It's snowing...

[Drew Wiley]

It's the whole Delta and even SF Bay ecosystem that's endangered. As usual, everyone is fighting over water that isn't there. And once it is, they'll find some wayto waste it. Ultimately, it's all based on snowmelt. But what is done with that is obviously a very bitter bone of contention in the headlines almost daily. And now there is real drought even in the Northwest in places which were traditionally immune. The gist of the problem is that once saltwater starts intruding into the Delta, it's ruined for farming. And the flooding of rice fields out there is one of the remaining things keeping major waterfowl migration routes intact. Small fish are what keep bigger fish fed, and native Salmon runs are seriously endangered too. So it's getting to be a choice between eating salmon or almonds. When the infamous Floyd Dominy, the czar of the Bureau of Rec back in its dam-building day, was posed this question about salmon, he replied, "Let them eat cake", quoting Marie Antoinette.

[dsphotog]

The largest river in the state (by flow volume) is the man made California Aquaduct, its pumping from the delta, to L.A. full flow 24/7.

[bobwysiwyg]

The gist of the problem is that once saltwater starts intruding into the Delta, it's ruined for farming.

They would have to shut down intakes to avoid saltwater intrusion. It's a major source of drinking water for SoCal so more than just farming is affected.

[Drew Wiley]

Nowhere near that simple. Much of the Delta is below sea level. If there's not positive river flow flushing it out, the saltwater automatically intrudes from the Bay, not only into the farms (which are economically just as valuable as those on the West Side), but potentially affecting domestic water for numerous cities up here (those which don't have Sierra sources). It's a very finicky engineering system. Most of the water which SoCal steals gets stolen from them first by giant Kern Co. agribusiness. The standoff right now is basically high-cash water-intensive export income (almonds, other nuts) that are rushing to plant (both on speculation and for political leverage) versus fisheries and Delta farms potentially being ruined for decades or centuries to come. And "just farming" in this case involves about 90% of certain crops consumed in the US. Not much has changed since the Owens Valley water war over a century ago. Now people who wish to alter the plumbing simply arm themselves lawyers and corruptible politicians instead of sticks of dynamite.

[tgtaylor]

I just posted some personal observations regarding the Brown Pelican and other wildlife for whom the San Francisco Bay is a food source: http://spiritsofsilver.com/field_notes A sign of global warming or El Nino, or both?

Thomas

More in today's news: https://www.yahoo.com/health/toxic-a...925530927.html and
http://io9.com/all-signs-indicate-a-...ing-1722216118

Thomas

[Sirius Glass]

They would have to shut down intakes to avoid saltwater intrusion. It's a major source of drinking water for SoCal so more than just farming is affected.

The problem is that the Central Valley farmers have wasted water by flooding fields for years. Now they want to continue to over plant almond trees and want to steal more water from southern California. On the other hand southern California needs to capture the rain runoff and store it for later use.

[Nodda Duma]

The problem is that the Central Valley farmers have wasted water by flooding fields for years. Now they want to continue to over plant almond trees and want to steal more water from southern California. On the other hand southern California needs to capture the rain runoff and store it for later use.

I think resorting to fantasy to denigrate the people who feed the masses is a bit much.

So Cal does have a system in place to capture runoff. The problem is there hasn't been any lately.

[John Kasaian]

Nearly all plantations here have been on drip ever since drip became viable. Some crops like alfalfa and cotton and vegetables require flood irrigation but not trees and vines.

[Drew Wiley]

Cotton has long been the "black hole" in the Calif water cosmos, and largely untouchable, since it's federally subsidized and most grown on land owned by five big Kern Co oil corporations - themselves politically untouchable. That kind of abuse did finally get mitigated to some extent already, but along with it, the price of melons went up nationwide, which were also mass-grown there. Watermelon, among others, need a lot of... you guessed it. But now they're pushing big almond groves further out into West side desert. The strategy seems to be to plant em and then demand the water at the expense of less lucrative crops. So what they're doing now is drilling deeper and deeper and perhaps depleting the piggy bank of the underground aquifer for decades to come. It's getting so bad that they're getting subsidence issues with roadbeds, building foundations, etc. But everything here follows the axiom, "water flows to money".

[Sirius Glass]

I think resorting to fantasy to denigrate the people who feed the masses is a bit much.

So Cal does have a system in place to capture runoff. The problem is there hasn't been any lately.

Yes, it is called the Pacific Ocean.