Delta crisis: UC researchers float peripheral canal
DELTA DETAILS: Largest estuary on the West Coast
Total acres: 491,774
Total population: More than 515,000
Major cities: Sacramento, West Sacramento, Stockton and Oakley
What it does: Supplies drinking water to 23 million Californians and more than 1,800 agricultural users
Levees: 1,100 miles long
Rivers: The Sacramento, San Joaquin, Mokelumne and Consumnes rivers and their tributaries flow into the Delta carrying half the state's runoff
Fish at risk: steelhead, salmon, smelt, sturgeon
Peripheral canal: Proposed channel to divert water around the Delta rather than through it. Californians in 1982 overwhelmingly voted down a plan to build a canal.
Californians have been agonizing over the fate of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta for decades, but growing environmental threats have infused the debate with new urgency. At the end of October, the Delta Vision Task Force wraps up a yearlong study and will deliver its final recommendations to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature.
UC researchers and faculty serve on the task force, and many others have long played a significant role in studying the Delta's economic, political and environmental challenges.
Viewing the Delta's problems from an engineering, biological, environmental and legal perspective, many UC researchers have come to a similar conclusion: The best – or the least harmful – way to preserve this delicate ecosystem is to build a peripheral canal to carry drinking and agricultural water around the Delta rather than through the middle.
Since California voters defeated a 1982 effort to build a peripheral canal, the concept has fueled bitter debate cast in terms of a Southern versus Northern California battle for precious water. More than 90 percent of voters in most Northern California counties voted against the '82 plan. But times have changed.
"The current Delta is unsustainable," said Jay Lund, UC Davis environmental engineering professor. "It's not serving the interests of the fish, the water users or the local economy."
Due to population growth, the San Francisco Bay Area is now more dependent on Delta water than Southern California, Lund said. And the forces of nature are conspiring to render the Delta ever more unsustainable.
"The current Delta is unsustainable. It's not serving the interests of the fish, the water users or the local economy."
- Jay Lund, UC Davis professor of environmental engineering
"The forces of nature will take over the region," said Lund. "It's inevitable, and we'll have to deal with it."
Rising seawater, a product of global warming, continues to threaten the aging, fragile Delta levees that keep the saltwater from intruding on the fresh river water. A major earthquake would likely cause massive levee failure, endangering water supplies from the Bay Area to San Diego. Many of the Delta islands are already sinking below sea level and subject to flooding.
Students monitor Delta fish populations.
A team of UC Davis researchers highlighted those dangers in the "Comparing Futures for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta" report written in collaboration with the nonprofit Public Policy Institute of California.
The report looked for solutions that would balance the needs of the ecosystem with those of California's struggling economy. The best solution from the standpoint of the ecosystem would be to stop all water diversion from the Delta, said Lund, one of the report authors, but that would devastate the economy.
So the UC Davis researchers looked at three options for exporting water:
- Continue pumping water through the Delta
- Build a peripheral canal
- Create a dual-conveyance that combines a canal with pumping through the Delta
The peripheral canal, they concluded, would be the most cost-effective option over time. And it ties with the dual-conveyance method for the second-most favorable option for fish viability. That led the report authors to conclude that the peripheral canal would be the best option for exporting water and that the export water users should pay to build it.
"The best indication of the crisis the Delta is in is the fact that we have five endangered fish out there."
- Peter Moyle, UC Davis professor of fish and wildlife biology
They also concluded that the ongoing cost of maintaining the levee system will continue to escalate, and maybe it's time to let the less economically valuable islands flood.
That wouldn't be such a bad idea for the fish, said Peter Moyle, a UC Davis fish and wildlife biologist who has been studying the Delta since 1975. He and his graduate and undergraduate students have been monitoring the Delta fish population for the state Department of Water Resources since 1980. Every month his marsh crew goes out on a boat to trawl the waters. They drag for five minutes, and then count, measure and identify the fish they've netted before releasing them.
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"The best indication of the crisis the Delta is in is the fact that we have five endangered fish out there (Delta smelt, green sturgeon, winter run and spring run Chinook salmon, and the Central Valley steelhead)," Moyle said. "The Delta smelt is on the verge of extinction, and salmon fishing was shut down this year. The problem is it's not one thing, but it's a whole bunch of things."
Fish are coming out on the short end of the competition with humans for water. The water that flows back into the Delta is polluted with fertilizers. Fish get caught in the water pumps and confused by the artificially changing direction of the water flows.
Richard Frank, a member, along with UC Berkeley environmental engineering professor Raymond Seed, of the state's Delta Vision Task Force, has reached similar conclusions to the ones UC Davis researchers are promoting.
"I've come to the conclusion that a peripheral canal is the best of a bad set of alternatives," said Frank, executive director of the California Center for Environmental Law & Policy at UC Berkeley's School of Law. "There is no magic silver bullet for the Delta."
Frank, a lawyer in California government for 30 years before joining the university, thinks the debate over the canal won't be the same as in 1982 because the science is more advanced and the Delta's crisis more dire. The canal is just one of many issues that need to be resolved, he said.
"Our existing system of governance is broken," Frank said. "Over 200 state and local agencies claim jurisdiction over the Delta. They're often operating at cross-purposes."
The task force is recommending that the state create the California Delta Ecosystem and Water Council with regulatory authority over Delta projects. They also want the region designated a National Heritage Area and State Recreation Area.
The Delta has great potential as a recreation resource, Frank said, and he'd like to see more of those uses developed.
"The Delta is a valuable place in the region," he said. "It's underappreciated as an ecological, cultural and recreational resource. We should try to enhance those uses."