Dams may be answer to future droughts
By Carolyn Lochhead, San Francisco Chronicle
Driven by drought, California stands ready to build a water system for the 21st century. Ideas are flowing: conservation, recycling, desalination, aquifer recharge, floodplain restoration, storm water capture.
But the biggest, most expensive, most popular item of all is the foundation of the 20th century water system — dams. Even if El Niño rains bring a bounty of water to the state this winter, the momentum for dam building is unlikely to fade.
Farmers stand to benefit. So do many urban users. The losers would be people like Anita Lodge.
Lodge, 58, clings to the last remnant of a Gold Rush homestead deep in the San Joaquin River Gorge 33 miles north of Fresno, where her ancestors mined ore by wheelbarrow and her mother hung laundry on the willows. Now the 7-acre spread is surrounded by a federal preserve alive with bears and bobcats, herons and eagles, and in spring, a profusion of wildflowers.
Behind a bend downstream lies a linchpin of California’s water system: Friant Dam, snaring the river on its path from the Sierra foothills to Fresno and the San Joaquin Valley. Completed in 1942, Friant can hold 520,500 acre-feet of water for farmers and cities in the southern San Joaquin Valley. That’s almost twice what the 2.6 million customers of the Hetch Hetchy system used in a year, even before drought-prompted conservation measures kicked in.
Desalination to recharge aquifers is the better choice; no loss via evaporation.
Changes from water hungry to water friendly agriculture should be in the mix as well.
rock4tahoe, Desalination is the answer. A rain dance by ty the Washoe would help as well. It works!!! I saw it as a kid, and yes it did rain at lakel level and snow at the higher elevations after a few days.
Hope for rain and snow. OLS
Desalination is very expensive, uses a tremendous amount of energy, only works from the coast and will have have to have pipelines or canals built all over the state. How does the Sierras get water pumped up from the coast? Why not use the flow of water to provide storage and get clean power crom it. I like the underground storage use also. It has taken a severe drought to get the politicians to act to do something about an issue that should have been addressed 30 years ago.
OLS. I like your optimistic attitude. You are always so positive. :)
A couple of years ago I read that a defense contractor was working on a material to replace Kevlar.
By mistake they came up with a material that required a small fraction of the energy currently needed to desalinize sea water.
Has anyone heard if this is coming to fruition?
“But the biggest, most expensive, most popular item of all is the foundation of the 20th century water system — dams.”\
Are we looking for a rational, greatest good choice or is it a popularity contest? I think people are confusing Facebook likes with good decisions!
The dams have all been built out in the 1950’s as a result of the Central Valley Project. There are really no rivers left that should be dammed. The idea to do it is not only wrong, it is financially impossible without the state becoming bankrupt sooner than predicted. The best idea is to deport all of the illegals in the state to reduce consumption of water and tax payer dollars by a federal order as the state liberals in power want open borders and will not enforce the law which is really a disaster. It is like a 100 people you don’t know using your water and your food and your house without your permission, there are millions doing this in the state.
Yet Justice your State of Jefferson friends make a living off of one of the most water consuming crops grown in California.
To satisfy a world market.
Oh yeah, and to infer those undocumented workers aren’t paying for their water use just like all of us is misrepresentation of facts.