By Tim StroshaneIt is Drinking Water Week, according to the American Water Works Association and the Delta Stewardship Council. When not paying attention to the ever-present and necessary news about the novel coronavirus pandemic spreading COVID-19 disease, in the middle of March we began hearing about California re-entering drought. (Courthouse News Service and Los Angeles Times.)So this week seems like a good time to talk about California droughts past and present, and how we can protect drinking water for all—especially customers drinking water from small water suppliers and in rural communities of our state.Drought now joins pandemic and murder hornets in a rather apocalyptic 2020. The California Department of Water Resources (DWR) checked its Sierra snowfields on April 30th and found that snowpack [...]

by Tim Stroshane, Policy Analyst, Restore the Delta It was alarming, hardball news to hear yesterday that Leroy Anderson Dam—which holds back Silicon Valley’s Anderson Reservoir—is considered by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC, a federal dam regulatory) so seismically unsafe that its owner, the Santa Clara Valley Water District , must drain it to the last drop by October 1 this year. FERC viewed the District (“Valley Water”) as having slow-walked its response to seismic safety concerns, according to the San Jose Mercury News. Anderson Dam is underlain by channel sediments that could liquefy and undermine the dam’s foundation in good-sized (say, magnitude 6.6) earthquake nearby.  The Calaveras Fault is very close by. In 1984, I felt a 6.2 magnitude quake from [...]

I was minding my own business, checking Twitter Tuesday morning, December 10, when I saw this article from the Washington Post: “Septupled”—I had to think about that for a moment. Greenland’s rate of ice melt increased by a factor of seven times, reported the Post. Since 1992, Greenland’s ice sheet lost just 33 billion tons to neighboring oceans, compared with 254 billion tons now—an acceleration of 7.6 times. The 89 scientists authoring the Greenland report stated: “The Greenland Ice Sheet holds enough water to raise mean global sea level by 7.4 [meters, or about 32 feet on average].” The current melting rate is enough to raise global sea levels vertically about 1 centimeter (about three-eighths of an inch), they found.  Greenland study co-author Andrew Shepherd of [...]

by Tim Stroshane, policy analyst, Restore the DeltaWhile engaging with the Newsom Administration’s “water resilience portfolio” process and the governor’s “single-tunnel option,” we at Restore the Delta kept our eyes on the bigger picture. That picture includes a climate emergency: all bets are off on a stable climate moving forward decades and even centuries. That picture includes the health, well-being, and social and economic prospects of the Delta’s environmental justice communities.  The big picture also, sadly, includes a “single-tunnel option” for diverting water from the Delta. That proposal has new moving parts, each of which mesh into a power play by San Joaquin Valley growers and their water agencies to control California’s water future. With prospects of desiccating heat, fires, [...]

by Tim Stroshane, Policy Analyst, Restore the Delta The concrete-walled room was intimate and windowless, with chairs arranged into several rows facing toward a screen onto which a slide projector beamed DWR’s PowerPoint presentation. Placed in each corner was an easel with large displays for different facets of the State Water Project system. Each easel had a DWR staff person standing with it. To the side was a table where a court reporter sat with a laptop into which she would pour words stated at the event. There would be no questions or statements made in front of the assembled public this agency nominally serves.A “public meeting” held by DWR on May 13, 2019 once more illustrates that DWR officials [...]

In a recent column for CALmatters, Ellen Hanak and Jeffrey Mount of the Public Policy Institute of California offer a bit of advice to us Delta residents.“By proposing to build one tunnel instead of two, Gov. Newsom has opened the door for a grand compromise. The Delta’s many interests should seize this opportunity.” Thanks for the tip, PPIC. Residents of the San Francisco Bay-Delta (there are more than 4 million of us) agree to evaluate proposals by the Newsom administration with clear eyes and in a spirit of collaboration. Here are some questions Delta people plan to ask as we engage with this new process. Does the plan reduce water exports? The primary purpose of a single Delta tunnel is no [...]