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Gov. Jerry Brown’s cheerleading squad was in high-spirited form Friday with the latest news that his twin tunnels project in the delta inched a step closer to reality. The state Department of Water Resources gave its approval to the tunnels by certifying the environmental reviews for the project. And really, what did you expect? The DWR answers to Brown, and Brown wants to build those four-story tunnels to funnel north state water from the Sacramento River, under the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, to farmers and cities in the south.

 

A project that might make much of the Sacramento River vanish into three giant holes in the ground will not jeopardize the waterway’s ailing salmon and smelt populations, according to new analyses from the federal government. The Delta Tunnels – which would be 35 miles long, cost at least $15 billion to build and be capable of sending much of the state’s biggest river to farmers and urban users – received a stubby thumbs-up from the Trump administration on June 26.

The deadline is Aug. 14 to apply for water storage funding from the Proposition 1 bond measure voters approved in 2014, and while the folks working to build Sites Reservoir will be applying, they don’t need the money. Enough water agencies have agreed to invest in the reservoir near Maxwell that it can be built without taxpayer funds, according to Sites Project Authority General Manager Jim Watson. Twenty-eight agencies have signed on to support the construction in exchange for a share of the water that would be delivered from the lake, according to the authority’s website.

Californians have moved heaven and earth to get water to the state’s thirsty cities and farms. We pipe water through the nation’s longest aqueducts, store it in the tallest dams and pump it over mountains. But when it comes to the storm water that falls directly on our cities, we flush it out to sea. For California, fresh off a historic drought and suddenly the de facto leader of U.S. climate policy, wasting any water is unacceptable. That’s why Senate Bill 231, by state Sen. Bob Hertzberg, D-Van Nuys, is so important.

Slowly – but surely – we are learning that the near-catastrophic failure of Oroville Dam’s main spillway wasn’t truly caused by weather, even though the state claims that in seeking federal aid for repairs. Rather, it resulted from poor engineering and construction when the nation’s highest dam was rising more than a half-century ago as the centerpiece of the State Water Project, and poor maintenance since its completion. The latest evidence is a huge report by a team of engineering experts, headed by Robert Bea and Tony Johnson of the University of California’s Center for Catastrophic Risk Management.