The Northern California Fly Fishing Board

Hey all, I wanted to share an op-ed that we recently put out.

We can solve the water ‘crisis’ in three easy steps

California has enough water. Surprised?

We hear endlessly about the “water crisis.” Politicians are pushing to build more dams, at a cost of several billion dollars each. Even the Peripheral Canal has resurfaced as a solution to our crisis. Yet do we really need to pile on to the state’s debt and wait decades for these “solutions” to be built? Isn’t there a quicker, cheaper, smarter answer to our problems?

Let’s be clear. California certainly faces major water challenges such as global warming and increased demand. So, some people are rushing to build dams — expensive 19th century solutions to 21st century problems. We don’t need solutions that are expensive, destructive and useless. A little common sense shows us that the real answers to our problems are easy, efficient and smart.

Why dams don’t work: Dams are expensive. Dams today are the most expensive option for water, costing billions of dollars each to build and maintain. Taxpayers could end up paying a bill that’s almost 50 times — yes, 50 times! — the cost of smarter solutions.

Dams are destructive. California already has lost 90 percent of its river environment. We have lost 95 percent of our salmon and steelhead habitat. Our commercial fisheries — and the communities they once supported — are barely hanging on as it is. Building more dams will only destroy more rivers and more fisheries.

Dams are useless. California already has 1,400 dams on its rivers. As a practical matter, there is very little water to collect behind new dams anymore. According to the state, new dams would provide even less reliable water than cloud seeding!

Why common sense does work: Saving water is easy. Conservation really does work. California has cut its per capita water use by 50 percent over the past 40 years, even as the state has boomed. Simply using the tools we already have — such as new appliances and drip irrigation — we can easily cut our water use another 20 percent and still support a growing population and even bigger economy.

Recycling water is efficient. Why spray clean, clear drinking water on our golf courses and median strips? We can use the rainwater that runs into our storm drains and recycle our wastewater. Through reclamation and recycling we can save enough drinking water each year for 1.5 million households — roughly all of Los Angeles.

Storing water is smart. Every year enough water for almost 3 million households — one-quarter of all the households in California — disappears into thin air behind our existing dams. It’s much smarter to store our water underground, by allowing it to seep into the water table. In fact, we already store enough water underground to fill Hetch Hetchy 15 times over — and there’s room for much, much more.

These three easy steps easily beat billion-dollar dams and canals.

Tony Bogar works with Friends of the River, California’s statewide river conservation group (www.friendsoftheriver.org).

Some interesting solutions raised in your post on how to save water, but I do have some questions:

1) I've heard that using drip irrigation (at least in large scale ag) leads to salt build-up and this salt can quickly harm the soil, forcing farmers to have to let their land rest more often, so the salenity will wash away again. True? Not true? There is no other larger user of water in this state than agriculture, so if we could find solutions that work for ag, that would be more than half the battle.

2) If we had most of our state's water settle into the water table, who is going to keep track how much people use? If you're on a municipal water system, you have a meter and are billed accordingly. If every person had their own well that tapped into the aquifer, who would keep track of it? Wouldn't that lead to even greater waste?

I'm not trying to shoot holes in your ideas or be the devil's advocate, but I do have some serious questions that I would really like to be answered. Thanks!

Cheers!

FlyGuy (Dave)

Well FlyGuy (Dave), I'm pretty quick to put out the stuff we produce, but I'm not actually in the conservation dept., I'm the fundraiser... so, let me put those questions to our twin towers of power, Steve Evans and Ron Stork. They've been with FOR in the conservation deptartment for nearly two decades each and are eternal springs of wisdom and knowledge... so, let me ask them and I'll post the reply here.

On the ground water pumping, I think I'd say that unregulated groundwater pumping already is creating huge problems, including the killing of rivers. While there are problems with how the water gets taken out, it still remains the most cost effective place to store it.

B-

Something else that would help is if other municipalities/regional govts mimicked Orange County's new wastewater treatment system that puts treated water back in to the recharge basin instead of flushing it out to see. You just have to get people past the idea that they're drinking treated wastewater. :teeth

Hey FlyGuy, here is a response from our Conservation Director. We do really appreciate you raising the questions. This whole line is new for us in that we are trying to take it more mainstream, so seeing where folks have questions is really important to us.

B-



1. Salt -- Some soil shouldn't be under irrigated agriculture at all, regardless of whether its drip, spray, or flood. For example, there are several thousand acres of land in the Westlands Water District with high selenium content with clay pan underneath it. The soil soon becomes saturated. The solution was to drain the polluted run-off into the Kesterson Wildlife Refuge, which ultimately caused deformation of waterfowl from selenium poisoning. There have been various stop-gap measures applied but the farmers want to drain their polluted run-off to the Delta or to the Coast and into the ocean. A federal judge found the federal government to be responsible for solving the drainage problem because they caused it by issuing the water contracts to Westlands in the first place. We think the ultimate solution will have to be to take a couple of hundred thousand acres of land out of production, which will reduce the pollution problem and save water. But farmers and Feinstein are against this solution.

2. We can't have a rational water policy in California without some kind of government control over groundwater. Storing water underground is the simplest, most effective, and cheapest solution, except for the fact that under current law anyone with the money can dig a well and tap into that water. Groundwater basins used to store water must be adjudicated and carefully managed to prevent water mining. Even with the policy problems with groundwater management, California has established more than 5 million acre feet of groundwater storage in the past decade, which is 10 tens the amount of water the state projects would be supplied by new dams.

I bet that neither the Gov nor 99% of the Legislature know that we have established 5 MAF of groundwater storage in the last decade (out of sight, out of mind) or for that matter nearly 1 MAF in storage behind new dams that supposedly haven't been built in years. Our "leaders" and most of the public have really swallowed the water speculators' factoids hook, line, and sinker. The strong push for dams is based on both emotion and greed. Emotion in that people seem to need some "concrete" solution visible to everyone like a dam and greed in that, if you can get Uncle Sugar to buy you a new car, wouldn't you make the case that life as you know it will end unless you get that new, free car?

Steven L. Evans
Conservation Director

Here is a response from Ron Stork, long-time FOR Conservation staffer... a bit more technical.

B-

Drip irrigation creates a wetting front (like any type of irrigation). A wetting front is the portion of the soil where water from the drip irrigation stops and the soil beyond is dryer. This is where soluble minerals accumulate and may precipitate. You can see this with furrow irrigation too. The water in the furrows rises and white minerals accumulate at the top of and in the center of a furrow. Such local salination is only a problem if sensitive plant tissue must grow into the salinated zone (mostly a problem with seedlings). When this local or micro salination is a problem, more uniform irrigation like rain or sprinkler irrigation is used to ensure that a problem wetting front does not appear on the surface of the ground.

The drip-irrigation wetting front is, of course, disrupted by rainfall, which drives soluble minerals downward. So the notion that drip causes long-term local surface micro-salination along the drip-irrigation wetting front is not true where winter rainfall is reasonably significant.

Soluble minerals can come from minerals in solution, either in the irrigation water or the soil profile itself. It can also come from dissolving minerals of the soil – although this process is slow.

Success of irrigated agriculture requires that soluble minerals are not allowed to build up to toxic levels in the root zone of the soil. This is not usually a micro-salination problem, but a larger scale issue. Ideally enough water is applied (by whatever method) to move excess minerals out of the root zone. There are two places for successfully removed minerals in excess of plant requirements to go: saline drainage water or the ground away from the root zone. If the salts cannot move away from the root zone, then the root zone will become increasingly less suitable to grow commercial crops.

Since drip irrigation reduces the amount of water that evaporates from the ground, drip irrigation means less water can be used to grow a crop—sometimes significantly so. Since water contains dissolved minerals, irrigated areas that receive less imported water will receive less dissolved minerals, reducing the need for saline (and sometime toxic) drainage (either into rivers or into deeper soils that can receive water). Drip also allows more precise application of water to the ground, which provides another tool to manage the location of problem groundwater.

In a nutshell, drip irrigation makes salt-management easier to handle, and is particularly helpful when water supplies are short, expensive, saline, highly valued, or the groundwater table is high and saline (and therefore cannot or should not receive more water). Still, drip irrigation cannot solve every problem inherent in irrigated agriculture. Some lands just don’t have a long-term future in irrigated agriculture.

On the groundwater allocation issue, there are institutional mechanisms (courts, agreements) to divide up a groundwater supply fairly. Of course, ideally, important or troubled groundwater resources would be subject to regulatory authority of the state and local governments, but in most cases the authority to do so is either unclear or unused. Nevertheless, where there the motivation to allocate the groundwater resource fairly is strong, court adjudication or settlements have been implemented.

Thanks for the very informative replies. The ideas proposed would really be sweeping in our state, if they were to pass.

Perhaps they should also consider not having ag in certain areas ex: down in the Southern Central Valley near Hanford or up in the Klamath River basin, where soils are not at all suited to large scale ag, and require lots of amendments, and of course, plenty of water. Perhaps there should be less building on prime farm land as well. The idea of growing rice in California might be something that could be limited as well.

But knowing how this state works and how quickly (or not) things change, I can't see these kinds of changes happening for many years.

Cheers!

FlyGuy (Dave)

True... the solutions are big and the problems are big and the political climate of the day tends to focus on the small. It will be a challenge, but it's worth a try.

Many Californian liberals -that includes most conservation groups- hold two opposing viewpoints. Namely, they believe that A: global warming is real and we will experience lower snowpack in the Sierras, resulting in ore water falling as rain; and B: that all of our water needs can be met through conservation/groundwater storage.

These are mutually exclusive beliefs. If we receive more rain and less snow, then the water runs directly our the sea once our dams our full, with no way to recover or store any more. Water simply cannot be stored undergroud without some way of slowing it, via a dam/canal/injection well or spreader dam in almost every instance.

If global warming is indeed real, and we will receive less snow and more rain, then we DO need additional surface storage: dams. Otherwise our reservoirs will fill very early in the winter and we will lose all the water that would normally be released slowly as snowmelt.

On to the conservation point: it is an utter fallacy to believe that if we can just put enough bricks in toilets we can save enough water for the 50 million Californians we will have living here, sooner than you think. Our state does need new storage, that is the bottom line, and ground storage cannot be a reality.

Regarding the comment on "not having ag in certain areas," let us assume that you are a farmer and I am a city resident. Would you believe that I have the right to tell you what to do with my own land, land that has likely been in my family and farmed for generations? Perhaps you also believe that you as a farmer have the right to tell me, as a city resident, that I cannot have a car and must rely upon mass transit exclusively?

I like fish and free flowing rivers. I don't like dams, but I am smart enough to know that we need them, or we need to halt our rapid population growth immediately.

First of all... let's do that farmer/urban person thing... you are forgetting that the urban folks are actually paying for the water being used. All that water on marginal land is pretty much heavily subsidized by tax payers... so, I think we actually do have a say.

Let's say Global Warming is real... it might NOT mean that more snow will fall as rain... it might mean there is less water overall... sure, what falls may fall as rain, but we'd be talking about an overall drop... in that case it would make very little sense to pay billions of dollars for dams that will never fill up.

The truth is that conservation measures will provide a lot more water than those dam projects that are being proposed. We have 1,400 dams in CA... the best, most effective locations have been taken. We are left with the dregs. If you think otherwise, you have been suckered in by folks that are looking for their bit of pork... their bridge to nowhere has become a dam for no purpose.

Don't go throwing the liberal tag out here... how can you be a true conservative if you want the govt. to provide expensive dams that will benefit the few (remembering that almost 80% of water in CA is used in ag, not by urban users). Not very conservative idea there. Heck, it's even a little bit socialist... actually... it's VERY socialist.

So, Mr. Devil... I think you'll find that a common sense solution won't be found in big walls of concrete... conservation is a real part of it... don't say it can't be done... SoCal has actually done it for the past 20 years and there are still massive amounts that can be done... massive... both in urban and in agricultural areas.

B-

Bjorn,

I do have a question about something that Devil's Advocate raised and to quote: "Water simply cannot be stored undergroud without some way of slowing it, via a dam/canal/injection well or spreader dam in almost every instance". How would the water be delivered to underground storage with these conveyances? When I read this thread earlier in the week I though this was a great idea but that question would seem to present a problem.

Well, I don't think that is actually true... I'd have to consult the conservation staff, but I think it is a bad assumption. I'll check. Again, I'm the money guy, not the conservation staff guy.

B-