The
politics of the drought makes the drought need to be over.
It is a
win for Jerry.
And
some small bits of progress in water and infrastructure management.
From
the heavily limited US view of the “politically realistic” the drought
management has been a roaring success and I would be stunned if certain
political resumes are not now decorated with the bureaucratic medals of valor
that will advance careers.
The
hydrology of the state of California still suffers some major inconvenient
truths.
The
aquifer is depleted and still not well managed.
Under
California is, or maybe was, a giant fresh water lake where agribusiness takes
well water.
Up here
on the surface we have full, or fuller dams, green hills, a high snow pack and
in a way the drought is over. Underground our largest water reserve is way down
and there is no plan to replenish it or even do that much to keep the
agricultural sector from drilling where they wish, as deep as they wish and
pumping beyond any sustainability.
Aquifer
water is normally among the cleanest. Ours is not. Water filters down through
the soil and arrives at the aquifers without biological contamination. Chemical
contamination on the other hand travels all the way down. In California that
includes the aftertaste of MTBE gasoline additive still in the system,
industrial farming chemicals, contamination from everyday combustion engine
vehicle use, other industrial chemicals and chemicals used in fossil fuel
exploitations, especially in hydraulic fracturing.
Our
Central Valley was once mostly wetlands where industrial farming did not need
to drill very deeply to exploit pristine, clean, groundwater. A century later
those wells run ever deeper to water ever drying soils that are accumulating
metals and salts.
Recent
droughts have made things worse, and many hand-to-mouth actions were taken by
agricultural businesses to fix their problem for themselves that made our
collective problems much worse and harder to repair. We have no serious plan to
replenish that aquifer or bring ourselves to any kind of water cycle
sustainability.
California
had a structural problem with water use before most of us were born. With the
dams, channels, canals and pipelines around out state we have one of the
largest water infrastructure systems in the world and yet it is not enough for
our 40 million people nor reliable for our agriculture and fish
hatcheries.
The Oroville
Dam scare woke a lot of people up to what some people have been saying for a
long time only to be stonewalled by state water management. We should give
thanks for what Friends of the River attempted to make right before there was a
disaster. We should listen to what such expert groups are saying now and we
should figure out how obvious problems were allowed to fester and how
legitimate, fact based, public concern was ignored.
A lot
of what we have in water infrastructure is not in good shape, and some of it
was conceptually bad from the start. Right now the drought is “over” and
most of the dams are full, but some are not. To jump into Lake Shasta would
probably still kill you from the fall, and things are better. Two years ago the
fall would have certainly killed you. In many places we are taking too much out
of the dams, spending the reserves in good times, lacking the reserves in bad
times. Governor Edmund Brown Jr. would be well advised to think of water the
way he thinks of money. (Water really flows, for dollars it is just an
expression). We have an average amount of supply of water. There are ways to
budget it, save it for a non-rainy day, and think of how to collect up more of
it.
Right
now we have surpluses of water in many places and no serous way to get it into
our largest water reservoirs, the aquifers. We also have still have dams where
we still ask too much of them and cannot use them to capacity for the hydroelectric
power that would abate fossil fuel use.
Now
that we are facing climate change, we need to think about how these already bad
averages and cycles will be affected. It is called Global Warming for a reason.
That does not mean consistent warming everywhere, or consistent drying everywhere.
Describing
our water resources in a way that is simpler than it really is we have most of
our central valley reserves in the snow pack and the aquifer, with the dams in
the east mostly catching snow pack run off creating a second tier storage and
the dams in the north west being more part of the Pacific North West higher
rain pattern. To the east we take water out of a larger, multi-state river
system.
The
snow pack, the Great Basin and the areas around Humboldt and Del Norte will all
be affected by climate change and we should make our plans to deal with the
worst case estimates. In good years we will not use everything we have, but on
bad years, that conservative planning will pay off, and bad years are part of
the natural cycles of weather. Climate change certainly means that the ups and
downs will get more extreme.
One of
the reasons we don’t catch what we need is deforestation. Deforestation
includes brush, undergrowth, smaller trees, wild lands and one should not just
think of big sequoias and other pines.
Reforestation
does not increase the water supply or cause more rain unless there is so much
of it that it causes a cooling effect. Reforestation DOES affect how long the
water stays around and where it goes and what kind of impact it has on infrastructure.
There
is a thing called the run-off rate, (or flood speed) in watershed management. When
the area uphill from a river system and its feeder streams is only farmland and
housing, then the water rushes off quickly, usually taking precious top soil
with it. When the river is high and looks muddy, that's an unhealthy watershed
without proper forest cover. We lose topsoil creating dirty water that is bad
for marine life and it carries with it all the toxins and trash of our agribusiness/industrial
society causing even more damage.
When an
area has better ground cover it takes longer for water to make it from rain to
river, it is filtered by the forested areas and comes in cleaner. Look at a
stream in a redwood park for example. The water is clear, even after the rain. In
certain geological areas, that rain water that is being held up in forest cover
never goes to the stream, but instead seeps into the ground and goes to the
aquifers.
So, we
have a state that is currently wet and green, but letting good water rush off
while underground we have a serious shortfall and some contamination problems
and in the mountains we have a snow pack that may now melt at a faster rate.
There
are some things that can be done and can be done quickly.
We can
move from drought consumption thinking to environmentally sustainable thinking
in our water use. This drought showed that we know how to save water, there is
no reason to stop.
The
Brown administration has called the drought “over” but called on us to keep up
the water saving efforts. I agree wholeheartedly.
Moving
to a form of water use more in keeping with the different climate areas of our
state and its different local biomes should include some changes in what we
grow, how we make parks, home landscaping, gardens, etc.
The
drought measures should not end, they should become our new normal.
The use
of native plants and low water landscaping would help a lot and we Californians
would stop having front yards that look like New England and start having green
spaces around us that look more like Mexico, of which we were once a part.
Greywater
use needs to become the required standard, the zoning and the code and the
State should step in and just make it legal everywhere and mandatory in most
places. Our shower, sink and cleaning water can increase our urban and suburban
tree coverage at the same time we will be returning tap water to the
environment in a way that it can use.
There
are ways to make ground water capture zones. Fresh water can be pooled into
wetland reserves over deep well perforations, with sand and rock for filtering,
in a way that can speed up clean replenishment of the aquifers. Probably the
best way to do this is spread out around the state in many small projects, some
of which would be fed by diverting water that cannot be held in Sierra Nevada
dams. Probably the worst way to do this is with some high energy injection pump
systems.
It
would be very interesting to ask the hydrology experts and environmental
biologists for some aquifer replenishment plans that were based more on science
than political expediency or economic opportunism, try out a few models, and
then repeat the more successful ones around the state. It will take years, but they
will be years well spent. The rewards will be decades long.
Reforestation
that targets the watersheds, controls soil erosion and helps aquifer
replenishment needs to be a priority. There need to have woodland buffer zones
around the water ways and on sharp slopes. Rain that falls needs a chance to
soak in keeping that water around a while longer and letting it flow cleanly
into the streams and rivers where our salmon run. The top soil needs to be
protected.
Global
warming is going to change which plants thrive where, and since plants don’t
walk, swim or fly, reforestation might be a big part of how we keep our forest
communities with a healthy mix and protect part of the spectrum of trees and
plants from extinction.
At some
point sooner or later we will learn to pipe our sewage back up hill and put it
back into the environment. Instead of being a waste that we treat and dump, it
needs to become a resource that we put to use. There are ways of treating
sewage using natural plants in ponds. From there waste water can be used to
grow lumber, fiber for paper, cotton etc. and then join the rest of the water
cycle evaporating, seeping down to the ground water or becoming part of the
healthy run off.
Again,
a lot of work has already been done on exactly this kind of natural methods to
treat waste water right here in California. The government of California needs
to be putting out requests for proposals for some small scale tests and
eventually build up to where we make use of the sewage from our large urban
areas.
As an
avid hiker, I am enjoying the lush green of my favorite parks and the lands
around them. But even as my boots are getting muddy, I know that our drought
isn’t really over, all we have now is a moment of respite.
More
dry times are coming. We need to be ready for them.
