From his office along the Colorado River in Glenwood Springs, Eric Kuhn can see the bottom of Lake Powell.
Kuhn, the general manager of the Colorado River District, has been working for months on a study asking if future droughts will drop water levels in Lake Powell so low that Glen Canyon Dam won’t be able to produce hydropower or release enough water to meet downstream demands.
If there’s any hope of preventing California from shriveling into a parched wasteland, the state will have to figure out some simple things first. Namely, how much water it has and where it’s all going. Shockingly, California isn’t tracking much of its water. It’s like a business that’s opted to fire the accountants and operate under the honor system, using an abacus and semi-annual estimates from middle managers. A new report from the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, known as PPIC, says that the state’s five-year drought has exposed “serious gaps and fragmentation.”
It is disheartening to see once credible environmental organizations calling for a “more of the same” approach – one that has so miserably failed for a quarter century – in a misguided attempt to help the imperiled delta smelt. Of course we must save them, but neither the public, nor the delta smelt, will benefit from a proposal built on fiction. Claims that the Projects have “sucked”, “trapped”, or made the Delta too salty thru “massive water diversions” are patently untrue.
Wildlife experts at the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge have found alarming evidence that the salinity of the sea has reached a point where the fish are not breeding. Biologists noticed that among the dead fish washing up on the shores of the sea this summer, there were no small ones. They were all full-grown. This means the fish are not breeding. And there’s more bad news. Audobon California Policy Director Mike Lynes says the diminishing habitat is hurting the birds.
A year ago, it seems to us, a whole lot of people were thinking over their water habits. We’re just hoping the progress we made at conserving water (albeit forced upon us) won’t go down the drain (pardon the pun). Last summer, people were attending workshops and demonstrations on native plantings and low-water maintenance landscaping. They were deciding to let some of their green space go brown and were checking out alternative groundcovers.
Never before has San Joaquin County agreed to share its prized groundwater with outside interests.That could change in the coming months, as county leaders move closer to finally considering approval of a one-time experiment with the East Bay Municipal Utility District. It is very modest experiment, involving a very small amount of water. But, if successful, the experiment could demonstrate that it’s possible for competing interests to cooperate in an era of increasing regulations and intensifying droughts.
Tam Doduc knows what she’s doing. Doduc, a longtime water board member, has the unenviable job of serving as the hearing officer — that is, as a sort of judge — in the tunnels case. She hears objections, occasionally poses her own questions, and keeps dozens of water attorneys in line which is no small feat. Doduc is a civil engineer by trade, not an attorney, but this is clearly not her first time presiding over a formal hearing.
California still faces drought conditions, but the impact on agriculture this year is less severe than it was the previous two years, according to the annual report from UC Davis. The report, released Monday, said the wetter winter and spring helped the state partially replenish surface water storage and increased recharge to some aquifers. Still, statewide storage in reservoirs remains below historical average and groundwater is substantially overdrawn in many areas.The report estimates the 2016 drought will result in $247 million loss of farmgate revenues as well as 1,815 full and part time jobs statewide.
Drought was a key factor as the total receipts from Fresno County decreased by more than 6 percent in 2015, an industry insider says. Farm gate receipts in the county totaled $6.61 billion last year, down from the $7.04 billion in 2014, according to county Agricultural Commissioner Les Wright’s most recent Crop and Livestock Report. Water-supply issues were a top concern last year, as were the slippage of some commodity prices and labor shortages, said Ryan Jacobsen, chief executive officer of the Fresno County Farm Bureau. “It dropped a little bit more than I was probably expecting,” Jacobsen said.
First seabirds started falling out of the sky, washing up on beaches from California to Canada. Then emaciated and dehydrated sea lion pups began showing up, stranded and on the brink of death. A surge in dead whales was reported in the same region, and that was followed by the largest toxic algal bloom in history seen along the Californian coast. Mixed among all that there were population booms of several marine species that normally aren’t seen surging in the same year. Plague, famine, pestilence and death was sweeping the northern Pacific Ocean between 2014 and 2015.
