The Northern California Fly Fishing Board

Dustin,
You project much wisdom in your prediction .....more people with more water consumption. I agree, and we all want the necessary provisions for our children....house, food, yata yata. This all takes water too.....of which we need more of.
I would like to see us make the water grabbers be forced to install on ALL existing dams, before construction of ANY new dams, and impliment on ALL new dams, workable PLUNGE POOL fish ladders. Doing this would restore SOME and not close completely much spawning and rearing habitat to our anadromous fisheries. This seems benificial to troutoid residency too, to me.
Until this happens though, I agree that keeping them OUT of new habitat systems and keeping them confined to already compomised systems, a GRAND idea....them being the water grabbers.
.....lee s.

CA is going to grow in population... that is true. But I think it is wrong to say this fact means we need more dams. The current population only drinks, flushes and waters their laws for 20% of our developed water resources. 80%, or there abouts, is used by Ag. There is a lot of water savings to be had. LA has actually done it. San Diego has had to. Sacramento is pretty bad at water conservation. There are lots of gains to be made that could accomodate 10M more people... 20M more people, if we get smart, make the biggest water users pay the most and if Ag decides to use less water.

The population argument overlooks where our water actually goes now. It goes to fields and farms and a lot of it goes to waste.

Think about the potential for gray water. We now flush our toilets with drinking water. Every flush is water that could go in ice for your drink of choice over the rocks. If we can figure out how to better use gray water... bam... no need for dams, maybe ever... at least not for the general population. Think about all the places we use drinking water for uses that really don't require drinking water... that's a lot of water.