Wringing Out Weird Notions

Drought always brings grand water schemes out of the woodwork. Someone proposes hauling icebergs down from the Arctic, or getting water from the Yukon. These are harmless musings that have a touch of realism and appeal until they are studied a bit. With the next winter storms, the drought disappears and the schemes go back on their shelves.

So it is that Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn has dusted off an old proposal that Southern California tap the Columbia River in Washington State and Oregon and the Snake River in Idaho for future water supplies. The price tag would be something like $10 billion, supposedly paid out of defense-spending cuts.

This is the ghost of the old North American Water and Power Alliance project conjured up years ago by an engineering firm. It was not practical then and it is not practical now--and has been effectively banned by Congress. It’s harmless to talk about it, perhaps, unless people in Southern California take the idea seriously as the answer to future water needs and unless such loose talk alarms people in the Northwest that California is out to steal their water. Alas, the alarm bells already are ringing in Boise, Seattle and Portland. Southern California must again try to live down its reputation as would-be water thief.

California must solve its own water problems. But the state has not developed a modern, comprehensive water plan since the State Water Project was drafted back in 1957. That plan is of little use now, in part because the project is able to deliver only about one-half the water that was originally promised.

Assemblywoman Delaine Eastin (D-Union City) is sponsoring a bill in the Legislature that would create a 15-member California Water Planning Task Force to draft, by November, 1993, a strategy for meeting the state’s water needs for the next 30 years. Her bill (AB 3426) should be enacted into law this year so that California can begin to do the sort of water planning it must to meet future requirements, whether in drought years or so-called normal years, which in fact will be periods of constant shortage.