A Power Struggle : Broken Pipeline Opens Floodgate of Problems for Pleasant Valley

More than 600 anglers competing in the annual Blake Jones Trout Derby last weekend noticed the water level falling in Pleasant Valley Reservoir. It meant that time was running out on the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, drop by drop.

An eight-foot-diameter steel pipe, or penstock, supplying water from Crowley Lake to a power station above Pleasant Valley burst the night of Tuesday, March 5. Apparently, a valve to the generator at the lower power station and a bypass valve were closed simultaneously, backing up the water pressure. Suction from the sudden loss of 40 acre feet of water through the 8x20-foot break also crumpled several hundred feet of the penstock.

An acre foot is enough water to cover an acre of land a foot deep.

When the water was shut off at Crowley, the flow into Pleasant Valley was reduced to about 35 cubic feet per second--all incidental water arriving from Rock and Pine creeks.

The level was falling because the DWP is required by state law to maintain a flow of 100 c.f.s. out of Pleasant Valley Reservoir into the Lower Owens River. Anything less and fish might die, says the California Department of Fish and Game, and the DWP would face charges under Section 5937 of the state Fish and Game Code:

The owner of any dam shall allow sufficient water to pass through a fishway . . . to keep in good condition any fish that may be planted or exist below the dam. . . .

The DFG points out that the DWP has an alternative, of which the DWP is aware.

“They could release water down the (adjacent) Lower Owens Gorge,” said Curtis Milliron, a DFG fishery biologist based in Bishop.

The gorge--recalled by area old-timers as a trophy brown trout fishery--essentially went dry in the 1950s, when the DWP diverted the flow from Crowley into penstocks feeding three power stations between Crowley and Pleasant Valley.

But the DFG says the DWP doesn’t want to restore the gorge fishery because it would then be required to maintain it--Section 5937--at the expense of bypassing its generators when there isn’t enough water to serve both.

“That’s probably a consideration,” said Chris Plakos, public affairs officer for the DWP. “You don’t want to create problems that aren’t there.”

The DFG determines sufficient flows while the DWP has the flow gauges, monitoring itself. But the DFG holds a strong hand in this power play--and says that’s what this situation is about: power, not water, because the water will wind up in Los Angeles anyway.

Plakos said, “It is a water issue. There’s a break in the system. The department wants to continue conveying water down to the city of Los Angeles.”

There is a recent legal precedent for what may be developing. There is no section in the Fish and Game Code to protect fish behind a dam, as in Pleasant Valley Reservoir. But in September of 1988, a group of Nevada farmers with water rights to the Bridgeport Reservoir in the northern Eastern Sierra drew their water off so fast that fish in the reservoir and the East Walker River below it were destroyed by the silting from sediment.

The DFG and the fishing lobby CalTrout prosecuted on Section 5937 for the stream damage and on state water quality laws for the reservoir. The farmers lost several rounds in court, had their water permits revised and were ordered to repair the damage at considerable cost.

So the DWP would run risks by allowing Pleasant Valley Reservoir to dry up. The fishing was pretty good there last weekend.

That’s why the DWP, squeezed by the DFG, has emergency crews working long hours to restore the downstream flow without going through the gorge or harming the fisheries. At a cost estimated by outsiders at $10 million, the DWP is trying to convert the crumpled ruins of the penstock into an open flume capable of carrying 100 c.f.s. to Pleasant Valley.

“They have to do something within about the next (week) to get water into Pleasant Valley Reservoir,” Milliron said.

The DFG doesn’t want the entire gorge rewatered. In the upper stretch, between Long Valley Dam at Crowley and the first power station, a dense population of small brown trout is sustained by about 16 c.f.s. from springs and seepage of the dam. There also are some endangered Owens tui chub that would be jeopardized without the dry buffer zone between the upper and middle power stations.

Normally, that water is collected at the upper power station and run into the penstock, but without the penstock the DWP had no place to put it.

So, as an additional stopgap measure, another hole was cut in the penstock 2 1/2 miles above the break to divert the water into a natural ravine across about two miles of the Bishop Tuff volcanic table land, into the Round Valley pasture irrigation canal system and ultimately into Rock Creek, bringing the Pleasant Valley inflow up to about 50 c.f.s., according to the DFG, or 65 c.f.s., according to the DWP.

Plakos said, “Our engineering staff determined that if we could get it out of the area where the men are working, you’d have a much safer situation. The other problem is if you run it down the gorge, the best guesstimates are it would take about 10 days for (16 c.f.s. of) water to get down into Pleasant Valley.”

Sixteen 16 c.f.s. amounts to more than 10 million gallons a day--enough to fill more than 600 back-yard swimming pools--but Milliron said most of the water is finding its way into Rock Creek en route to Los Angeles.

“I don’t think we can make an issue that they’re actually wasting a lot of water in a drought,” Milliron said.

However, Darrell Wong, a DFG colleague, said the quality of the water returned to Rock Creek is reduced by the collection of sediment and impurities along the way.

“They’re very creative,” Milliron said. “That’ll buy them time. They want to do anything they can to keep that (gorge) fishery from establishing. But if they can’t do the flume and Pleasant Valley goes dry, we could end up with another East Walker River situation, and they would be held very accountable for that, especially in light of the fact that they have an alternative flow path.”

Thaddeus Taylor, a CalTrout activist in Bishop, said the DWP has been in violation of state law ever since the ‘50s, when it dried up the gorge. However, there was no CalTrout then and the DFG struck an agreement with the DWP to provide property to build the Hot Creek Fish Hatchery.

Phil Pister of Bishop, recently retired after nearly 40 years with the DFG as a fishery biologist, said, “One of my first jobs in 1953 was to go up there and rescue fish when they dried it up. It seemed then we had all the resources we needed. It was like selling Manhattan for a few jewels.”

The situation--and the environmental mood--are different now.

“There are other ways to provide power,” Pister said. “There aren’t other ways to provide fish.”

Plakos suggested one alternative for power would be “buying more oil from Kuwait.”

Taylor, also a member of the Inyo County Water Commission, has gone a few rounds with the DWP before but emphasized that Los Angeles’ water supply is not at issue here.

Rewatering the gorge, Taylor said, “would amount to maybe one acre foot a year due to loss by evaporation.”

On a tour of the area with DWP officials last Friday, Milliron shot videotape of a newly erected fish screen at the outflow of the middle powerhouse, designed to prevent fish from passing through if there were a last-resort need to divert water into the gorge.

Milliron reminded the officials that the screen was illegal. Under Section 5936 of the code: It is unlawful to willfully destroy, injure or obstruct any fishway.

Plakos said the screen was removed the next day.

Two days after the break, the DWP asked the DFG if it could reduce the flow out of Pleasant Valley to 50 or 75 c.f.s. The DFG refused. It had already agreed, because of the drought, to drop the flow from 200 to 100 last summer.

“We feel 100 is really below what that river needs to maintain itself as a viable fishery, long-term,” Milliron said.

Plakos said the three power stations normally run only “a few hours a day,” on demand from Los Angeles, but the DWP apparently is not willing to trade power for trout.

But if it doesn’t get the water moving in time, it may not have a choice.