CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, APRIL 25, 2017, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, APRIL 25, 2017, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“BIG WATER YEAR LEAVES HUGE DEARTH OF INFORMATION”
In this remarkable water year, which
ended more than five years of severe drought in California, there are still
plenty of noteworthy water questions to contemplate and act upon.
Here’s the central one: Three years after California passed what’s
often called a landmark groundwater regulation law, no one knows how much
under-surface water remains accessible to wells and no one has a clue to how
much replenishment the state’s supplies actually got from last winter’s massive
storms.
It’s easy to see that once-depleted
reservoirs are back at peak levels, again drowning abandoned towns, buildings,
corrals and other structures sacrificed decades ago to the need for water
storage.
But groundwater remains a mystery.
Things may not be quite as mysterious
as years ago, but one thing for sure: supposed new information the state now
possesses about ground water basins is essentially common sense stuff
understood long ago by anyone with even a modicum of knowledge about California
rainfall, lakes and rivers.
Example A is a somewhat breathless
mid-winter report from the California
Department of Water Resources called “Water Available for Replenishment,”
showed demand for local water and imports from other regions is highest in the
Tulare Basin of the southern San Joaquin Valley.
The same report says “runoff, natural recharge and outflow are
highest on the North Coast.” And we were told the estimated water available for
replenishing ground water basins is highest in the Sacramento River region
(about 640,000 acre feet a year, enough to satisfy the needs of 1.4 million families).
This is all the stuff of common-sense:
Virtually no one familiar with California’s water world doesn’t know that farms
in the Tulare Basin consume a lot of water, both from the Central Valley
Project and from wells. Who doesn’t know it typically rains more on the North
Coast than anywhere else in the state? And who doesn’t know the Sacramento
River watershed contains some of California’s largest reservoirs, from which
water could be shifted to replenish aquifers?
So this was essentially a useless
report, telling interested Californians little they didn’t already know. There
is still no way to tell how much water remains in easily reachable aquifers
around the state. For example, no one has a clue how much water lies in most
California underground lakes. We do, for example, know golf courses in the
Coachella Valley portion of Riverside County, including Palm Springs, Rancho
Mirage and the aptly-named Indian Wells, always remained green even as the
state Capitol lawn and many others went brown in the drought.
Drought or not, the vast underground
lake beneath the Coachella Valley keeps water shortages there at bay year after
year. Plus, much of the water sprayed onto the valley’s myriad greens and
fairways eventually filters back down to the aquifer.
Far more important would be to know
the extent of aquifers and their winter replenishment in the Central Valley.
During the drought, farmers spent heavily to deepen wells and reach new, lower
levels of underground supplies, but no one had the foggiest notion how long
that could persist. Winter storms at least partially replenished supplies, but
it’s still anyone’s guess how much water rests there or how long it might last.
Water meters, reported Leon Szeptycki,
executive director of Stanford University’s Water in the West program, could
help a bit with this. He told a university magazine that “If everyone had a
meter on their well and you knew how much everyone was using, you could sort of
calculate everyone’s contribution to aquifer depletion. But if you don’t know
any of those things, they just become things to fight about.”
That’s pretty much where we are today,
more than 12 years before the new state law’s eventual deadline for controlling
and measuring use of ground water as thoroughly as surface water is managed
now.
The bottom line: We know that after a
winter of heavy rain, there is no more drought in California. Even Gov. Jerry
Brown admitted that.
We also know at least some Californians want controls on ground
water use, but that’s many years off. All of which means that we know
startlingly little more now than before the groundwater law passed three years
ago, and that’s a crying shame.
-30-
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
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