bring
their basins into balance, as required by California’s landmark
Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). The run of
storms revealed an assortment of bright spots and hurdles the
state must overcome to fully take advantage of the bounty
brought by the next big atmospheric river storm.
It was exactly the sort of deluge
California groundwater agencies have been counting on to
replenish their overworked aquifers.
The start of 2023 brought a parade of torrential Pacific storms
to bone dry California. Snow piled up across the Sierra Nevada at
a near-record pace while runoff from the foothills gushed into
the Central Valley, swelling rivers over their banks and filling
seasonal creeks for the first time in half a decade.
Suddenly, water managers and farmers toiling in one of the
state’s most groundwater-depleted regions had an opportunity to
capture stormwater and bank it underground. Enterprising agencies
diverted water from rushing rivers and creeks into manmade
recharge basins or intentionally flooded orchards and farmland.
Others snagged temporary permits from the state to pull from
streams they ordinarily couldn’t touch.
This tour traveled 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.
Hampton Inn & Suites Fresno
327 E Fir Ave
Fresno, CA 93720
This tour ventured through California’s Central Valley, known as the nation’s breadbasket thanks to an imported supply of surface water and local groundwater. Covering about 20,000 square miles through the heart of the state, the valley provides 25 percent of the nation’s food, including 40 percent of all fruits, nuts and vegetables consumed throughout the country.
Across a sprawling corner of southern Tulare County snug against the Sierra Nevada, a bounty of navel oranges, grapes, pistachios, hay and other crops sprout from the loam and clay of the San Joaquin Valley. Groundwater helps keep these orchards, vineyards and fields vibrant and supports a multibillion-dollar agricultural economy across the valley. But that bounty has come at a price. Overpumping of groundwater has depleted aquifers, dried up household wells and degraded ecosystems.
Innovative efforts to accelerate
restoration of headwater forests and to improve a river for the
benefit of both farmers and fish. Hard-earned lessons for water
agencies from a string of devastating California wildfires.
Efforts to drought-proof a chronically water-short region of
California. And a broad debate surrounding how best to address
persistent challenges facing the Colorado River.
These were among the issues Western Water explored in
2019, and are still worth taking a look at in case you missed
them.
To survive the next drought and meet
the looming demands of the state’s groundwater sustainability
law, California is going to have to put more water back in the
ground. But as other Western states have found, recharging
overpumped aquifers is no easy task.
Successfully recharging aquifers could bring multiple benefits
for farms and wildlife and help restore the vital interconnection
between groundwater and rivers or streams. As local areas around
California draft their groundwater sustainability plans, though,
landowners in the hardest hit regions of the state know they will
have to reduce pumping to address the chronic overdraft in which
millions of acre-feet more are withdrawn than are naturally
recharged.
Bruce Babbitt, the former Arizona
governor and secretary of the Interior, has been a thoughtful,
provocative and sometimes forceful voice in some of the most
high-profile water conflicts over the last 40 years, including
groundwater management in Arizona and the reduction of
California’s take of the Colorado River. In 2016, former
California Gov. Jerry Brown named Babbitt as a special adviser to
work on matters relating to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and
the Delta tunnels plan.
Groundwater helped make Kern County
the king of California agricultural production, with a $7 billion
annual array of crops that help feed the nation. That success has
come at a price, however. Decades of unchecked groundwater
pumping in the county and elsewhere across the state have left
some aquifers severely depleted. Now, the county’s water managers
have less than a year left to devise a plan that manages and
protects groundwater for the long term, yet ensures that Kern
County’s economy can continue to thrive, even with less water.
The whims of political fate decided
in 2018 that state bond money would not be forthcoming to help
repair the subsidence-damaged parts of Friant-Kern Canal, the
152-mile conduit that conveys water from the San Joaquin River to
farms that fuel a multibillion-dollar agricultural economy along
the east side of the fertile San Joaquin Valley.
There’s going to be a new governor
in California next year – and a host of challenges both old and
new involving the state’s most vital natural resource, water.
So what should be the next governor’s water priorities?
That was one of the questions put to more than 150 participants
during a wrap-up session at the end of the Water Education
Foundation’s Sept. 20 Water Summit in Sacramento.
The Sacramento and San Joaquin
rivers are the two major Central Valley waterways that feed the
Delta, the hub of California’s water supply
network. Our last water tours of
2018 will look in-depth at how these rivers are managed and
used for agriculture, cities and the environment. You’ll see
infrastructure, learn about efforts to restore salmon runs and
talk to people with expertise on these rivers.
More than a decade in the making, an
ambitious plan to deal with the vexing problem of salt and
nitrates in the soils that seep into key groundwater basins of
the Central Valley is moving toward implementation. But its
authors are not who you might expect.
An unusual collaboration of agricultural interests, cities, water
agencies and environmental justice advocates collaborated for
years to find common ground to address a set of problems that
have rendered family wells undrinkable and some soil virtually
unusable for farming.
New water storage is the holy grail
primarily for agricultural interests in California, and in 2014
the door to achieving long-held ambitions opened with the passage
of Proposition
1, which included $2.7 billion for the public benefits
portion of new reservoirs and groundwater storage projects. The
statute stipulated that the money is specifically for the
benefits that a new storage project would offer to the ecosystem,
water quality, flood control, emergency response and recreation.
California voters may experience a sense of déjà vu this year when they are asked twice in the same year to consider water bonds — one in June, the other headed to the November ballot.
Both tackle a variety of water issues, from helping disadvantaged communities get clean drinking water to making flood management improvements. But they avoid more controversial proposals, such as new surface storage, and they propose to do some very different things to appeal to different constituencies.
Get a unique view of the San Joaquin Valley’s key dams and
reservoirs that store and transport water on our March Central
Valley Tour.
Our Central Valley
Tour, March 14-16, offers a broad view of water issues
in the San Joaquin Valley. In addition to the farms, orchards,
critical habitat for threatened bird populations, flood bypasses
and a national wildlife refuge, we visit some of California’s
major water infrastructure projects.
Participants of this tour snaked 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.
The 2-day, 1-night tour traveled along the river from Friant
Dam near Fresno to the confluence of the Merced River. As it
weaved across an historic farming region, participants learn
about the status of the river’s restoration and how the
challenges of the plan are being worked out.
A few tickets are still available for our Nov. 1-2 San Joaquin River
Restoration Tour, a once-a-year educational opportunity to
see the program’s progress first-hand. The tour begins and ends
in Fresno with an overnight stay in Los Banos.
Explore more than 100 miles of Central California’s longest river
while learning about one of the nation’s largest and costliest
river restorations. Our San Joaquin River
Restoration Tour on Nov. 1-2 will feature speakers from key
governmental agencies and stakeholder groups who will explain the
restoration program’s goals and progress.
The Sacramento and San Joaquin are the two major rivers in the
Central Valley that feed the Delta, the hub of
California’s water supply network.
Our last two water tours of 2017 will take in-depth looks at how
these rivers are managed and used for agriculture, cities and the
environment. You’ll see infrastructure, learn about efforts to
restore salmon runs and talk to people with expertise on these
rivers.
Protecting and restoring California’s populations of threatened
and endangered Chinook salmon and steelhead trout have been a big
part of the state’s water management picture for more than 20
years. Significant resources have been dedicated to helping the
various runs of the iconic fish, with successes and setbacks. In
a landscape dramatically altered from its natural setting,
finding a balance between the competing demands for water is
challenging.
Our water tours give a behind-the-scenes look at major water
issues in California. On our Central Valley Tour, March
8-10, you will visit wildlife habitat areas – some of which are
closed to the public – and learn directly from the experts who
manage them, in addition to seeing farms, large dams and other
infrastructure.
The recent deluge has led to changes in drought conditions in
some areas of California and even public scrutiny of the
possibility that the drought is over. Many eyes are focused on
the San Joaquin Valley, one of the areas hardest hit by reduced
surface water supplies. On our Central Valley Tour, March
8-10, we will visit key water delivery and storage sites in the
San Joaquin Valley, including Friant Dam and Millerton Lake
on the San Joaquin River.
ARkStorm stands for an atmospheric
river (“AR”) that carries precipitation levels expected to occur
once every 1,000 years (“k”). The concept was presented in a 2011
report by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) intended to elevate
the visibility of the very real threats to human life, property
and ecosystems posed by extreme storms on the West Coast.
Contaminants exist in water supplies from both natural and
manmade sources. Even those chemicals present without human
intervention can be mobilized from introduction of certain
pollutants from both
point and nonpoint sources.
Both the drought and high nitrate levels in shallow groundwater have necessitated deeper
drilling of new wells in the San Joaquin Valley, only to expose
water with heightened
arsenic levels. Arsenic usually exists in water as arsenate
or arsenite, the latter of which is more frequent in deep lake
sediments or groundwater with little oxygen and is both
more harmful and difficult to remove.
Whiskeytown Lake, a major reservoir in the foothills of the
Klamath Mountains nine miles west of Redding, was
built at the site of one of Shasta County’s first Gold Rush
communities. Whiskeytown, originally called
Whiskey Creek Diggings, was founded in 1849 and named in
reference to a whiskey barrel rolling off a citizen’s pack mule;
it may also refer to miners drinking a barrel per day.
A new era of groundwater management
began in 2014 with the passage of the Sustainable Groundwater
Management Act (SGMA), which aims for local and regional agencies
to develop and implement sustainable groundwater management
plans with the state as the backstop.
SGMA defines “sustainable groundwater management” as the
“management and use of groundwater in a manner that can be
maintained during the planning and implementation horizon without
causing undesirable results.”
This issue examines the impacts of California’s epic
drought, especially related to water supplies for San Joaquin
Valley rural communities and farmland.
This handbook provides crucial
background information on the Sustainable Groundwater Management
Act, signed into law in 2014 by Gov. Jerry Brown. The handbook
also includes a section on options for new governance.
This 3-day, 2-night tour, which we do every spring,
travels the length of the San Joaquin Valley, giving participants
a clear understanding of the State Water Project and Central
Valley Project.
This 30-minute documentary-style DVD on the history and current
state of the San Joaquin River Restoration Program includes an
overview of the geography and history of the river, historical
and current water delivery and uses, the genesis and timeline of
the 1988 lawsuit, how the settlement was reached and what was
agreed to.
This 25-minute documentary-style DVD, developed in partnership
with the California Department of Water Resources, provides an
excellent overview of climate change and how it is already
affecting California. The DVD also explains what scientists
anticipate in the future related to sea level rise and
precipitation/runoff changes and explores the efforts that are
underway to plan and adapt to climate.
Salt. In a small amount, it’s a gift from nature. But any doctor
will tell you, if you take in too much salt, you’ll start to have
health problems. The same negative effect is happening to land in
the Central Valley. The problem scientists call “salinity” poses
a growing threat to our food supply, our drinking water quality
and our way of life. The problem of salt buildup and potential –
but costly – solutions are highlighted in this 2008 public
television documentary narrated by comedian Paul Rodriguez.
A 20-minute version of the 2008 public television documentary
Salt of the Earth: Salinity in California’s Central Valley. This
DVD is ideal for showing at community forums and speaking
engagements to help the public understand the complex issues
surrounding the problem of salt build up in the Central Valley
potential – but costly – solutions. Narrated by comedian Paul
Rodriquez.
This 3-day, 2-night tour travels the length of the San Joaquin
Valley, giving participants a clear understanding of the State
Water Project and Central Valley Project.
15-minute DVD that graphically portrays the potential disaster
should a major earthquake hit the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
“Delta Warning” depicts what would happen in the event of an
earthquake registering 6.5 on the Richter scale: 30 levee breaks,
16 flooded islands and a 300 billion gallon intrusion of salt
water from the Bay – the “big gulp” – which would shut down the
State Water Project and Central Valley Project pumping plants.
30-minute DVD that traces the history of the U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation and its role in the development of the West. Includes
extensive historic footage of farming and the construction of
dams and other water projects, and discusses historic and modern
day issues.
This beautiful 24×36 inch poster, suitable for framing, features
a map of the San Joaquin River. The map text focuses on the San
Joaquin River Restoration Program, which aims to restore flows
and populations of Chinook salmon to the river below Friant Dam
to its confluence with the Merced River. The text discusses the
history of the program, its goals and ongoing challenges with
implementation.
Fashioned after the popular California Water Map, this 24×36 inch
poster was extensively re-designed in 2017 to better illustrate
the value and use of groundwater in California, the main types of
aquifers, and the connection between groundwater and surface
water.
The 24-page Layperson’s Guide to Integrated Regional Water
Management (IRWM) is an in-depth, easy-to-understand publication
that provides background information on the principles of IRWM,
its funding history and how it differs from the traditional water
management approach.
The 28-page Layperson’s Guide to Groundwater is an in-depth,
easy-to-understand publication that provides background and
perspective on groundwater. The guide explains what groundwater
is – not an underground network of rivers and lakes! – and the
history of its use in California.
The 24-page Layperson’s Guide to Flood Management explains the
physical flood control system, including levees; discusses
previous flood events (including the 1997 flooding); explores
issues of floodplain management and development; provides an
overview of flood forecasting; and outlines ongoing flood control
projects.
The 24-page Layperson’s Guide to the Central Valley Project
explores the history and development of the federal Central
Valley Project (CVP), California’s largest surface water delivery
system. In addition to the project’s history, the guide describes
the various CVP facilities, CVP operations, the benefits the CVP
brought to the state and the CVP Improvement Act (CVPIA).
A new look for our most popular product! And it’s the perfect
gift for the water wonk in your life.
Our 24×36 inch California Water Map is widely known for being the
definitive poster that shows the integral role water plays in the
state. On this updated version, it is easier to see California’s
natural waterways and man-made reservoirs and aqueducts
– including federally, state and locally funded
projects – the wild and scenic rivers system, and
natural lakes. The map features beautiful photos of
California’s natural environment, rivers, water projects,
wildlife, and urban and agricultural uses and the
text focuses on key issues: water supply, water use, water
projects, the Delta, wild and scenic rivers and the Colorado
River.
Located in the middle of California, the San Joaquin Valley is
bracketed on both sides by mountain ranges. Long and flat, the
valley’s hot, dry summers are followed by cool, foggy winters
that make it one of the most productive agricultural regions in
the world.
The valley stretches from across mid-California between coastal
ranges in west and the Sierras on the east. The region includes
large cities such as Fresno and Bakersfield, national parks such
as Yosemite and Kings, millions of people, and fertile farmland.
Flowing 366 miles from the Sierra
Nevada to Suisun Bay, the San Joaquin River provides irrigation
water to thousands of acres of San Joaquin Valley farms and
drinking water to some of the valley’s cities. It also is the
focal point for one of the nation’s most ambitious river
restoration projects to revive salmon populations.
The Pacific Flyway is one of four
major North American migration routes for birds, especially
waterfowl, and extends from Alaska and Canada, through
California, to Mexico and South America. Each year, birds follow
ancestral patterns as they travel the flyway on their annual
north-south migration. Along the way, they need stopover sites
such as wetlands with suitable habitat and food supplies. In
California, 90 percent of historic wetlands have been lost.
This issue of Western Water looks at the BDCP and the
Coalition to Support Delta Projects, issues that are aimed at
improving the health and safety of the Delta while solidifying
California’s long-term water supply reliability.
This printed issue of Western Water features a
roundtable discussion with Anthony Saracino, a water resources
consultant; Martha Davis, executive manager of policy development
with the Inland Empire Utilities Agency and senior policy advisor
to the Delta Stewardship Council; Stuart Leavenworth, editorial
page editor of The Sacramento Bee and Ellen Hanak, co-director of
research and senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of
California.
This printed issue of Western Water examines the issues
associated with the State Water Board’s proposed revision of the
water quality Bay-Delta Plan, most notably the question of
whether additional flows are needed for the system, and how they
might be provided.
This printed issue of Western Water examines
groundwater banking, a water management strategy with appreciable
benefits but not without challenges and controversy.
This printed copy of Western Water examines the challenges facing
small water systems, including drought preparedness, limited
operating expenses and the hurdles of complying with costlier
regulations. Much of the article is based on presentations at the
November 2007 Small Systems Conference sponsored by the Water
Education Foundation and the California Department of Water
Resources.
This Western Water looks at proposed new measures to deal with
the century-old problem of salinity with a special focus on San
Joaquin Valley farms and cities.
