With virtually no public notice, state officials quietly gave away a significant portion of Southern California’s water supply to farmers in the Central Valley as part of a deal with the Trump administration in December 2018.
One year later, it remains unclear why the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) signed the agreement, which strips the agency, during exceptionally dry years, of 254,000 acre-feet of water — about what Los Angeles consumes in six months. This change will place extra strain on urban water users during drought years. The agreement could also have potentially disastrous implications for the Sacramento River’s salmon runs, since it will negatively impact river flows and water temperatures.
Less water in the Delta could negatively impact the Sacramento River | Photo by Yichuan Cao/NurPhoto via Getty Images salmon runs. |
Less water in the Delta could negatively impact the Sacramento River | Photo by Yichuan Cao/NurPhoto via Getty Images salmon runs.
“What the state has done could be the difference between a productive salmon season and destitution for commercial fishermen,” said Noah Oppenheim, the executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations.
The deal — signed Dec. 12, 2018 by Department of Water Resources director Karla Nemeth and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s commissioner Brenda Burman — revised a set of rules, called the Coordinated Operation Agreement (COA). This agreement governs the storage of water in northern California reservoirs and the withdrawal of water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Massive pumps at the estuary’s south edge, operated jointly by the Bureau of Reclamation and the DWR, draw between 4 and 5 million acre-feet of water from the Delta most years and send it south via a pair of canals. Together, these water projects serve more than half the state’s residents and millions of acres of farmland while, ostensibly at least, leaving enough water in the estuary and in upstream storage reservoirs to support native fish and wildlife.
Full story: https://www.kcet.org/shows/earth-focus/ ... las-supply
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