[env-trinity] Fresno Bee- Water drain plan revives Kesterson pollution fears

Sun Mar 20 19:03:15 PST 2005

http://www.fresnobee.com/local/story/10166203p-10983717c.html

Water drain plan revives Kesterson pollution fears 

Proposal would remove selenium blamed for 1980s wildlife disaster.

By Mark Grossi / The Fresno Bee 

(Updated Sunday, March 20, 2005, 9:33 AM)

            The Fresno Bee  

Jim Ganulin remembers the collective gasp at the Los Banos fairground on that March night 20 years ago. 

Federal authorities announced that shocking bird deformities and wildlife carnage would force them to shut off the flow of toxic irrigation drainage to Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge.

But there was a bigger surprise: They also intended to cut off irrigation supplies to 42,000 farming acres, the source of the bad drainage, in the Westlands Water District. Ganulin was Westlands' legal counsel at the time.

"I took off for Sacramento immediately to talk with our legal advisers," says Ganulin, who now has a private practice with Baker, Manock & Jensen in Fresno.

"It was March, and people needed water for the next season. It was emotional. Drainage was a concern, but we couldn't lose water service."

They didn't lose water deliveries, but the drainage headache has lingered 20 years. To this day, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation gingerly works under court order on defusing this political booby trap.

The bureau, owner and operator of the Central Valley Project, expects to release in May a document with several alternatives for disposing of bad water for Westlands and other federal water customers on the San Joaquin Valley's west side. 

Surprisingly, at least for environmentalists, one option involves moving water into ponds where it would evaporate - the same strategy at Kesterson all those years ago.

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"It's the damnedest, dumbest thing I've ever seen," says lawyer and environmentalist Lloyd Carter, who covered the Kesterson story as a Fresno Bee reporter in the 1980s. "You wonder if they have learned anything." But in the current-day thinking, officials propose water treatment to remove a trace element called selenium, then the water would go to 5,000 acres of evaporation ponds.

The selenium, which occurs naturally on the Valley's west side, is what caused the poisonings at Kesterson.

Selenium-laced drainage from Westlands in west Fresno County went into the federal San Luis Drain, a concrete canal, and then to Kesterson ponds in western Merced County. The water evaporated, leaving a concentrated residue of selenium and a public relations nightmare.

An unhealthy place

At the time, nobody knew concentrated selenium was toxic. But shortly after Westlands began draining into Kesterson in 1979, biologists began noticing something was wrong.

Federal wildlife biologist Gary Zahm, now retired, remembers an odd smell at Kesterson in October 1980.

"I know what an alkaline marsh should smell like," Zahm says. "Kesterson was an alkaline marsh, and it was like nothing I'd ever smelled before. There were no frogs either. It was quiet. Something was definitely not healthy about this place."

In the following four years, Zahm and other biologists recorded chilling findings: widespread deformities, such as eyeless chicks, and thousands of dead birds - American avocets, black-necked stilts, eared grebes and many others.

Worse yet, Kesterson and a swath of surrounding land are part of an international flyway. Birds from thousands of miles away stop during migrations and nest in the area. They are supposedly protected by a migratory bird treaty.

The problems reached a higher political orbit when Jim Claus, a Kesterson neighbor, asked the state to stop Westlands drain water. The state Water Resources Control Board, the ultimate arbiter of water disputes in California, on Feb. 5, 1985, ordered the bureau to stop the flow.

On March 15, 1985, at a congressional hearing in Los Banos, the Interior Department announced the shutdown of Kesterson. The drainage stopped by summer 1986.

The media had a field day with selenium, the brand-new contaminant, and the 600,000-acre Westlands, the nation's largest federal irrigation district. The New York Times, CBS' "60 Minutes" and news outlets from around the globe came calling.

"It became pretty difficult to do your job for a while," Zahm says. "I had no daily schedule. I was conducting tours and talking to people on the phone."

Five years later, things calmed down a bit. Kesterson largely had been cleaned up, although it is still heavily monitored for elevated selenium levels and wildlife abnormalities.

Most of the 42,000-acre Westlands land has been purchased by the district, and officials say it is out of production. But federal officials estimate the district still has about 250,000 acres that will need to be drained by 2050.

An additional 81,000 acres in other west-side water districts receiving federal water will need drainage service as well.

Drainage problems happen all over the world - they are not new. Experts have tracked them for centuries. But Kesterson brought selenium toxicity into sharp, worldwide focus.

West-side drainage

In parts of the Valley's west side, irrigation water just won't percolate into the deeper ground water. An ancient layer of clay buried below the surface blocks it.

So the water, filled with salts from the soil, accumulates and rises from the clay layer until it begins to slowly poison the soil above. Crop yields diminish. At some point, the land can become sterile.

Federal officials clearly understood the dynamic when the San Luis Act was passed in 1960, authorizing delivery of Northern California river water and drainage of the affected west-side land.

They planned to build the San Luis Drain 188 miles through Westlands and up to the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, which empties into the Pacific Ocean. But a political vise clamped down on the plan, and Kesterson became the fallback.

Contra Costa County, which would have been at the end of the drain, wanted no part of the bad water and blocked congressional funding. The bureau had enough money to begin building the first phase anyway - an 82-mile section of the drain from the Lemoore Naval Air Station area in Kings County to the Los Banos area.

Kesterson entered the picture in 1970. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, anxious to find water for reviving wetlands, joined the bureau in making holding ponds for the drainage at Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge.

Westlands growers then installed perforated pipes beneath their fields to capture the drain water and funnel it into the San Luis Drain. By 1979, the tainted water began arriving at Kesterson.

After the wildlife disaster was discovered and the drain was plugged in 1986, scientists, farmers and others tried, without much success, to find a disposal solution for water that nobody wanted.

"Not a drop of water leaves Westlands," says district spokesman Tupper Hull.

The dilemma is partially eased as land goes out of production. The latest figures show the district already has retired about 80,000 acres, and about 20,000 more are expected.

But the Bureau of Reclamation still needs a solution for other affected land cultivated by Westlands and other federal water customers on the west side.

One idea would include some combination of retiring land, using water as efficiently as possible and sending treated drainage to the evaporation ponds, so the water wouldn't have to leave the Valley.

Another option would move the dirty water to one of two places in the delta. A third choice would discharge the water into the Pacific Ocean near Point Estero, north of Cayucos Beach. Few observers seriously believe the drainage water will be sent to the delta or the ocean.

In a preliminary study three years ago, the bureau announced a preference for dealing with the drainage in the Valley. The announcement drew a firestorm from critics who worried about the evaporation ponds.

So in May, when the next generation of options is unveiled, there will be no preferred alternative.

Mike Delamore, chief of the San Joaquin Drainage Division for the bureau, said the No. 1 choice will be picked by July 2006.

"We're not required to have a preferred alternative on this draft," Delamore says. "We want to hear what the public thinks first." 

      The Fresno Bee  

The reporter can be reached at mgrossi at fresnobee.com or (559) 441-6316.
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