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<td><span class="yiv6751259559PrintFriendlyIntro">section of the <i>Chico
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13, 2014.</span></td>
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<td><span class="yiv6751259559PrintFriendlyIntro">This article may be
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<td><span class="yiv6751259559PrintFriendlyIntro"><a rel="nofollow" class="yiv6751259559moz-txt-link-freetext" target="_blank" href="http://www.newsreview.com/chico/content?oid=12742766">http://www.newsreview.com/chico/content?oid=12742766</a></span></td>
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<td><span class="yiv6751259559PrintFriendlyIntro">Copyright ©2014 Chico
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<td><span class="yiv6751259559PrintFriendlyIntro">Printed on
2014-02-13.</span></td>
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<h1>The big squeeze</h1>
<h2>North State water supplies under pressure as drought
parches California</h2>
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<span class="yiv6751259559ContentBy">By <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.newsreview.com/chico/archive?author=oid%3A190066" class="yiv6751259559AuthorLinksOff">Alastair
Bland</a></span> <span class="yiv6751259559PrintFriendlyBody">
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<img src="cid:3.2124272092@web125406.mail.ne1.yahoo.com" alt="" height="5" width="1"><br>
<span class="yiv6751259559ContentImgCaption">Water officials
say Lake Oroville is at 38 percent of
capacity.</span><br>
<span class="yiv6751259559ContentImgCredit"> PHOTO COURTESY
OF CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF WATER RESOURCES </span><br>
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<div>A thousand feet beneath the city of Chico, in the
pitch-black waters of the Tuscan Aquifer, time has
proceeded for ages without sound or sunlight, mostly
unaffected by the world above. But in recent years, an
increasing tug of upward force has been moving the
Tuscan Aquifer’s water toward the surface of the
Earth—drawn, ultimately, by the thirst of fruit trees
and vegetable fields hundreds of miles away.</div>
<div>And in 2014, there simply is not enough water to go
around. The driest year in California’s history ended
just six weeks ago, and a second dry winter is
underway. Gov. Jerry Brown declared a drought
emergency on Jan. 17, and state and federal water
agencies have warned farmers and cities that there
will be virtually no allocations this year unless a
great deal of rain should soon fall.</div>
<div>Recent weekend storms did little to dent the huge
water deficit. Shasta Lake and Lake Oroville are up to
37 percent and 38 percent of capacity, respectively,
whereas both were at 36 percent the week before.
Folsom Lake is at just 26 percent. In the San Joaquin
Valley, San Luis Reservoir—a major agricultural
supplier filled with Delta water—is just 30 percent
full, and streams and rivers that usually become
wintertime torrents of mud-brown water have dwindled
into quietly trickling brooks. Sierra Nevada
snowpack—usually relied upon for late-summer water—is
a fraction of its normal amount. As of last week,
Black Butte Lake had entirely dried up.</div>
<div>To meet the needs of the parched state, water
managers are increasingly relying upon the groundwater
reserves of the Tuscan Aquifer, a trend that critics
say is already proving unsustainable. The aquifer’s
volume has apparently been diminishing through the
years as farmers are forced to drill deeper and deeper
to tap the reservoir, according to Christina Buck,
water-resources scientist with the <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.buttecounty.net/waterresourceconservation/WaterCommission.aspx">Butte
County Department of Water and Resource Conservation</a>.
This not only threatens Chico’s municipal water supply
but also could eventually cause measurable shrinkage
of surface rivers and lakes.</div>
<div>“Officials know that we could be looking at longer
droughts in the future, and they’re looking for
another source of water as a life-extender,” said Jim
Brobeck, water-policy analyst with Chico-based <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.newsreview.com/chico/www.aqualliance.net">AquAlliance</a>.
“So they want to integrate our groundwater into the
state water supply.”</div>
<div>Brobeck says the chief threat to the region’s
underground water stores is an increasingly common
practice called groundwater substitutions, or
transfers, whereby landowners sell their own surface
water to others in need—often making a healthy
profit—and replace it with well water from the public
supply.</div>
<div>This wasn’t a problem years ago, when there was less
demand for the state’s water. During the previous
worst-ever drought in California’s history in the late
1970s, only 22 million people lived in the state.
Today, almost 40 million people populate California,
and more farmland than ever before is under intensive
cultivation. Salmon and steelhead numbers are dropping
as their spawning streams are increasingly diverted
for human use. The governor now wants to build a pair
of giant tunnels that could divert most of the already
heavily used Sacramento River to the San Joaquin
Valley—a project that critics argue will not solve the
state’s water shortage.</div>
<div>Forecasters expect a dry winter. Should March, April
and May come and go with little to no rain, the
likelihood that any will fall before September is
virtually zero. With growers in the Sacramento and the
San Joaquin valleys already banking on reduced
production, and salmon unable to spawn under current
conditions, no one knows how California and its
environment will cope should a second year pass with
almost no rain.</div>
<div><b>Several miles south of Chico, straddling the line</b>
between Butte and Glenn counties, is the large
property owned by John Thompson. The rice grower works
1,400 acres on land that his grandfather worked in the
1940s. Thompson produces several varieties of rice,
mostly for table use but also for an Oregon sake
brewery. His water comes from the Feather River and is
provided on a contractual basis by the state’s
Department of Water Resources.</div>
<div>This year, though, there may be very little—even
none—available.</div>
<div>“We still have a chance for some rain in February and
March, but it’s looking almost certain that our
production will be cut by 50 percent,” Thompson said.
If the state allots him no water at all from the
Feather River, he will still have his wells—though
Thompson estimated that he could keep only 300 to 400
acres of his land in production using groundwater.</div>
<div>He noted that even the drought of 37 years ago did
not reduce Lake Oroville as much as the current
conditions have. “We’re really in uncharted waters
here,” he said. “In ’77, we had more water in the lake
and less people in the state.”</div>
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<img src="cid:3.2124272092@web125406.mail.ne1.yahoo.com" alt="" height="5" width="1"><br>
<span class="yiv6751259559ContentImgCaption">The receding of
the lake has revealed all sorts of junky
treasures, including this old car entangled
with fallen tree branches.</span><br>
<span class="yiv6751259559ContentImgCredit"> PHOTO BY MELANIE
MACTAVISH </span><br>
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<div>While the Sacramento Valley’s farmers will feel the
strain caused by the drought, the severe absence of
rainfall will devastate few agricultural areas as
severely as it will the Westlands Water District, on
the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. The region
receives just six or seven inches of rainfall in an
average year and relies almost entirely on water from
the Sacramento Valley, transported south from the
Delta via two canals. This year, hundreds of thousands
of acres of Westland’s farmland will almost certainly
receive no water at all.</div>
<div>“We’re bracing our farmers for possibly no allocation
this year,” said Jason Peltier, Westlands’ deputy
general manager. “If that happens, farmers will let
their fields go dry and use what water they get to
keep their orchards alive.”</div>
<div>Peltier said his region’s 600 farmers may need to
fallow as much as a third of their land this
summer—roughly 200,000 acres left to bake in the sun.</div>
<div>But many water-policy analysts say that Westlands’
farmers are largely to blame for any drought-related
grievances they may suffer. The region is a relatively
young farming district whose contract with the federal
government stipulates that other farming areas as well
as environmental needs must come first in dry years.
Chinook salmon, for example, must have enough water to
spawn in and enough flowing downstream to the sea to
carry juveniles safely past the two major pumps that
serve the San Joaquin Valley.</div>
<div>Nonetheless, farmers in Westlands have been shifting
en masse from annual field crops to fruit
trees—especially almond orchards. Critics say this is
a bad strategy in arid regions.</div>
<div>“Those trees need water every year,” said Mike
Hudson, a water activist and commercial salmon
fisherman in Oakland. “You can’t fallow them during
drought. This is creating a constant demand for water
in a state without a constant supply of water. It
takes away all flexibility in management.”</div>
<div>In years when vegetable farmers may have once simply
fallowed their fields due to shortages in the state
and federal supplies, nut and tree-fruit farmers now
pay large amounts of money to irrigation districts in
the Sacramento Valley for deliveries of water.</div>
<div>This trend, critics like Brobeck say, is driving the
rise in groundwater substitutions. Not only is this
process denting the Chico region’s supply, it may also
be driving a decline in salmon populations.</div>
<div>That’s because transferring water from north to south
requires using two giant pumps in the Delta that can
actually reverse the seaward flow of the river system.
This causes young fish migrating toward the sea to
swim toward the pumps instead. Millions of baby salmon
have died through the years in this way. If more water
continues to be removed for the benefit of farmers,
some fish species likely will go extinct, critics say.</div>
<div>In 2013, the Yuba County Water Agency sold away
72,000 acre-feet of groundwater and replaced it with
well water, according to a report last year from the
Bureau of Reclamation. The same document predicted
that other districts along the Sacramento River would
make more than 37,000 acre-feet of groundwater
transfers, including 5,000 from the Glenn-Colusa
Irrigation District, in the same year.</div>
<div><b>Local groups, including <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.newsreview.com/chico/www.aqualliance.net">AquAlliance</a>
and</b> the <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.becnet.org/">Butte Environmental
Council</a>, believe these groundwater transfers
have the potential to create a water deficit in what
is currently one of the last water-secure regions in
the state.</div>
<div>And the transfers could be ramped up in coming years.
In 2010, the Bureau of Reclamation and the state’s San
Luis & Delta-Mendota Water Authority submitted a
proposal to make up to 600,000 acre-feet of annual
groundwater transfers from Northern California to
users south of the Delta. The proposal, which intends
to supplement the federal water-delivery system with a
new water source, requires an environmental impact
report before it can be initiated—a mandate of the
California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA.</div>
<div>However, the government has bypassed this potentially
costly step by edging through a legal loophole,
according to critics.</div>
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<img src="cid:3.2124272092@web125406.mail.ne1.yahoo.com" alt="" height="5" width="1"><br>
<span class="yiv6751259559ContentImgCaption">Jim Brobeck, a
water-policy analyst with AquAlliance, says
the selling of surface water and subsequent
groundwater pumping by farmers is a threat to
the Tuscan Aquifer.</span><br>
<span class="yiv6751259559ContentImgCredit"> PHOTO BY MELANIE
MACTAVISH </span><br>
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<div>“They’re calling it a one-year water transfer,
instead of a long-term project, and that allows them
to skip the CEQA guidelines,” explained Robyn DiFalco,
executive director of the <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.becnet.org/">Butte Environmental
Council</a>. “Now, we’re seeing multiple one-year
transfers, year after year, without environmental
review.”</div>
<div>Brobeck at <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.newsreview.com/chico/www.aqualliance.net">AquAlliance</a>
confirms the same—that the federal and state
applicants are skirting environmental laws and
essentially stealing Northern California’s water.</div>
<div>“They just keep delaying the environmental review,
which allows them to operate on a year-by-year basis,”
Brobeck said.</div>
<div>On Feb. 3, the Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District
announced it would be activating five wells this
winter to draw up groundwater from the Tuscan Aquifer
and transfer it to orchards in Glenn and Colusa
counties. The measure is an emergency action never
taken before, since these trees normally would receive
surface water from the Sacramento River.</div>
<div>Thaddeus Bettner, general manager of the irrigation
district, says roughly 10,000 acres of almond and
walnut trees have woken from winter dormancy several
weeks early and are now budding. Without water on
their roots, the trees could suffer damage—not only
for this year but for successive seasons, as well.</div>
<div>“We’re faced this season with a situation that we’ve
never seen before,” Bettner said. “We’ve had to decide
whether we allow damage to occur to the season’s yield
and maybe the trees themselves, or use groundwater and
try and protect the trees and the area’s economy.”
Bettner guesses his district will use about 3,000
acre-feet of groundwater on the area’s orchards this
winter—a fraction, he points out, of the 700,000
acre-feet of water used in the region per year.</div>
<div>But this one-time emergency strategy could become a
long-term one. Bettner said the Glenn-Colusa
Irrigation District will soon begin the CEQA
environmental review process with the aim of making
these transfers any time allocations of river water
are reduced.</div>
<div>Brobeck said the area’s canal system was initially
built to alleviate pressure on groundwater reserves.</div>
<div>“So, using them to distribute groundwater represents
a huge shift,” he said.</div>
<div>About 10 percent of California’s land surface area is
cropland, most of it irrigated—and there are critics
who believe the state’s agriculture industry has
exceeded its sustainable level.</div>
<div>“Agriculture needs to be using half the water it is
now,” said David Zetland, a water-law blogger and
author of the forthcoming book <i>Living with Water
Scarcity</i>. Zetland calls the San Joaquin Valley
“the No. 1 hotspot of unsustainable agriculture” and
believes one way to curb farm growth and sustainably
manage the industry would be to prohibit agricultural
districts from importing water from other drainages.
He said the perception that Northern California has a
surplus of water is false.</div>
<div>The governor’s drought emergency brought Californians
quickly to attention in January, spurring action,
including issuing rationing measures or enforcing
those already in place, among urban and rural water
districts.</div>
<div>But Brobeck at <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.newsreview.com/chico/www.aqualliance.net">AquAlliance</a>
isn’t convinced, and he even takes issue with the
notion that there is an emergency. We know, Brobeck
says, that California is a dry region. We know that
droughts occur here. Farmers who settled land that
receives only six inches of rain per year took a
gamble—and he feels they are now dragging down the
rest of the state.</div>
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<span class="yiv6751259559ContentImgCaption">Frank Gehrke,
chief of snow surveys for the California
Department of Water Resources, measures the
snowpack near Echo Summit on Jan. 3, finding
levels at one-fifth of what is typical for
early January.</span><br>
<span class="yiv6751259559ContentImgCredit"> PHOTO COURTESY
OF CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF WATER RESOURCES </span><br>
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<div>“The emergency is not the fact that we’re having a
drought,” he said. “The emergency is the fact that
people are planting thousands of acres of permanent
crops in areas with an unreliable water supply.”</div>
<div><b>West Coast salmon numbers have</b> declined all
the way north to Alaska, but only in California are
their troubles so directly related to water shortages.
In the Central Valley, federal laws protect salmon by
guaranteeing that enough water will always be left in
the Delta to support their populations. However, these
laws are failing, and even in nondrought years, salmon
seem to come up short when farming districts want the
same water. The Central Valley chinook runs have
declined through the years, while agriculture acreage
has steadily grown.</div>
<div>Already, the current drought has heavily impacted
Central Valley fish populations. In November, the
Bureau of Reclamation began reducing the outflow from
Shasta Dam as an emergency effort to conserve water in
Lake Shasta. But the drastic measure left thousands of
nests—or redds—full of fertilized chinook salmon eggs
high and dry. Biologists believe that as much as 40
percent of the fall-run chinook spawn was lost.</div>
<div>A similar loss of more than 10 percent of chinook
salmon redds occurred in the American River after
officials reduced the outflow from Folsom Lake in
January.</div>
<div>Even in times of drought, endangered fish species are
supposed to be protected by the Endangered Species
Act. Additionally, a 1992 law called the Central
Valley Project Improvement Act requires that a minimum
of 800,000 acre-feet of water be reserved every year
for the benefit of fish and wildlife. The intent of
that law was to protect chinook salmon and, in fact,
double their population.</div>
<div>But the law has so far failed.</div>
<div>Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast
Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, explained that
the Bureau of Reclamation regularly “games the system”
by releasing water from Folsom or Shasta lakes and
officially logging the releases as part of the
required 800,000 acre feet intended to support
wildlife and migrating fish. This meets the
obligations of the 1992 Improvement Act.</div>
<div>“But then, when the water reaches the Delta, they
pump it south,” Grader said. “They’re double
accounting with the water.”</div>
<div>The drought has stoked up the debate surrounding the
Bay Delta Conservation Plan, the state’s proposed
water conveyance project that would divert much of the
Sacramento River via two giant tunnels into the San
Joaquin Valley.</div>
<div>Peltier, of Westlands, like many in the agriculture
industry, supports the plan. He thinks the proposed
35-mile-long twin tunnels would increase reliability
for farmers by allowing sufficient transfer of water,
even in dry years, without compromising the health of
the Delta. The existing water pumps near Stockton,
operating at full force, can reverse the seaward flow
of the Sacramento River, confusing migrating fish and
disrupting their natural life cycles.</div>
<div>But opponents of the Bay Delta Conservation Plan,
including salmon fishermen and environmental groups,
say the project likely would destroy struggling fish
populations by simply removing too much water, too
consistently. One of the plan’s main drawbacks, they
say, is that the twin tunnels would not produce any
new water, as desalination and water-recycling systems
would do.</div>
<div>Many farmers in the San Joaquin Valley have lamented
what appears to them to be a waste—river water flowing
past the Delta and out to sea.</div>
<div>“In years when there is a surplus, the Bureau of
Reclamation should allow us to capture that water,”
said Joe Del Bosque, who farms mostly almonds and
melons on 2,000 acres in the Westlands Water District.
Del Bosque said he might have enough water stored in
San Luis Reservoir to last him through the year—but
2015, he says, could destroy him.</div>
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<span class="yiv6751259559ContentImgCaption">Chico farmer and
winemaker Berton Bertagna is worried about
water allocations for his 600 acres of
orchards.</span><br>
<span class="yiv6751259559ContentImgCredit"> PHOTO BY MELANIE
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<div>But environmentalists say that, to support the
Sacramento River’s fisheries, a substantial portion of
its water must be allowed to flow undisturbed to the
sea.</div>
<div>“It really gets me when people say that the water
flowing into the Bay is wasted,” said Jerry Cadagan, a
longtime water activist in Sonora. “It’s not wasted.
It’s essential to keep alive a valuable fishery.
Salmon is a food source, healthy just like
pomegranates and almonds.”</div>
<div><b>Earlier this week, Northern</b> <b>Californians</b>
were reminded what it feels like when water falls from
the sky. Umbrellas came out, and clusters of people
assembled under awnings and bus shelters. The roads
grew slick and fishtails of spray erupted from passing
cars in the streets. It was pouring.</div>
<div>But it wasn’t nearly enough.</div>
<div>The culprit for the ongoing drought is a massive
ridge of high pressure that remains anchored over the
North Pacific Ocean. It has hardly shifted for 14
months and is creating a massive atmospheric rain
shadow on the West Coast. Storms that would normally
float eastward over California with the jet stream are
being deflected northward by the ridge, which is
roughly the size of the Andes Mountains. When this
devastating barrier will dissipate is unclear.</div>
<div>Randall Osterhuber, the lead researcher at the
Central Sierra Snow Laboratory near Donner Pass, said
if this ridge breaks down, another large storm or two
could still swoop in over California, soaking the
valleys and cloaking the mountains.</div>
<div>“But every day that it’s clear and dry,” he said,
“the statistical chances that we’ll have an average or
almost-average water year decline significantly.”</div>
<div>Cadagan, who has lived through at least two severe
droughts in California, says this one takes things to
a new level. He is confident the state’s residential
water supplies will last the rest of 2014.</div>
<div>“But if we don’t get rain this winter, and if next
fall is dry, too, we’re going to see people leaving
the state,” he said.</div>
<div>Ed George, a farmer near Davis, believes he may
survive the year. He uses water from wells, which he
suspects to be part of a subterranean water system fed
and recharged by the perennial supply of Lake
Berryessa—rather than the drainage of the dwindling
Cache Creek—and George believes his water supply will
hold out. He hopes so, anyway. Other growers, he is
certain, will produce little to nothing in 2014.</div>
<div>“Food is going to be really expensive,” he predicted.</div>
<div>George expects that ranchers will have to cull their
herds of cattle when the dry spring provides no ample
pasture.</div>
<div>And in fact, that’s happening locally already,
according to Orland-based cattle rancher Shannon
Douglass. Last week, Douglass began selling some black
Angus steers from the 50-head herd she and her
husband, Kelly, have built up over the last decade.</div>
<div>“I just announced to customers this week that we will
be out of beef very shortly, as we are forced to sell
livestock that we would have kept for finishing,” she
told the CN&R.</div>
<div>Berton Bertagna, a fourth-generation farmer in Butte
County, has more than 600 acres of orchards that could
go dry this year if his water supply is cut off.
Worse, his groundwater supply is dwindling—evidence,
perhaps, that we are overdrafting the Tuscan Aquifer.</div>
<div>“I had to lower three different wells last year,” he
said, adding that many other area farmers will be
tapping the aquifer if they receive no allocation from
their irrigation districts.</div>
<div>“We’re all really worried about the groundwater
supply,” Bertagna said. “Those of us who have orchards
need to water those trees every year. But we might not
get rain, and we might not get snowpack, so we’re just
hoping we can get our trees through the year with our
wells.”</div>
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