Growers, Environmentalists Join Forces : San Joaquin Water Salvage Plan Pushed

Growers in the arid western San Joaquin Valley have decided to pursue an ambitious and unusual project to purify agricultural drainage water and recycle it--an approach that could, if successful, salvage vast cropland areas now threatened by selenium and other poisonous byproducts of heavy irrigation.

The plan hinges on a novel strategy to defray the enormous cost of building purification plants, forecast to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, by marketing the cleansed drainage as fresh water to cities. The desalting plants would serve as a substitute for a now-defunct federal plan to dump the pollutants in San Francisco Bay via a 207-mile canal.

The project has been developed through an unlikely association of agribusiness and environmentalists, an alliance of old adversaries that underscores the mounting urgency that now surrounds the quest for a solution to the vexing problem.

Less Faith in U.S. Solution

Moreover, it represents a growing belief among farming interests that the federal government, which for decades has supplied the cheap irrigation water needed to transform the desert-like western valley into an agricultural colossus, will not be able to quickly resolve the problem of what to do with that same water after it has been drained from the land.

“Typically, we have looked to the federal government to be the ones that take this problem and manage it,” Jerry Butchert, manager of the Westlands Water District, a sprawling, 600,000-acre federal irrigation district that contains much of the threatened acreage, said this week. “But it looks as though they are not going to be able to do something very rapidly, and we don’t think we can wait.”

Representatives of Westlands and the Environmental Defense Fund--a research and lobbying organization that in the past has fought against delivery of subsidized water to the Westlands--agreed this week to jointly ask a key congressional committee for a loan of about $2 million. The money would be spent on what one Westlands official called “fast-track” studies to work out crucial financial questions and design a prototype desalination plant.

A joint letter requesting the money is being drafted, district and EDF officials said. Significantly, they said they do not at this point expect U.S. Bureau of Reclamation assistance. A decision on the loan should come next month, congressional officials said.

If technical and financial obstructions can be removed, proponents said that construction of the first of what eventually would be a series of $40-million desalting plants could begin within two years and that the plant could become operational as early as 1988.

“We are excited about the option,” Butchert said. “I guess maybe we have to be excited--because we are rapidly running out of viable options.”

Several proposals have been evaluated by Westlands directors since March, when the federal government threatened to cut off water if a solution to selenium contamination and related drainage problems was not found. Among them were proposals to drive the waste water down deep into the earth, to treat it with chemicals and to allow it to sit in large ponds and evaporate. The evaporation pond strategy was favored, but costs greatly exceeded expectations, and this week it was tabled.

While growers said they still do not want to rule out any approach--particularly deep-well injection of the waste water, an option the environmentalists are wary of--they made it clear that treatment of irrigation drainage at desalting plants is the one they want to pursue now.

Permanent Answer Seen

“We think we ought to be moving on this and not just thinking about it,” said Butchert.

Desalting, if feasible, would be attractive to farmers because it represents a permanent solution, not only to selenium pollution but also to a longstanding concern about creeping salt content in the west side soils. Advocates envision a series of the plants operating up and down the valley floor, recycling all irrigation runoff.

Environmentalists favor the proposal because it would prevent drainage water from being dumped into the ocean, an option they have long opposed, and also because recycling farm water could decrease the need to construct new dams or other water projects.

“Our goals are less water (going) south and fewer new facilities that cause environmental degradation,” said Thomas J. Graff, an attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund who negotiated with the farmers. “Third, we are worried about (selenium) runoff.”

Nevertheless, a number of obstacles must be cleared. Among technical concerns, the desalting process creates in relatively small quantities a brine that itself constitutes a hazardous waste, and there is no consensus on how it would be handled. Also, there are questions whether the processed water could be marketed at a high enough price to make the project financially feasible.

“On paper it has a lot of promise,” said David N. Kennedy, director of the state Department of Water Resources. “But we need to work on it to see if it is really practical.”

Becomes Poisonous

Westlands and other western valley growers have long known that a system was needed to drain spent irrigation water from their fields. When it mixes underground with natural contaminants, the salty water used for irrigation becomes poisonous, and when it rises back to the surface, it can spoil the land and render it useless for farming.

For decades, however, the growers believed that the Bureau of Reclamation would complete construction of a drainage canal to carry the waste to the ocean. But the project stalled unfinished, and since has all but died under a weight of political, financial and environmental concerns.

The terminus of the uncompleted canal was the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge, and it became the temporary storage point for the irrigation drainage.

Last March, reacting to the discovery that the natural contaminant selenium was being carried with the runoff to Kesterson, the federal government threatened to cut off water to 42,000 acres of farmland until a permanent solution to the waste water problem was developed. Federal scientists had determined that selenium in the reservoir was causing deaths and birth deformities among wildfowl at the marsh.

While a compromise eventually was reached to keep the farms at least temporarily in production, the announcement stunned growers and altered the dynamics of their decades-old relationship with the federal government.

“Since World War II, and probably before that,” said Zach Willey, senior economist for the Environmental Defense Fund, “the farmers knew there had to be drainage on the west side. And there was a belief handed down over several decades that the way the drainage was going to happen was that the federal government was going to come in and build another project, come in and drain it all in the (San Francisco) bay.

“But people didn’t anticipate the pollution problem.”

Shunned as Impractical

The Environmental Defense Fund, even before the arrival of selenium, had been promoting desalting plants as an alternative to the Bureau of Reclamation’s drain. But the idea was shunned by growers as impractical.

“The farmers always thought they were going to get the drain, and so their attitude was, ‘Why think about any alternative?’ They just weren’t taking these alternatives seriously. Now they listen to the merits. They wouldn’t listen before.”

The technology is not altogether new, although this proposal would put it on a scale heretofore untried. Similar plants are in operation in Israel. A small trial unit is being run by the state in Los Banos, and the Bureau of Reclamation is starting up one in Yuma, Ariz.

Though there are some technological hitches, principally problems associated with pre-treatment of the water before it is fed through the plant, the growers have viewed finances as the major obstacle.

Willey said a large plant could cost as much as $40 million to build and roughly another $5 million each year to run.

He estimated that eventually six such large plants, capable of processing 25 million gallons of water daily, could service the entire western side of the valley. Others less optimistic about the farmers’ dedication to water conservation estimate perhaps as many as 20 might someday be needed.

The plan calls for growers to finance construction of the plants with private loans, to be paid back in part with proceeds generated by selling or “trading” the purified irrigation water.

The water could be marketed in two ways. It could be sold and moved via existing canals directly to other water systems, like the Metropolitan Water District, which serves much of Southern California.

Or it could be traded. Under this method, the actual water produced by the plants would be reused on the farms, and the irrigation water the growers are contracted to buy would instead be delivered to other systems.

A similar swapping arrangement was engineered this year between the Imperial Irrigation District near the Arizona line and the Metropolitan Water District.

Environmental Defense Fund officials envision the water’s being priced at a rate corresponding with what it would cost to create new water in California with dams or other traditional facilities.

“New water of any sort in California is going to cost a lot,” Willey said. If such prices can be obtained, he said, the net farmers would be spending to take care of the irrigation pollution problem would be anywhere from $100 to $200 an acre--far less than what they would pay to install environmentally sound evaporation ponds.