Another Missed Opportunity
By: John Kingsbury, Executive Director
Recovering from this historical drought would no doubt cause change in people’s behavior. Right? While Californians can take full credit for willingly sacrificing their landscape and adjusting habits to save our water supply for another year, did we learn much from this exercise? Water districts, agriculture and home consumers did. However, for regulators of the state and federal reservoirs, not really.
In the midst of our recovery, the state’s largest storage reservoirs, Shasta, Oroville, and Folsom are flushing millions of gallons of fresh water to the sea. Senator Dianne Feinstein and several congressional Republicans argued that the water should be captured for agricultural purposes. And, at the same time, this additional fresh water could be diverted and put to beneficial use by both north state and southern California homes. Yet regulators over the state and federal reservoirs see it differently and let the water head to the bay.
Certainly Californians have learned to use water efficiently, improve water use technologies, and recycle our waste water, but we missed the opportunity to “bank” flood water.
We are in a drought with landscape irrigation restrictions. Many ground water basins are in a deficit. Yet flood water is being allowed to flow past those who have complied with water restrictions and the impacted underground water storage reservoirs. The answer is not to continue with landscape restrictions, higher water rates, and a change in the quality of life, but to implement measures to capture and store winter excess flood flows as a water “bank” for later use in the summer and the fall.
Development of new and expanded surface storage facilities to store and “bank” the flood water and increase injection of this water into the aquifers should be one of the state’s top priorities for utilization of existing voter approved state water bond funds. But, to date, there is little movement to do so.
This missed opportunity is inexcusable.
