It is not a good water story, it is an interesting one and shows what can happen with short-term thinking and band-aid engineering. The sea was created because of the water canals that were designed in the past were poorly engineered and could not handle a flooding in the Colorado river in 1905 - the basin was flooded and it has been a lake ever since. It is mostly fed by irrigation run-offs from the agriculture in Impreial county - which means that the sea has chemical deposits that continue to build up. The problem is that over 100 years of deposits will be exposed as the lake continues to evaporate - which makes it an ecological and health disaster. It is really an interesting area, and frankly, makes for fascinating doomsday like scenery. There are scenes that look as if they came directly from a Mad Max movie there.
Ah! Is this old fuck up what Democrats fear today? Don't want any repeats of screw ups! Better to do nothing!
I am actually not following the Democrats vs. Republicans debate here (frankly, I am just tired of it) - I am just fascinated by the area and the story and how it got to where it got. My personal interest is really looking at it as a system design and maintenance issue - I have to make many design and implementation decisions on an on-going basis - and it is always something that nags at me - when it makes sense to just get something out there that works - and when we actually need to rethink an issue and accept a short-term hit in order to design and implement something that will not lead us down a hole we can not easily extract ourselves out of.
Well I am not following this either. I do not know why it is a Democrat vs Republican thing! That is why I started the damn thread after hearing the silly or it seems to me a silly position by a Democrat. Democrats don't build Dams. What the hell! And there are so needed to store the infrequent rains. Perhaps even prevent some disasters.
Does California really need more dams? We're running out of places to put them You hear this every time there's a drought or deluge in California: "Why haven't they built more dams?" Truth is, they've built a bunch. And they're about done with it. Tally them up. There are more than 1,400 dams in the state. At least 1,000 are major and 55 can hold 100,000 acre-feet or more of water. One acre-foot is enough to supply two average households for a year. There are 36 reservoirs that can contain at least 200,000 acre-feet. Eleven can hold 1 million or more. The biggest is Shasta on the Sacramento River at 4.5 million acre-feet. Then comes Oroville with its broken spillways on the Feather River at 3.5 million. The largest reservoir in Southern California is Diamond Valley in Riverside County at 810,000 acre feet. For perspective, Castaic Lake off Interstate 5 heading over the Grapevine is about 324,000 acre-feet. So there's already a heap of storage capacity in California — or what's called "surface storage" in water talk, in contrast to underground aquifers. The largest 200 reservoirs alone have a combined capacity of 41 million acre-feet. There's at least one dam on every river running off the west slope of the Sierra except for the Cosumnes, just south of Sacramento, says Jeffrey Mount, a water expert at the Public Policy Institute of California. "And that doesn't have enough water in it to make a dam worthwhile," he adds. Thankfully. The Cosumnes frequently spills over its banks, flooding roads and barns. But just before it enters the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the natural-flowing Cosumnes forms a popular nature preserve that annually hosts thousands of migratory waterfowl, including giant sandhill cranes. California has lost 95% of its wetlands since 1900. So pardon if talk of "balancing" what's left isn't really appealing. Anyway, dams don't make it rain and end droughts. And lack of rain was our principal drought problem, regardless of corporate agriculture's squawking about governments and judges coddling salmon. "You can build more dams, but there isn't more water flowing into California," says Jay Lund, a water expert and professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Davis. "This year, there's more water than reservoirs. But if you can only fill them every 10 years, they make less sense economically." There aren't many sensible dam sites left in California. "We've already built the cheap dams," Lund says. "The remaining sites mostly are pretty expensive and are not going to give you that much water. Economically, you're not going to find a lot of people volunteering to pay for those dams. They'd be happy if someone else paid for one." For environmental and cost reasons, Gov. Ronald Reagan killed dam proposals on the Eel River and the Middle Fork of the Feather nearly 50 years ago. An earthquake scare later scuttled a proposed dam on the American River above Folsom Lake. There are earthquake faults all over California that unnerve dam builders. "There's nothing simple about water in California," Lund notes. The best bet for the next major dam in California is called Sites, named after an old settlement in the low foothills of the Coast Range 14 miles west of the Sacramento River near Colusa. This would be an "off-stream" reservoir that didn't dam a river, so there's much less opposition from environmentalists. Water would be piped into the reservoir from the Sacramento when it was running high. It would have a capacity of 1.8 million acre-feet and be the seventh-largest reservoir in California. It's estimated that 500,000 acre-feet could be delivered a year, split between agriculture, domestic and environmental use. But there'd be only minor flood-control value, experts say. The cost? About $5 billion. Proponents are preparing to seek money from the $7.5-billion water bond issue that voters approved in 2014. Of that, $2.7 billion was set aside for water storage. Under the measure, up to half a project's cost could be paid for by the bond money. The rest would need to be footed by the water users on their monthly bills. But before water districts in the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California commit to pitching in, they'd need assurance the water could be moved through the troubled delta. And that's anything but certain. Delta farmers and environmentalists are fighting Gov. Jerry Brown’s $15.5-billion plan to dig two monstrous tunnels to siphon off fresh Sacramento River water before it ever reaches the estuary. And Brown hasn’t shown any interest in trying to fix the fish-chomping water transfer system that exists. One other major dam is being promoted, but its economics are less promising and its environmental impact more controversial. It's Temperance Flat near Fresno on the San Joaquin River above Friant Dam. Its backers also are eyeing a piece of the 2014 bond issue. "The default reaction when we're faced with a water emergency is the 20th century notion that large investments in concrete will somehow solve our problem," Mount says. "But if you've already tapped out that, the alternative is to look more closely at whether we can do a better job with what we have. And to date we haven't done that." Operate the dams more efficiently. Recharge the aquifers. Expedite groundwater regulation. Capture storm runoff. Recycle. Desalinate. Build Sites. Compromise and fix the delta. One thing is not the answer: continuing to plant thirsty nut orchards in the arid San Joaquin Valley. http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-sac-skelton-california-water-capture-dams-20170220-story.html
For those who are proponents of the downfall of California, be careful what you wish for. If it was a nation, it would have like the 7th or 8th biggest economy in the world.
6th. Overtook France recently. https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/07...an-all-but-five-nations-world-bank-data-says/
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com...ornia-drought-lesson-dams-20170317-story.html California drought’s biggest lesson? Build more water storage The winter’s welcome wet spell has brought at least an unofficial end to California’s drought. But has the rain washed away the most obvious lesson of the Golden State’s dry weather? Quite possibly. The Democrats who control state government say the right things about continuing to push water conservation and to move away from unmetered water systems. But when it comes to perhaps the drought’s most obvious lesson — the need to sharply increase water storage capacity — their silence is deafening. With large new dams and reservoirs, California could easily collect vastly more water every year.
http://www.abc10.com/article/news/l...of-gallons-in-uncollected-rainwater/406802167 Verify: Has California lost billions of gallons in uncollected rainwater? Despite retaining drought measures, the wet season has proved to be a boon for Northern California. But is the state still missing out on storing rainwater? State Sen. Ted Gaines, R-El Dorado Hills, thinks so: The reservoir The proposed Sites Reservoir project goes back decades. It would divert water from the Sacramento River through canals and into storage. The proposed location is 10 miles west of Maxwell in Antelope Valley. But, Ron Stork, senior policy advocate at Sacramento advocacy group Friends of the River, said it is still an idea. “The dams don’t exist, the pumps to put the water in the reservoir don’t exist, some of the canals exist, but one canal doesn’t,” Stork said. Moreover, the state’s Water Commission would still have to approve construction funding for the project. “That could take some years, even if all went well for the project.” Stork pointed out. The water Betsey Hodges, a spokeswoman with Gaines’ office, said the reservoir is designed to hold a maximum of almost 600 billion gallons of water. “Even allowing that the reservoir would not be filled to capacity right now to allow for continuing precipitation, Sites being filled to half of 1 percent would still equal ‘billions’ of gallons of water that are not being captured.” she said. The state’s Department of Water Resources estimates that, as of Feb. 2, sites could have stored more than 251 billion gallons of water. Their estimate factors in high river flows, but notes that the reservoir would not fill quickly during a storm. Todd Manley, Director of Government Relations at the Northern California Water Association, said Gaines’ tweet is correct. “Currently, there are billions of gallons flowing through the Sacramento River system.” Manley said. Moreover, Jim Watson, General Manager at the Sites Project Authority, said even in a dry year, the water diversion into storage could be huge because of isolated storm events that produce peak flows.
Last winter's Coyote creek flood was ridiculous planning for the victims and for the waste of the water. There are at least three more damn site of large storage capabilities on Coyote creek, but the dams were never built. Two were, more than 40 years ago, three never built. One may have prevented this flood that occurred when the up stream reservoirs fill to capacity. One more would have save the day. But the planners compounded the error by allowing building the flood plain that has to be allowed to fill when the dams are full. What is this sort of management? It boggles my mind! Why is it the Democrats can just overwhelm and wear down the logical minds into silence? And then no one remembers. I think the population of California is nearing triple the population when the last reservoirs were built.
I knew it was all those damn illegals that built those cities in areas where there weren't enough water to support a city!
There's some truth to there being a limited amount of water for a population that is growing (by whatever means).
I think the question MARIS suggests is that if you have to ration, who should get the water: legal residents or "illegal" ones or both. If it were up to me, I wouldn't withhold water at all, or discriminate against people based upon their nationality.
Because California (and Nevada, and Arizona) are all areas that have areas that are deserts that they have converted to cities. Cities need water. So they pipe in water from other areas that have a (slight) surplus of water.
