Water Boys, in the Mud, Gamble Again

Sometime this fall, maybe early October, we will likely experience a condition of life that has never been seen in California. A condition that was never supposed to happen. That, in fact, was supposed to be impossible.

That condition is known inside the water agencies as “going down to the mud.” It refers, of course, to the great water reservoirs of the Sierras. “Going down to the mud” means the endgame has been reached, means there is no further protection against another year of drought.

In a literal sense, the phrase is incorrect. A small pool of water almost always remains in the reservoirs, below the intakes, unreachable and unusable. Technically, this condition is known as “dead storage.”

But you see what I mean. We are headed to a place where we’ve never been. By the end of summer the State Water Project’s reservoirs will be at, or very near to, dead storage. Ditto for the federal reservoirs.

We will be down to the mud.

Only slowly is the significance of this condition being acknowledged. Put most simply, it poses the gravest economic threat to California in modern history.

We’ll get to the threat in a minute. First, let’s be clear that we could have avoided this condition. We could have conserved the water, but we did not. Over the last four years the state reservoirs have released more water than in any equivalent period in history.

This policy was a conscious gamble. The state was betting that the rains would soon come. They did not, and the gamble was lost.

The federal managers played it smarter. Today, they still have 3.8 million acre-feet sitting in their reservoirs. That’s a fair amount and it constitutes the last substantial cushion against another dry year.

So what is happening with this water?

We are gambling again. The feds are letting it go, almost all of it. They are letting it go, among others, to rice farmers so they can raise a monsoon crop in this drought year. The feds say the rice farmers have old and sacred rights to this water, rights that get them 75% of their allotments. So the feds are going down to the mud.

This amounts to the biggest roll of the dice yet. The reason can be seen right here in the Sacramento delta.

For the water neophytes out there, let me explain that the delta has a unique status in the California water world. It’s the central switching point. The Sierra reservoirs all empty their supplies into the delta, and then great pumps suck the water out and shipped it south to the San Joaquin farmers and the cities of Southern California.

But the delta is also vulnerable. It’s an estuary, connected to the Pacific via San Francisco Bay, and needs a constant inflow of fresh water to push back the salt water of the ocean. Without a supply of fresh water, the sea starts to intrude, and the delta turns salty.

So what do you think happens this fall if rains don’t come and all the reservoirs have gone down to the mud?

That’s right. The sea invades the delta and the big pumps begin pulling salt water into the aqueducts. Salt water is no good, so the pumps must shut down.

Once salty, the delta could remain that way for months. Huge amounts of fresh water would be required to flush it clean.

The scenarios that would flow from this condition are so nightmarish they seem unreal. Contra Costa County, which pulls all its water from the delta, could find itself without drinking water. Likewise, San Jose and parts of Santa Clara County.

As for Southern California, we would lose the supplies provided by the state aqueduct for the duration of the shutdown. It would not be fun.

There are some technical fixes that might help. The state may throw up barriers across some delta waterways to stop the ocean from moving eastward. No one knows how much protection the barriers would provide.

Mainly, the water boys, as always, are betting that the rains will come, and the state will be saved.

The size of this gamble is dazzling. And it is being made in the name of honoring contracts to rice farmers and their ilk. In the name of business as usual.

Maybe the water boys will win this final gamble. Maybe the rains will come early in the fall.

Let’s hope they come very early. Because here in the delta, there was some bad news last week. Salinity readings hit 265 parts per million, violating state standards for the first time during this drought.

In mid-February, what is supposed to be the wettest season of the year, the salt already was moving eastward.