California’s Water Wars Flare Up as SoCal Makes a Land Grab
Wired - Apr. 2016
THE ONE BIG thing to understand about water in California is this: The north has it, the south wants it. Yes, sure, pedants will say it’s more complicated. That you need to consider pre-1914 water rights, and which federal or state agencies have jurisdiction over which reservoirs, and whether it was an El Niño year, and if it is an El Niño year, is it a stereotypical El Niño or is it a weird outlier El Niño … and so on.
Which is why it is so, I’m going to say it, exciting when a water story comes along that is straight up NorCal vs SoCal. Earlier this week the Metropolitan Water District (representing 19.5 million Californians from LA to the Mexico border) bought the better part of five islands in the crux of the state’s water infrastructure. The agency says the buy isn’t just to protect its water supply, but to shore up protection from earthquakes and rehabilitate fish ecosystems. But northerners are wary that this is a land grab, designed to give their “neighbors” unhindered access to the finite stuff.
Back in the 1960s, California thought it had its water problem licked. Led by then-governor Pat Brown (father of current governor Jerry Brown), the state’s water agency constructed massive mechanical pumps that would ship water from the relatively wet, relatively unpopulated north to the empirically dry and stiflingly crowded south. Brown later said he built the so-called State Water Project to “correct an accident of people and geography.”
Correcting one accident created another. Those pumps are at the south end of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, which drains the aforementioned rivers (which run through titular valleys) into the San Francisco Bay. In fact, the water flowing out of the Delta keeps the salty bay water at, um, bay. And that’s the problem, because some fraction of every gallon sucked out of the Delta gets replaced by sea water. If the Delta water gets too salty, endangered fish die. And the pumps go off, regardless of the 25 million thirsty southern Californians.
cont'd
http://www.wired.com/2016/04/californias-water-wars-flare-socal-makes-land-grab/