The Sacramento Delta: A Gordian Knot - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 208

rangy body inside, and the hybrid whirred quietly out of Berkeley, heading northeast.
It was alternately sunny and overcast as we slipped past rolling hills, a wind farm with
huge spinning blades, and across the bridge at Suisun Bay, where the Sierra snowmelt
flows out into San Francisco Bay. Around a sweeping bend, the Delta suddenly spread
wide ahead: a biologically rich zone that is home to 500,000 people, 300,000 acres of ag-
riculture, and 750 species of flora and fauna. It is the largest estuary on the West Coast.
Five major rivers, and many smaller tributaries, feed into it. It is California's most im-
portant, and vulnerable, freshwater resource.
Since 1940, the Delta has served as the nexus of the federal Central Valley Project
(CVP), a water system run by the Bureau of Reclamation that consists of twenty dams,
eleven hydroelectric generators, five hundred miles of canals and aqueducts, and count-
less pumps, pipes, and ditches. The CVP moves Sierra Nevada snowmelt from the
northern end of the Central Valley to the southern end, to Los Angeles. The system ir-
rigates 3 million acres of farmland and provides freshwater to 2 million consumers a
year. The region's other water system, the State Water Project (SWP), diverts water from
the Feather River across the Delta to the Harvey O. Banks pumping plant, in Tracy.
“It all soundslike it makes sense, but the Delta system is really a giant Rube Gold-
berg-esque machine,” * Gleick said, gesturing out the window at a tangle of muddy
canals. “They've twisted so many knobs and pulled so many levers here that no one
really knows how the Delta's plumbing works anymore. It just goes on and on, somehow.
You can't honestly describe the Delta as a naturalsystem anymore.”
Before the human plumbing system siphoned of most of its water, the Delta carried
25 million acre-feet of water a year; now it gets about 8 million. Grizzly bears—the ones
featured on the California state flag—used to roam here but are now gone. Enormous
herds of tule elk once thrived around the marsh, but few remain.
During the gold rush of 1848 to 1855 in the Sierra Nevada, prospectors used hydraul-
ic mining—high-pressure streams of water to wash away rock and uncover gold—which
led to the mass erosion of the Yuba, Sacramento, and other rivers, with thousands of
tons of silt flowing downstream and into San Francisco Bay. The rivers have still not
fully recovered.
“It's hard for me not to dream of what it used to be like,” Gleick said.
We arrived in Tracy, once a quiet agricultural town that has morphed into an exurb
of San Jose. Sprinklers were whirling in the midday heat, turning brown patches into
bright green grass and evaporating thousands of gallons of water up into the sky.
Two sets of giant pumps near Tracy suck up the Delta's water and propel it south: the
federal Tracy Pumping Plant, which serves Central Valley farmers, and the Harvey O.
Banks Delta Pumping Plant, which is state-run, and before the gates of which we now
stood.