Even after a decade of studies and tens of thousands of pages of analysis, no one can say precisely what Gov. Jerry Brown’s twin tunnels will do to the Delta. Pushing forward with the $17 billion project despite the uncertainty, backers are promising to evaluate the impacts of the tunnels after they’re built, and potentially change how they are operated as new information comes to light.
Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration gave the official go-ahead Friday for his controversial plan to bore two huge tunnels beneath the heart of Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The state Department of Water Resources said it had finalized the lengthy environmental review of the $17.1 billion Delta tunnels project, officially known as California WaterFix. In what’s known as a “Notice of Determination,” regulators said building and operating the tunnels complies with the California Environmental Quality Act and won’t harm fish, wildlife or human health.
The Colorado River flows 1,500 miles (2,400km) – through rises and rapids, valleys and deserts, all the way to Mexico. But this river of critical importance to our country is facing incredible challenges. The Colorado River provides water to almost 40 million Americans, but it is still reeling from the impacts of a 17-year drought that has drained most of Lake Mead and left Arizona and Nevada on the brink of imposed shortages. The struggle we face to protect the Colorado River basin is one of necessity, not choice.
Michael Grahek trudged through the murk of a historic Los Angeles Department of Water and Power water tunnel, his flashlight sweeping its century-old concrete walls. His light then settled on some a strange outlines in the Sylmar shaft. “Notice the footprints,” said Grahek, LADWP manager of southern aqueduct and Owens Lake Operations and maintenance, pausing inside the arched tunnel. “Somebody stepped in the wet cement almost 100 years ago.”
A French language immersion school in Clairemont Mesa became the fourth campus in San Diego where water was found to have unsafe levels of lead, city officials said Thursday. At a meeting of the City Council’s Environment Committee, officials with the Public Utilities Department said La Petite Ecole was one of numerous schools to ask the city for testing. Unsafe levels of lead were previously discovered at three San Diego Unified School District Schools — Birney Elementary School in University Heights, Emerson-Bandini Elementary School and San Diego Cooperative Charter. The latter two share a campus in Southcrest.
The San Diego County Water Authority issued a request for interest for the proposed pumped storage project in January that drew 18 respondents. The respondents included five full-service entities offering to finance, design, permit, build, and operate the project, as well as responses from two developers, five off-takers, and six parties interested in building the project, providing equipment for the project, or serving as a consultant for engineering, procurement, and construction services. SDCWA said in a release that the responses confirmed that the project would be a valuable resource helping integrate more variable generation and providing other grid support services.
Fresh Sierra mountain snowmelt would make a better drink of water for rural Tulare County folk who currently rely on wells tainted by fertilizers, leaky septic systems and decades-old pesticide residues. Nobody argues with that here in California’s San Joaquin Valley. The problem is obtaining even a tiny fraction of the average 1.7 million acre-feet of Kings River snowmelt that heads mostly to farm fields each year. Even after securing the water, millions of dollars would be needed for a treatment plant, which is required for surface water.
A decades-old effort to restore water and salmon to California’s second largest river is on the chopping block under a proposal by House Republicans to speed up dam projects and increase diversions to farmers. The legislation would override federal and state restoration projects on the San Joaquin River as well as allow for increased pumping of California’s vital water source, the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. It would limit safeguards for Chinook salmon and other species protected by the Environmental Species Act and diminish water deliveries to wildlife refuges during drought periods.
State water resources officials and federal regulators caused the failure of the Oroville Dam spillway in February by ignoring long-established guidelines and neglecting their duty to manage risks and detect flaws, a scathing report by a Berkeley engineering expert concluded Thursday. Robert Bea, a professor emeritus of engineering at UC Berkeley, said in his analysis of the causes of the spillway failure at the nation’s tallest dam that the “progressive deterioration” of the chute could have been prevented if proper procedures had been followed.
The drought may be over and Central Valley farmers are getting more water than they have in years, but that hasn’t stopped congressional Republicans from resurrecting a bill that would strip environmental protections for fish so more water can be funneled to agriculture. The bill is likely to meet the same fate as others before it, despite farmers having a new ally in the White House and Republican majorities in both houses of Congress.
