Rain, Snow, And Water

It's raining today in Northern California.  And it's going to rain tomorrow, with perhaps more rain later this week. It's all very welcome, because we're in the fourth year of an ongoing drought which is straining California's economy and has proved devastating to segments of the agricultural sector. I'm grateful for the rain, and even more grateful for the snowpack in the Sierras--which I can see from my window as I write. In my town, we're ahead of normal rainfall for early March and only slightly behind normal rainfall for the entire year, which is measured from July 1-June 30 of each year.

As important as the rain is, the snowpack in the mountains is the real key to the water needs of thirsty Californians. And even though the snowpack is also ahead of normal, the actual water content in the pack is at just 87% of normal. Which means that--barring a very wet March and April--the water wars in California will continue.

Here's the skinny on the water issue from my perspective:

• California's population and economic growth are largely dependent on good, reliable supplies of water. The bulk of this water comes from the seasonal rains and snow which fall on the state during the months of November-early April. If we get a dry winter, we won't make up the deficit during the late spring and summer months, when we often go for 150 days or more without a trace of rain. As California has grown, however, its capacity to store and hold the water that falls on the state has fallen far behind the state's demand for water.  Consider this: in 1960, California's population stood at 15.7 million.  Fifty years later, the population is expected to exceed 37 million--an increase of 135%.
• In spite of this growth, environmentalists have blocked construction of new dams and water storage projects.  The last major dam to be completed in California was the New Melones Dam near Jamestown in 1979. It has storage capacity of 2.4 million acre feet. Since the New Melones Dam was completed, California's population has grown by nearly 60%. And yet not only do the environmentalists oppose the construction of new dams in the Sierras to create new reservoirs, they actually support tearing down the O'Shaugnessy Dam which supplies the water and some of the electricity to San Francisco. This dam has storage capacity of 360,000 acre feet.
• Some two-thirds of California's water supply comes from a huge estuary called the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Standing at the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, the Delta has been a major source of water for Southern California. However, as Southern California has grown and its demand for water has increased accordingly, the fresh water supply has been depleted and incursion of salt water from the San Francisco Bay is now creating a different set of environmental effects in the Delta. Not only that, but the massive pumps used to move the water to and through the 715-mile aqueduct system is depleting the population of a 2-inch long fish called the Delta Smelt.
• The smelt population was officially classified as endangered in 1993. Because its habitat has been shrinking owing to the incursion of the bay's salt water--as well as its being sucked into the huge pumps that supply the aqueduct, and because it's a food source for the non-native striped and largemouth bass--the population has been steadily shrinking to the point that the fish stood on the edge of extinction in 2004. 
• On August 31, 2007, Judge Oliver Wanger of the Federal District Court ordered that water deliveries be severely curtailed from December to June. Farmers have received increasingly smaller supplies of water since the ruling was issued and thousands of acres of prime farmland have gone fallow over the past two summers. This has driven the unemployment rate to over 16% in Kern County, nearly 17% in Fresno County, over 17% in Kings County, and 17.5% in Tulare County.

So the economic impacts to agriculture and the California economy overall are severe.  Here's the irony: it's not that California does not have enough water from natural sources.  The truth is that an estimated 60% of California's rainfall is not only not captured, but flows straight into the ocean. Until Californians realize that the Sierra Club and other environmental interests are paralyzing the state and its economy, California will continue to shrink, will continue to export jobs to other countries and other states, and will lose huge swaths of one of its most important and lucrative industries--agriculture.