The controversial Delta Conveyance Project may have bigger problems than legal action over its recently approved environmental impact report. Who’s going to pay the estimated $16 billion price tag?
The three top Democrats seeking to replace the late Dianne Feinstein in the United States Senate managed to clearly answer every question California’s McClatchy opinion team recently managed to pose. Except for one.
When do you get labor icon Dolores Huerta attacking a press conference attended by NAACP leaders? When it’s about water — which as we know is for fighting, not drinking. A press conference yesterday at the Capitol, put on by the group Groundswell and attended by state Sen. Steven Bradford and NAACP regional president Rick Callender, is raising environmentalists’ hackles.
The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is the West Coast’s largest estuary, an awe-inspiring area of wetlands with 700 miles of waterways and 1,100 miles of levees nestled between the San Francisco Bay and the Central Valley south of Sacramento. It’s one of the most magnificent places in California—a refuge of orchards, marinas, tin-roofed shacks, plantation homes and tiny historic towns that feels more Deep South than Golden State.
The story of California’s water wars begins, as so many stories do in the Golden State, with gold. The prospectors who raced westward after 1848 scoured fortunes out of mountainsides using water whisked, manically and in giant quantities, out of rivers.
A proposal to build a project to capture water in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta during wet weather and make it available in drier areas is advancing as state officials anticipate losing 10% of its water supply by 2040 as a result of hotter temperatures.
California water regulators have released a long-awaited analysis of options for managing flows in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, where fish populations have been declining and the ecosystem has been deteriorating.
The delta is the central hub of the state’s water system, drawing together rivers from a vast watershed and supplying pumps that send water flowing to cities and farms.
The Biden administration’s environmental justice office is investigating whether California’s water agency has discriminated against Native Americans and other people of color by failing to protect the water quality of San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s investigation was triggered by a complaint filed by tribes and environmental justice organizations that says the the state Water Resources Control Board for over a decade “has failed to uphold its statutory duty” to review and update water quality standards in the Bay-Delta.
It’s gone by several names: Peripheral Canal, Water Fix and Delta Conveyance.
Its design has changed several times, from a canal to twin tunnels and most recently a single tunnel.
However, its purpose has been unchanged for seven decades – bypassing the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta as water is moved from Northern California to San Joaquin Valley farms and Southern California homes.
When California imposed its first-ever regulation on the extraction of water from underground aquifers in 2014, it gave environmental groups a landmark victory in their decades-long effort to overhaul water use laws.
It was also a political setback for farmers, who are California’s major water users and have depended on wells to irrigate their crops as increasingly frequent droughts reduce surface water in rivers and reservoirs.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
