CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, APRIL 22, 2014, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“GROUND WATER BECOMING ANOTHER BIG CALIFORNIA FIGHT”
The next front in California’s
long-running water wars has already opened, and the reasons for it will
sometimes be hard to see – but not always.
That next fight is over ground water,
source of about 35 percent of the state’s fresh water in normal years and a
much higher percentage in dry ones like 2014. This battle has the potential to
become far more bitter than even the quarrels over how to distribute water from
the Delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin river systems.
For it’s all but certain that
regulations of some kind will come soon to this only source of California fresh
water that currently has virtually none.
“In the coming months, I will be
working…on strategies for more effective groundwater management,” wrote
Democratic state Sen. Fran Pavley of Calabasas in her latest constituent
newsletter. When Pavley broaches a subject like this, no one involved can
afford to ignore her. Only last year, she authored the state’s first
regulations on hydraulic fracturing (fracking) for oil and natural gas, and
back in 2006, she was the force behind the AB32 restrictions on greenhouse
gases, progenitor of the state’s ever-controversial cap-and-trade program.
For sure, the long-running drought
here is producing conditions that almost demand regulation.
As things get drier, especially for
San Joaquin Valley farms now drawing just a small fraction of their normal
water entitlements from both the state Water Project and the federal Central
Valley Project, many of those farmers are pumping ground water furiously to
keep their crops and businesses alive.
The longstanding presumption here has
been that if there’s water under your land and you have a well, you can take as
much as you want. That has sometimes ignored effects on other nearby
property owners and the public.
One of those effects can be land subsidence,
which in some Central Valley locales has topped 20 feet and can be spotted by
passing motorists who see instruments and wellheads that once were on the
surface perched on pipes reaching high above the current ground level.
Subsidence, in turn, can lead to
problems moving surface water in canals, something water agencies cannot long
tolerate. Over-pumping ground water can also spur intrusions of brackish salt
water into fresh water aquifers.
The reality is that some of
California’s most significant environmental laws have been the direct results
of crises. The Field Act, passed just after the 1933 Long Beach earthquake,
changed the way schools all over the state are built. Building standards for
other structures changed immensely after the 1971 San Fernando earthquake
severely damaged the Olive View Medical Center. The drought of 1975-77 produced
major water conservation changes, among them wide government distribution of
low-flow toilets and shower heads, now standard in new homes and one reason today’s
drought has not yet proved as disastrous as previous ones.
So far, drought has not produced great
enthusiasm for Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed twin tunnels water project to bring
Sacramento River water under the Delta to the state’s aqueduct. That’s partly
because in return for more than $20 billion, the state would get no more water,
even if the tunnels might assure more level supplies from year to year. So far,
the main backers are water districts on the west side of the San Joaquin
Valley, whose member farmers are prone to major water allocation swings from
year to year.
So that project won’t go anywhere for
awhile. Which could mean that legislators who want at least to purvey the image
of doing something about the drought will become more likely to adopt ground
water regulations.
If they try this, expect another loud
and large fight to break out, as farmers and water districts with wells of
their own can be expected to fight anyone trying to tell them what to do with
water they’ve long viewed as their own property.
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Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His
book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and
the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover
fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
