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Wringing More Water Out of the Arid West
By David Keller, Bay Area Director, Friends of the Eel River
Emerging Signs of Water Problems
As population and water consumption grow in any given region, water demand approaches the natural limits of the water supply. If we hit those limits, signs of trouble emerge: falling water tables, increasingly polluted and empty aquifers, dying rivers and fish and other endangered species, and shrinking lakes and wetlands.
In times of scarcity, water wars begin in earnest: urban users vs. agricultural users vs. fisheries and other public trust resources. Between countries; between states. Region vs. region. County vs. county. Migrations, moratoriums, and lawsuits become as common as falling fish counts.
In too many places, rather than preserving the natural capital and local wealth of a region, we see a decline of healthy, well-functioning rivers and aquatic ecosystems. This enduring damage represents the crippling of a region’s ecological foundation.
Many civilizations throughout history have ignored the warnings, and have shriveled and disappeared. The highly successful Anasazi constructed sophisticated water systems for agriculture and domestic supplies, yet logged their mesas and compromised their water supplies, which then failed to yield what they needed in a 50-year drought during the 12th century. They abandoned their immense pueblos and dispersed. Similar problems are developing now for those depending on the Aral Sea in Russia, the Jordan River, the Nile, the Tigris/Euphrates, the Ogallala Aquifer, Lake Powell and the Colorado River Delta. It can happen here. The overdrafted groundwater basin of Cotati, Penngrove, and Rohnert Park is a distressing local example. The overallocated Russian River and diminishing Eel River are of our own making as well.
National Trouble
More signs of these problems continue to appear throughout the arid west. On April 4, 2007, the New York Times ran a large front-page article, “No Longer Waiting for Rain, an Arid West Takes Action,” describing the desperate acts to grab more water before others do, as impaired watersheds of the Colorado River basin and Sierra snowpack see large population growth and political pressure to stay the course of development.
A Western drought that began in 1999 has continued after the respite of a couple of wet years that now feel like a cruel tease. But this time people in the driest states are not just scanning the skies and hoping for rescue. Some $2.5 billion in water projects are planned or under way in four states, the biggest expansion in the West’s quest for water in decades.
Everywhere in the West, along the Colorado and other rivers, as officials search for water to fill current and future needs, tempers are flaring among competing water users, old rivalries are hardening and some states are waging legal fights.
Like too many places around the globe, we are running a water deficit on the North Coast. Locally, we’ve seen the Sonoma County Water Agency regularly press for more Eel River water releases through PG&E’s Potter Valley Project. SCWA has stated its intention to purchase the PVP, yet states (paradoxically) that it doesn’t need the diverted Eel River waters for its customers, but rather for restoring Russian River Chinook salmon. Elsewhere, SCWA ramps up its “water shortage” rhetoric to the State water agency in order to receive a lower mandated flow limit.
Over the past two years, PG&E erred by transferring too much water out of the Eel River headwaters and into the Russian River watershed via the hydro project’s tunnel, and now must cut back to meet Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)’s mandated volumes and timings. SCWA joined with Potter Valley Irrigation District and others to demand additional water for springtime frost protection for Potter Valley crops. Mendocino and Sonoma growth, water, and agricultural interests apparently continue to think that killing off the Eel River’s threatened species of salmon and steelhead and continued damages to the Mendocino, Lake, and Humboldt economies are acceptable consequences of their efforts to bring more water to the Russian River and perhaps a larger Lake Mendocino.
FOER, Round Valley Tribes, National Marine Fisheries Service, Cal. Fish & Game, and others have argued strenuously against that tradeoff.
Meanwhile, SCWA is preparing a “Petition for Temporary Urgency Change” for the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB, which oversees all state water permits) to request lower minimum flows in the Russian River and Dry Creek, as a result of 30% lower rainfall this winter, to preserve water storage in Lake Mendocino for fall releases. SCWA made similar arguments in June 2004 when petitioning SWRCB successfully for temporary reductions in permitted flows.
Yet SCWA has not asked its water contractors to institute any mandatory water conservation measures. SCWA and cities are asking only for a 10-15% voluntary conservation.
“I want more, sir”
Several weeks ago, Santa Rosa amazingly requested that it receive an additional allocation of 1830 acre-feet/year more water than its existing limits under the 30-year Restructured Agreement for Water Supply, signed June 2006 by contractors and SCWA. All other water contractors appear willing to live within their current allocations. Santa Rosa seems to continue the path that matches more water with growth.
These policies contradict a strong letter, 2/2/05, from SRWCB to SCWA and contractors requesting that they come up with a “detailed plan of water conservation efforts that will offset future increases in demand, which in turn will result in no increase in Russian River diversions.”
“Follow the bouncing ball, please…”
Although Sonoma County’s draft General Plan and DEIR predict that the county does not have enough water to meet its 20-year future growth, the SCWA Urban Water Management Plan 2005 (UWMP) claims that there is sufficient water for growth. In March, a broad coalition of 14 organizations including FOER filed suit to overturn the recently adopted UWMP: it fails to address increased water diversion impacts to fisheries, recreation, agriculture, groundwater, and rivers; ignores future shortages while relying on “paper water”; and ignores contamination of the Russian River and groundwater by harmful pathogens and chemicals. (See http://tinyurl.com/34mssf). UWMPs are important documents used in all counties’ and cities’ long-term planning efforts to ensure that real water does exist for any new growth, and thus the plan must be accurate and valid.
On a positive note, Petaluma, not waiting for the county to figure this out, is now writing a new General Plan that projects a zero increase in overall water demand for the next 20 years’ growth. This will be done through a combination of conservation, efficiencies, recycling, reuse, and demand reductions. New developments will have to “mine” their water from the existing supplies by paying for improvements to the system and existing users’ practices and technology. Existing practices in Marin Municipal Water District, East Bay Municipal Utility District, Los Angeles’ Metropolitan Water Agency, and others have seen growth over the past 10+ years with no increase in overall water demands. It can be done, given political will and tasking engineers to do something different from the usual building of costly pipelines, pumps, and reservoirs.
“I Want to Pump You Up” Isn’t Just a Saturday Night Live Gag Line
As Marc Reisner noted, “Water flows uphill towards money.” And that has severe consequences.
The California Dept. of Water Resources, examining strategies for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, states that water-use efficiencies are critical in making progress against global warming. Approximately 19% of all electricity, 30% of all natural gas, and 88 million gallons of diesel are employed to convey, treat, distribute, and use water and wastewater. Increasing the efficiency of water transport and reducing water use would reduce GHG emissions significantly.
So what happens to water policy and GHG reduction efforts within the SCWA service area?
There is an ambitious push to export (pump) vast amounts of treated wastewater out of the SCWA service area. SCWA is now proposing two huge agricultural water reuse projects. This is a potentially serious blow to getting municipalities to improve their wastewater quality and design systems to reduce demands for new potable water from our rivers and groundwater for irrigation of parks and golf courses, “purple plumbing” for new developments, and for use in commercial, industrial and institutional developments.
The proposed North San Pablo Bay Restoration and Reuse Project, based on a smaller project originally designed to provide recycled water for flushing out the old salt ponds of the Napa Salt Marsh Restoration Project (Cargill site), has morphed into a huge network of miles of pipes and pumps for agricultural irrigation across the Marin, Sonoma and Napa hills and fields, enticed by US Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) funding.
This project, proposed with co-funding through Congressman Mike Thompson’s H.R. 236 and companion Senate bill from Sen. Feinstein, would create “a program to provide for the collection of treated urban wastewater and its conveyance to agricultural growers in Northern California for purposes of irrigation of thousands of acres. The North Bay Water Reuse Program would be the first cost-shared water reclamation and reuse project in Northern California, and the first to provide water primarily for agricultural and environmental uses.” (Sen. Feinstein) It would also provide a substantial income stream for SCWA.
The “North Bay Water Reuse Authority” has been assembled to provide wastewater sources and includes SCWA, Las Gallinas Valley (San Rafael), Novato, Sonoma Valley, and Napa sanitary districts. SCWA wants Petaluma too, but so far Petaluma is interested in using its wastewater to displace its own potable water demands during the next 20 years.
Without clear legislative restrictions, this reclaimed water might be used to support irrigation and development at Port Sonoma, Infineon Raceway, and elsewhere, and continue to drain the SCWA service area of reusable wastewater resources. While the original restoration of 10,000 acres of Napa Baylands Salt Marsh lands is very valuable, decisionmakers need to consider the externalized impacts of the huge agricultural irrigation exports on our rivers and groundwater.
World-Class Wine Grapes Irrigated with Treated Wastewater?
SCWA’s second project with USBR is the North Sonoma County Agricultural Reuse Project (NSCARP). SCWA proposes taking millions of gallons of treated wastewater from Santa Rosa and other cities, and pumping it to more than a dozen reservoirs to be built in vineyards and other ag lands in the upper Alexander Valley north to Cloverdale, up the Dry Creek Valley, and west to Forestville in the Russian River Valley. (See maps and documents at: http://www.scwa.ca.gov/projects/index.php.)
NSCARP objectives are to provide a reliable, long-term water supply for agricultural interests; reduce discharges from local wastewater treatment plants to local waterways; reduce the use of groundwater and surface water for agricultural purposes in north Sonoma County; provide an environmentally responsible, long-term method of recycled water use; and increase reliability and long-term sustainability of the regional water supply.
NSCARP would result in fewer agricultural diversions from the Russian River and its tributaries, which would enable the SCWA to release less water from storage in Lakes Mendocino and Sonoma to meet water demands and instream flow requirements. This would result in more water being conserved in storage in these reservoirs, which would provide more operational flexibility for the SCWA to benefit fisheries resources in the Russian River. The increased operational flexibility would not result in additional water being available for other uses because existing reservoir storage capacity, water rights, and flow requirements would not change - from the DEIR/DEIS.
These ranches and vineyards are now using water from wells, surface flows, or from the Russian River aquifer. SCWA has been using “water exchanges” to create a future customer base with this massive project. A recent court decision requires that SCWA assess the impacts on soils, groundwater, surface water, and vegetation of pollutants and emerging toxics in the wastewater.
Questions are already arising about the use of treated wastewater for irrigation of world-class grapes, and how that would play out in marketing strategies around the world. Closer to home, however, there are critical decisions to be made about the use of treated wastewater for expanded agricultural irrigation (beyond what is already pumped to the Geysers thermal energy generation sites) instead of using the water to displace potable water demands on the Russian and Eel Rivers and our groundwater basins.
Both projects are in early stages of preparation of EIR/EIS documents. In addition to addressing cumulative negative impacts, both projects need to show GHG reductions. As of now, these projects appear to be typical engineering dreams: lots of infrastructure and heavy construction activity, but with serious problems in net environmental benefits.
Final Act?
Unless we redirect public policy choices and engineering decisions towards restoration, reducing potable water demands, and GHG reductions, we will see the continued losses of our critical natural resources. We can’t live without healthy watersheds. If new development actually paid the true costs of their water supplies and wastewater treatment—including the externalized environmental costs—there would be a revolution in how we use water. The time to do this is now, not when systems collapse. The choice is ours to make.