SUMMARY: A series of storms have inundated California with copious amounts of water, but the state needs new pipelines to take advantage of such events and counteract the effects of the drought.
The rain and snow storms that battered California for weeks have claimed the lives of nearly two dozen people and caused billions of dollars in damage to public and private property.
The downside, however, is that they have dumped immense amounts of water on a state that has been suffering from severe drought for several years. Once this month, a staggering 160,000 cubic feet of water — 1.2 million gallons — flowed through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta every second. That’s enough water to fill a reservoir the size of Folsom Lake, about 1 million acre-feet, in three days, and doesn’t count the water falling on other regions like Southern California.
Whether the storms ended the drought, however, depends on California’s ability to catch enough water to fill its badly depleted reservoirs and at least begin to replenish underground aquifers that have been horribly overextended by desperate farmers.
So far, only a relatively small portion of the immense storm runoff has found its way into storage. For example, only a trickle of the delta’s strong currents have been pumped into state and federal aqueducts to supply the San Joaquin Valley and southern California, largely due to rules restricting diversions to protect endangered species like the 2-inch-long delta smelt.
San Joaquin Valley lawmakers have asked President Joe Biden and Gov. Gavin Newsom to relax rules so more runoff can either be shipped to farmers or stored in storage facilities like the San Luis Reservoir, which is now less than half full.
“This is no time to call back the pumps,” Sen. Melissa Hurtado and Rep. Jasmeet Bains, both Democrats from Bakersfield, told Newsom in a letter. “After several years of drought and low reservoirs, it only makes sense to take advantage of wet conditions.”
“We have a moral obligation to provide Californians with any relief that is within our control,” five Republican congressmen told Biden and Newsom. “Government regulations should not and must not deny our constituents critical water from these storms.”
But state water agencies say their hands are tied by environmental protection regulations that dictate that early winter currents are allowed to wash out the delta and San Francisco Bay.
What happened or didn’t happen during the week-long deluge suggests that California needs new pipelines to take advantage of the periodic “atmospheric flows” that bring immense amounts of rainfall.
Meteorologists believe the state will experience more unpredictable weather — prolonged droughts punctuated by occasional storm events like California has experienced — due to global climate change.
That means we need more reservoirs, like Sites Reservoir on the western side of the Sacramento Valley, which has been in the planning stages for several decades, and sinking basins to replenish aquifers. The long-dormant $4 billion Sites project now has the passionate support of state and federal officials, as well as some cash.
Meanwhile, the relatively meager diversions out of the delta now permitted by law reinforce the case for “delta conveyance,” which would allow more water to be diverted into the state and federal aqueducts, and thus underground reservoirs, without harming the environment affect restrictions. The project has been running for six decades, first as a “Randkanal”, later as a twin tunnel called “Water Fix” and now as a single tunnel.
California water managers will have another chance to fill reservoirs in a few months as the Sierra’s immense snowpack, which is twice the historical average and still growing, melts. We can only hope that Mother Nature sheds the snowpack’s water slowly enough to avoid destructive flooding.
Dan Walters is a journalist and author who writes for CALmatters.org, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media outlet that explains California politics and politics.
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