Book Reflection- Water in California

Introduction to Water in California by David Carle

 This book is a very concise and easy beginner’s guide to water issues in California.

Insert annual map of rain fall in California.

Most growth in California takes place where there is little water. Massive projects have been put into place to get the water from the north, from the Sierra Nevada Mountains as well as the Colorado River to the arid central and south of the state.

There are 20,000 miles of rivers and streams in California from 60 major watersheds. Only one of the state’s major rivers systems, the Smith River on the North Coast, is completely free of dams. The book says that there are six major water delivery systems in California: four that I have talked about previously in the blog- The California State Water Project, Central Valley Project (federal), Colorado River delivery systems and the Tuolumne River/Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct. The other two are the Los Angeles Aqueduct, and Mokelumne Aqueduct to the East Bay. 

California State Water Projects pipelines and canals travel over 600 miles from north to south California. It is the largest state water project in the United States.

The Central Valley Project, which was sanctioned by Theodore Roosevelt and built by the Army Corp of Engineers during the Great Depression, is one of the largest water systems in the world. It stores over 17 million acre-feet of water or about 17% of states’ developed water which it delivers to 8 water districts.

The book mentions the infamous Colorado River Compact. The Imperial Irrigation district gets most of the allotment of water from the River in CA that includes the Coachella and All-American Canals. The book also mentions the Metropolitan Water District which provides 60 % of the water in this southern region of CA from Ventura to Mexico; the Colorado in the travels 242 miles  Colorado River Aqueduct to the MWD.

Remember the talk I mentioned in the blog about Harmonie Hawley and Water in the West while we visited the University of California. I talked about over-pumping of ground water in Orange County, CA.  Ground water is more evenly distributed in California than surface water. Ground water is a more local source of water- meaning less need for long-distance (very long) transport of water. There are 850 million acre feet of groundwater in CA, twenty times more than the surface water.  The Central Valley alone over-pumps 800,000 million acre feet of water a year. The entire state of California over-pumps 2.3 million acre feet of water per year.

Agriculture is another concern in California- the state produces about 55% of the entire countries produce. Nine million acre feet of farmland depend on irrigation from state and federal projects and each year about 15,000 acres of farmland is lost to urban sprawl. I got to see the vast amounts farmland in California as we visited the Dairy Farm in the Central Valley.

Honestly, it is impressive how much California has engineered their water. The report of snowfall in the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains are of more concern than the local weather reports to Californians. Without massive water projects in CA only about 3 million people would live in southern California compared to the 18 million that live there today.