Clogged Drain on a Massive Scale

California has some of the world’s most sophisticated water works designed to get water to where it is needed for productive use. The federal Central Valley Project, for instance, annually delivers massive amounts of Northern California water to the west side of the San Joaquin Valley for the irrigation of crops.

There is a problem that water engineers have not yet solved, however: what to do with the leftover water after it has done its job. This is not a simple matter of runoff, for the water comes in clean and goes out dirty. Specifically, drainage water from portions of west side irrigation districts served by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s San Luis Project carry a variety of salts and a particularly pesky mineral element known as selenium.

There was a solution, once. A requirement of the San Luis authorizing legislation was that the 207-mile-long San Luis Drain be built from the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The dirty irrigation runoff would be diverted into the drain and ultimately dumped into the delta and swept out to sea. If the salts and other residue left by the irrigation water are not flushed from the soils, they quickly render the croplands impotent.

But only the first 85 miles of the drain were ever built. This used-water pipeline now terminates in Kesterson Reservoir, near Gustine in western Merced County. Rather than serving as a midway regulatory reservoir as originally planned, Kesterson--part of a national wildlife refuge--has become a dumping pond and evaporation basin for the mineral-laden irrigation water.

Water experts have known for years that the disposal of irrigation drainage from the San Joaquin Valley was a cumulative problem that would have to be dealt with at some point on a massive scale. It is somewhat akin to the issue of radioactive waste from nuclear power plants.

But since 1981 a specifically critical problem has developed at Kesterson with the discovery that a buildup of selenium has led to death and deformity in ducks and other waterfowl that have nested in the 1,280-acre Kesterson Reservoir. Moreover, the state Water Resources Control Board now contends that seepage from the shallow reservoir threatens to pollute underground water supplies in the area.

At the prompting of a nearby landowner, the state board has brought about a showdown with the Bureau of Reclamation and, secondarily, with the water districts that it serves in the Kesterson area. At a meeting in Sacramento on Tuesday, the board will consider a proposed order that would direct the federal agency to halt the pollution of Kesterson. One proposed solution is to line the reservoir and its marshes with clay or plastic at a cost of up to $78 million. An option would be for the bureau to close the reservoir to drainage altogether.

The federal bureau, as it has in other such encounters with the state, is playing hardball. Its lawyers claim that the alleged pollution has been brought under control and that in any event the state board lacks legal authority to issue its proposed abatement order.

To close Kesterson would be no solution, the federal lawyers argue. This would only require the creation of many smaller, uncontrolled Kestersons to handle the irrigation runoff. The most extreme solution would be to halt federal irrigation water deliveries to the farms drained by Kesterson. But some experts are not sure that this would have the desired effect. Farming organizations already have attempted to pressure the board to delay any action at all.

The state board should hang tough in this case. An order against the Bureau of Reclamation would not in itself create a solution to the short-run problem of selenium at Kesterson. But it would at least keep public attention on the issue and maintain pressure on the Interior Department to move beyond its existing temporary actions.

One expert suggests that the Bureau of Reclamation may be the innocent victim of a quirk of geologic mineral deposits in the Kesterson area farmland. But the state board’s responsibility is to protect state waters, regardless of the cause of pollution.

And we hope that none of this will inhibit the ability of the state and federal governments to work cooperatively toward solutions to the general problem of agricultural waste water throughout the San Joaquin Valley.