Construction crews race to build replacement canal as Central Valley sinks

[hunter]

We can rebuild a canal but we can't stop subsidence by controlling how much groundwater is extracted???

Seems an ass-backwards way of doing things.

More on subsidence:

https://www.usgs.gov/centers/land-subsidence-in-california

[TigressDem]

1. In a drought, you can only limit water use by so much.

These are farmers who need water for crops.

Maybe if they went to underground hydroponics that would protect crops from excessive heat while they could have skylights for the plants and the water needed would be a lot less?




It also says that there have been efforts to "recharge" the ground water and that the rebuild of the canal will help.

SO IF rebuilding the canal makes the system more self sustaining and less vulnerable to the problem, that makes it more of a long term solution.

[Hortensis]

2. Apparently the major recent cause of subsidence on this 30+ mile stretch

is drought. The canal brings water from the San Joaquin River to farmlands and people and depends on gravity to make the water flow, not pumping. So they're raising it. And as Tigress says.

Given the realities of climate change and less and less water running down from the mountains and dropping from the sky, Gov. Newsome just announced a big plan to "create more supply, capture more water" for California. We used to live in LA County and, suffering serious drought even back then (7 years out of the previous 9 when we departed), every time it rained bemoaned all the rain water that ran straight to the ocean instead of being captured, and of course the same all the time for nonrecycled sewage systems. So the overall plan to "make more water" now includes storing storm water, recycling waste, conserving water better, and desalinization. It's finally gotten bad enough to force the horrendous expenditures needed.

[hunter]

3. Many of these farms are living on borrowed time. Global warming is here to stay.

Just like the Colorado River it's likely the rebuilt Friant-Kern canal will never carry the water the canal did historically and that aquifers severely damaged by overdraft will never be recharged.

We broke this bank.

Rather than waiting until the bitter end when farms are abandoned and the topsoil blows away in the wind, we should be preparing for some sort of managed retreat, closing farms having the largest environmental footprints and restoring the land to something resembling a natural state.

In the long run water-intensive farming is only sustainable in places where water is plentiful and inexpensive. The southern end of California's Central Valley is no longer that place.

[Hortensis]

4. They know it, Hunter. A lot more profoundly than us at this point.

It's the nature of people to avoid making really big, difficult changes until they're forced on us. But, in this case, we really outdid ourselves.

In 1965 LBJ sent warning to congress to spark action. The "action" sparked was mostly conservatives/business committing to blocking all types of action. In the early 1970s my college physiology teacher told us what would happen if we didn't act, and it's happening. By the end of the 1970s, conservatives had come to dominate public policy, and culture, in the U.S. and other nations. It seems now like a perfect storm of human dysfunctions coming together and overwhelming all that sensible people did manage to do and would have done.

It helps me to read what sensible, committed people, businesses, and governments all around the globe, including CA's ag industry, are working on now that denial and delay have run their course. Many brilliant people are working on a vast range of approaches to a vast range of problems. Too late, gone, late, not too late. Many of the ideas and new technology are inspiring and promising new changes in themselves, and as I said, it helps me to connect a bit with their worlds.