Are Policy Makers Exacerbating Drought Scares? That's What It Looks Like in California

By Tara Lohan, AlterNet. Posted May 8, 2009.

Some of Southern California's water travels over 1,400 miles from the Colorado River, but much of it comes from Northern California's Sierra Nevada snowpack, and this runoff passes through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta (also call the Bay-Delta), the largest estuary in the West.

California's water system is often likened to an hourglass, with the Bay-Delta being the skinny part in the middle where the water must pass through to the south (with the aid of pumping stations). This distribution happens through the State Water Project controlled by DWR, as well as the federally run Central Valley Project.

This might all work out just fine, but the delta is a ticking time bomb.

"Since 1850, 95 percent of the estuary's wetlands and tidal marshes have been leveed and filled, with resulting loss of fish and wildlife habitat," reported the WEF. Farmland, marine shipping lanes, communities, railroads, and power transmission lines have filled in the space where marshland used to thrive. Additionally, huge pumps now suck 5.5 million acre-feet of water out of the delta each year to send south.

As a result, several fish in the delta, which environmentalists call key indicator species, are struggling for survival -- the delta smelt is listed as endangered, and the longfin smelt as threatened. Salmon populations are also in dire shape, and the state's salmon fishery is closed for the second year in a row.

The precarious future of these fish, and the delta itself, has resulted in restrictions on pumps that were sending water south to farming areas on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley and all the way down to urban areas like Los Angeles via a large water wholesaler called the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

It's Not Just Mother Nature, It's Us, Too

Keeping the growing cities and suburbs of Southern California hydrated requires complicated juggling. In recent years, it has gotten even more challenging. Restrictions on water being pumped out of the delta has coincided with other limitations on water that was coming from the Colorado River and the Owens Valley.

So, securing a stable supply of delta water is seen as key for Southern California's water managers. The recent dry spell is therefore a big cause of concern for those in Southern California, but things are likely to get worse in the decades ahead.

Climate scientists predict that changes in precipitation and temperature may make snowpack in the Sierra 40 percent smaller by 2050, and Rocky Mountain runoff into the Colorado River, which helps quench six other thirsty states besides, may suffer a similar fate.

Robert Glennon, author of several books on water, including the recent, Unquenchable: America's Water Crisis and What We Can Do About It wrote:

We love to blame Mother Nature for every natural catastrophe, but a close look at recent droughts, in California this year and Georgia last year, shows that these droughts are not more severe than previous ones.

Why, then, is there such a crisis? Because Californians this year and Georgians last year have outgrown their states' water supplies. The margin for weathering a drought has shrunk. The rain and the drought are about the same. It's us who've changed.

Glennon goes on to write about California's unsustainable population growth ("California's population grows by one person per minute.") which, indeed is contributing to stress on water supplies. But that's not the whole story, either.

"I think it is as much true that we are mismanaging water as it that the dry conditions have created this emergency," said Mindy McIntyre, the water program manager for the Planning & Conservation League, which lobbies in Sacramento on behalf of the environment.

The problem, she contends, is water rights. "It was recently revealed that the state has over-allocated water rights by eight times the average water that we get in the state in a given year and four times the amount we've gotten in our wettest year on record, and that doesn't include necessary flows for the environment, because the environment doesn't hold water rights, and it doesn't include groundwater or illegal diverters, which there are quite a few," she said.

Essentially, the state has promised eight times more water water than it can actually give to water agencies or irrigation districts because there simply isn't enough in the rivers and reservoirs. "This delusion has been abetted by a series of governors from Southern California, misguided regulators and politicians caving to constituents," wrote Michael Fitzgerald in his Stockton Record story.

This means that farmers who are planning on water for crops, may not get it, urban customers may be forced to cut back on how much water they use, or natural systems will be short-changed to provide for human interests instead.

See more stories tagged with: water, schwarzenegger, california, drought, water scarcity, water shortage, delta

Tara Lohan is a managing editor at AlterNet.

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