Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
conserve, irrigators grow thirsty, low-value crops such as cotton, rice, and alfalfa in con-
ditions better suited to cactus or scrub brush.
Even in the face of serious drought, irrigators resist any hint of government over-
sight, fearful of rationing or higher water prices. The result is the overpumping of
groundwater in California and other agricultural states such as Nebraska, Kansas,
Texas, Georgia, and Florida. This watermining,the technical term for pumping water
from aquifers faster than nature can replenish it, lowers water tables, causes sinkholes,
leads to wasteful runoff and evaporation, and, near coastlines, causes the saltwater pol-
lution of drinking supplies. Furthermore, aging aqueducts and canals cannot deliver
water to farmers in an efficient “on-demand” way, while overlapping bureaucracies and
emotional, politicized water debates have left numerous states in hydrological gridlock.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in California, the largest and thirstiest state in the
Pacific West, and a bellwether for water issues.
THE DELTA AND ITS DISCONTENTS
hree-quarters of California's water
is located in the north, but three-quarters of its
population is in the south. The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta—the vast marshy area
ringed by crumbling levees that Bob Bea fears are at risk of catastrophic failure—is the
link between the two. You cannot separate a discussion of water in California, and thus
the West, from a discussion of “the Delta.”
In the blunt vocabulary of local politics, the Delta pits farmers versus cities versus
fish. But in reality, the situation in the Delta is complex.
spongy peat and uprooting marsh grasses to create islands, and erecting about eleven
hundred miles of levees to keep the water at bay. In this way, 450,000 acres of fertile land
was “reclaimed” by the 1930s, and the Delta became one of the most productive farm-
ing regions in the world, with crops ranging from corn to alfalfa, grain, hay, tomatoes,
asparagus, pears, and wine grapes.
Two vast water systems, the State Water Project and the federal Central Valley Pro-
ject, use canals, aqueducts, pipes, and giant water pumps to move Sierra Nevada snow-
melt from the northern end of the Central Valley to the southern end, and then south
to Los Angeles. While these projects are efficient at moving water from remote sources
in the mountains to human communities on the dry coast, they were not built with
an eye to protecting the environment. Dams, pumps, and other man-made waterworks
have decimated the Delta's once thriving salmon and smelt populations, along with oth-
er aquatic species, raising the ire of conservationists and, lately, the courts. A series of
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