Delta tunnel project needs to be thrown out

ICYMI 8/4/23: New Age of Water, RTD Response to Jerry Meral

A New Age of Water is Dawning – Peter Gleick, TIME Magazine 8/3/23
Humanity has a decision to make. We stand today at the brink of a new age, at a fork in the road of our own survival. We can become another extinct species, a blink in time in the natural history of the earth, or we can recognize that water is so vital to our continued existence that we must find a new way to live with it, manage it, and protect it. A bad future is possible; it’s just not the future we would choose if we had a choice.
The good news is we have that choice: we can envision a positive future, a path to get there, and we can take the steps along that path.

LTE: Delta tunnel project needs to be thrown out - Marin I-J 7/28/23
Dear Editor, 
As an assistant policy analyst for the nonprofit Restore the Delta organization, I am writing in response to the recently published letter to the editor by Jerry Meral asserting that California needs to build the Delta tunnel right now.

I am a lifelong Stockton resident, as well as a first-generation environmental science graduate from University of the Pacific, and I am sad to see Meral, the retired deputy director for the California Department of Water Resources, dismiss the San Francisco-Bay Delta as a climate sacrifice zone. I think Meral implies that, since climate change is coming and there’s obviously nothing we can do, we should just give up on the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta National Heritage Area and build the Delta tunnel.

I believe that approving the project will lead to about 10,000 diesel truck trips for a decade of construction. Those trucks will increase emissions in a community with some of the highest national asthma rates. I also worry that the project will lead the extinction of the salmon. Harmful algal blooms could proliferate due to a dewatered Delta.

Meral appears to believe that, if we just install one more pipe (a plan rejected by voters since 1982), we can fix California’s water system before climate change wipes out our region. I think he is one of the last boosters of this plan. Even Gov. Gavin Newsom pulled back.

At Restore the Delta, we think California’s efforts would be better spent restoring the Bay-Delta for all the people and species who depend on a healthy estuary by increasing flows through the estuary, not piping freshwater around the region.

— Cintia Cortez, Stockton