Drought changing how agencies do business
By Coral Davenport, New York Times
FOLSOM — Drew Lessard stood on top of Folsom Dam and gazed at the Sierra Nevada, which in late spring usually gushes enough melting snow into the reservoir to provide water for a million people. But the mountains were bare, and the snowpack to date remains the lowest on measured record.
“If there’s no snowpack, there’s no water,” said Mr. Lessard, a regional manager for the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that built and operates a vast network of 476 dams, 348 reservoirs and 8,116 miles of aqueducts across the Western United States.
For nearly a century, that network has captured water as it flows down from the region’s snowcapped mountains and moves to the farms, cities and suburbs that were built in the desert. But as the snow disappears, experts say the Bureau of Reclamation — created in 1902 by President Theodore Roosevelt to wrest control of water in the arid West — must completely rebuild a 20th-century infrastructure so that it can efficiently conserve and distribute water in a 21st-century warming world.
For most of the 1900s, the bureau’s system — which grew into the largest wholesale water utility in the country — worked. But the West of the 21st century is not the West of Roosevelt. There are now millions more people who want water, but there is far less of it. The science of climate change shows that in the future, there will be less still.
This is why it is so important that a significant amount of Prop 1 money be allocated to the upstream part of the water supply – the Sierra Nevada’s provide 100% of Sacramento’s portion, and a full 65% for the rest of CA, yet the posturing goes on to ‘corral’ money towards water distribution in aqueducts, channels, etc., AFTER it goes down the hill – not enough money is geared to our ‘water factories’ of the forests, mountain streams, & soil conservation, which retains & cleans it better when healthy. . .not starved for stewardship. . .and they resist fire better, too. . .
We had dinner with a couple from Orange County recently. The gentleman, a retired school administrator, explained that there was no drought whatsoever. The problem is simply that the liberals have diverted all of Northern California’s water to the smelt, he said. He claimed that if the environmental laws were eliminated, the drought would be over. We tried to explain that we lived where the water comes from and that there was none there. But he was certain that it was simply a liberal conspiracy. It is fascinating what ideology (and ignorance) can produce sometimes.
He was also against government spending, apparently except for his pension.
Not to mention those radicals in the Mono Lake and Owens Valley committees who have had some of the Owens river diverted back to Mono and Owens Lakes. The dry alkali dust blowing off of both are creating some of the highest levels of respiratory diseases in the Nation in the Bishop area.
visiting relatives in socal. The entire region has plush green lawns that put edgewood to shame. It’s unreal. When I asked them about the drought they all just laughed and explained it’s all a government conspiracy.
Glad we’re all conserving so they can have lawns in the desert.
The water war goes on. So. cal and the Central Valley want more water… but we don’t have the water to send it off the hill.
It’s raining good as I write this but it’s merely a drop in the bucket. This was the lightest winter I’ve ever seen for snow fall.
Come on rain! OLS