California’s Central Valley is sinking — as the drought forces farmers to ponder the abyss

California’s Central Valley is sinking — as the drought forces farmers to ponder the abyss

Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian
28 Nov 2015 at 09:28 ET                   
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U.S. President Barack Obama walks with farmers Joe Del Bosque and Maria Del Bosque as he tours a drought affected farm field in Los Banos, California February 14, 2014. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

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As people dig ever deeper to find water, nearly 1,200 square miles of California is sinking 2 inches a month – destroying roads, bridges and farmland in the process

On a day when the skies were ashen from the smoke of distant wildfires, Chase Hurley kept his eyes trained on the slower-moving disaster at ground level: collapsing levees, buckling irrigation canals, water rising up over bridges and sloshing over roads.

This is the hidden disaster of California’s drought. So much water has been pumped out of the ground that vast areas of the Central Valley are sinking, destroying millions of dollars in infrastructure in the gradual collapse.

Four years of drought – and the last two years of record-smashing heat – have put water in extremely short supply.

Such climate-charged scenarios form the backdrop to the United Nations negotiations starting in Paris on 30 November, which are seeking to agree on collective action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

But the real-time evidence of climate change and the other effects of human interference in natural systems are already changing the contours of California’s landscape.

The strongest El Niño in 18 years is expected to bring some drought improvement to the Central Valley this winter, but the weather system won’t end it, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The Central Valley is the world’s largest patch of class one soil, considered to be the best for crops, and produces about 40% of the country’s fruits, nuts and vegetables .

In some parts of the valley, however, the land is sinking at a rate of 2in (5cm) a month. About 1,200 square miles, roughly bounded by interstate 5 and state route 99, is collapsing into what scientists describe as a “cone of depression”.

“The land around here is sinking, and as it is sinking, the bridge is going with it,” said Hurley, manager of the San Luis Obispo water company, on a tour of sinking infrastructure near the town of Firebaugh.

The water company, which is owned by area farmers, had recently rebuilt the levee, he said. But “because the water is hitting the bridge, they are going to have to reconstruct the bridge”. Wellheads were being destroyed, because they could not maintain pressure. Dams were sinking. “I am having a hard time pushing water through my canal,” Hurley said.

The sinking is a consequence of farmers’ desperate efforts to stay in business after California began cutting off their access to rivers and reservoirs because of the drought.

The farmers began a literal race to the bottom, going underground, drilling new and deeper wells, and pumping so much water from the layers of sediment, sand and clay that it is causing the ground to collapse.

The sinking is worse in this part of the valley because it is rich in clay. Pumping pulls the water out of the clay pores, causing the clay layer to collapse. “The issue is the amount of deepwater pumping below the clay. That is what is causing the subsidence,” Hurley said. “The land is sinking as they extract the water below the clay; there is a pressure differential. It is pulling the water out of the clay layer, and when it does, the clay collapses. And as it collapses, it brings everything with it.”

•••



On a mid-September day with temperatures reaching above 100F (38C), Steve Arthur took shelter in his air-conditioned truck in a prune orchard near the town of Merced, while overseeing a crew drilling a new well.

The harvest was over and the owner had left the trees to fend for themselves. The leaves were so dry they crackled. As the rig bore into the earth, wet clay slopped out, landing in a heap.

Arthur, whose family has been drilling water wells in the Central Valley since the 1950s, estimated he had drilled 10 new wells a month during the drought.

There was no way of keeping up with demand – even favoured customers were told they would wait months, if not years. In one week, he said, he installed more than 5,000ft of well casing.

The harvest was already over, and the farmer had no water to spare for the trees. But they must still be sustained, Arthur said. “If you can’t pump any water, everything will die. These crops cannot go a year without water. Everything you see for miles will be dead.”

Arthur recognises that farmers are trapped in this race to the bottom. The Central Valley is the second most pumped aquifer system in the country, according to the US Geological Survey.

His family runs their own small almond orchard near his home in Fresno. Last year his own well ran dry, because the water table dropped so low.

Arthur goes on at length about the importance of agriculture to the Central Valley, to the country. He has no patience with the authorities’ decision to cut off farmers and protect the state’s rivers – seeing it as a misguided attempt to preserve fish.

But even Arthur recognises that there are costs to pumping out the water beneath during these years of drought. “Are we over-pumping? I am sure they are probably doing that now because they don’t have any choice,” Arthur said.

•••

California records stretching back to the 1920s show the water table dropping during times of drought and recovering somewhat during years when there was heavy snowfall in the Sierra Nevada. The snowpack provides almost a third of California’s water supply.

The state has also experienced subsidence, with an emblematic picture of a stranded road sign exhibiting the drop.

But the deepening drought in 2015, along with a snowpack in the Sierra Nevada at a 500-year low , made the drop bigger and deeper.

These crops cannot go a year without water. Everything you see for miles will be dead
Steve Arthur

“Because of increased pumping, groundwater levels are reaching record lows – up to 100ft lower than previous records,” Mark Cowin, the director of California’s department of water resources, told reporters in August at the release of a subsidence report. “As extensive groundwater pumping continues, the land is sinking more rapidly and this puts nearby infrastructure at greater risk of costly damage.”

The California legislature last year voted to direct the state’s water agencies to come up with plans to guarantee supplies into the future.

Satellite data, analysed by University of California at Irvine scientists, suggest that the state has been losing about 4tn gallons of water a year from the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins since the drought began in 2011.

The satellites use highly sensitive gravity measures to monitor changes in the amount of water stored underground in soil and rock.

According to Jay Famiglietti, a water scientist at Nasa’s jet propulsion lab in Pasadena and a professor at UC Irvine, two-thirds of the lost water has been sucked out of aquifers in the Central Valley, causing parts of the valley to sink.

In some parts of the valley, the land has been dropping by almost 2in a month, according to Nasa satellite measurements.

Land near the city of Corcoran sank 13in in just eight months. Parts of the California aqueduct sank 8in in just four months last year.

The subsidence has already damaged and destroyed bridges, pipelines and roads, and is threatening thousands of miles more.

It is twisting and crushing well casings, and could eventually reduce the underground aquifer’s water storage potential. “Without the water to support those holes, the clays align and you get compaction,” said David Cehrs, a water scientist and president of the Kings River conservation district around Fresno. The situation is far worse in geological formations with more clay than sand, such as on the western side of the San Joaquin valley.

“With clay you get compaction up to 60%,” he said. “Sands also compact,” he went on. But he said: “If you dewater the sands you can put the water back into holes; if you dewater the clay you dewater the holes, and you can’t get the water back in it because you can’t refill the clay.”

That is, even if El Niño does bring heavy rains, there is no natural way to store the water. “We have lost that water storage capacity forever,” Cehrs said.

•••

On the night before Thanksgiving in 2005, Carey Wilson, who lives in the small Central Valley community of Madera Rancho, started to wash the dishes piled up in her kitchen sink – to find there was only air sputtering out of the tap. She called a service company to lower her well, which was originally drilled at a depth of 258ft. A year later, when that well went dry, Wilson, a single mother and federal government worker, paid $12,000 to drill a new well to 389ft and install a more powerful pump.

But her neighbours, who were facing similar problems with their wells, also started drilling, going down deeper than her well. “They were pulling the plug out from underneath us,” she said. “It was homeowner against homeowner.”

Major farms in the area dug deeper still, often to depths in the thousands of feet. On days when she did laundry, Wilson began to notice the pump kicking on when she was in the shower.

By August 2014, the water table in her area had dropped 18ft. The land had dropped too, twisting and crushing the PVC pipe connected to the well, she said.

“I know the writing is on the wall,” Wilson said. “It doesn’t matter if it rains for 40 days and 40 nights, here the water table is never going to go up.”
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2015
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/11/californias-central-valley-is-sinking-and-the-drought-forces-farmers-to-ponder-the-abyss/

This is right where I grew up! that picture with Obama is Like 30 Miles form my home town, me and my father did many brick jobs in Los Banos! ;) what they didn't tell you is (I don't think anyway!! is they have diverted most of the water that used to flow from up in Northern California's Reservoirs to the big City's like LA, so that the Central Valley Farmers are going broke..... basically destroying the farmers and farm ground!!

Forget the Missing Rainfall, California. Where’s the Delta Smelt?

Guided by bad science, regulators are flushing away millions of gallons of water to protect a three-inch fish.

By
Allysia Finley
April 26, 2015 5:58 p.m. ET

In California, it takes about 1.1 gallons of water to grow an almond; 1.28 gallons to flush a toilet; and 34 gallons to produce an ounce of marijuana. But how many gallons are needed to save a three-inch delta smelt, the cause célèbre of environmentalists and bête noire of parched farmers?
To protect smelt from water pumps, government regulators have flushed 1.4 trillion gallons of water into the San Francisco Bay since 2008. That would have been enough to sustain 6.4 million Californians for six years. Yet a survey of young adult smelt in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta last fall yielded just eight fish, the lowest level since 1967. An annual spring survey by state biologists turned up six smelt in March and one this month. In 2014 the fall-spring counts were 88 and 36. While the surveys are a sampling and not intended to suggest the full population, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service warns that “the delta smelt is now in danger of extinction.”
The agency acknowledges that its “existing regulatory mechanisms have not proven adequate” to arrest the fish’s decline since its listing under the Endangered Species Act in 1993 and that “we are unable to determine with certainty which threats or combinations of threats are directly responsible.”
Herein is a parable of imperious regulators who subordinate science to a green political agenda. While imposing huge societal costs, government policies have failed to achieve their stated environmental purpose.
The smelt population has been shrinking since the 1970s, with a few intermittent rebounds. In 2008 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued a 396-page “biological opinion” identifying delta pumps, which export water to Central Valley farms and Southern California, as a major culprit in the smelt’s decline. The agency imposed stringent restrictions on water pumping based on regression models—for measuring variables—that purportedly correlated water flows with smelt killed.
In 2009 Central Valley farmers sued the Fish and Wildlife Service under the Administrative Procedure Act for failing to apply the “best available science.” In a 225-page decision in 2010, federal Judge Oliver Wanger skewered the federal agency for not conducting an environmental-impact statement, and for misapplying data and making unexplained assumptions. “The public cannot afford sloppy science and unidirectional prescriptions that ignore California’s water needs,” he wrote. The judge ordered the Fish and Wildlife Service to redo its “arbitrary, capricious and unlawful” regulations.
But last year the Ninth Circuit of Appeals—renowned for its liberal outlook—reversed the decision. The three-judge panel did rip the agency’s biological opinion as a “jumble of disjointed facts and analyses.” Yet the ruling said that the restrictive pumping limits were warranted to “counteract the uncertainties” of its scientific analyses. In other words: The government’s actions were justified by its sloppy science.
The smelt’s decline might not seem such a mystery today had government regulators more closely examined the science. For instance, a 2008 study by San Francisco State University researcher Wim Kimmerer—a paper used by the Fish and Wildlife Service to support its pumping restrictions—found that the sporadic population losses attributed to pumping during the winter and spring when smelt are spawning failed to take into account “subsequent 50-fold variability in survival from summer to fall” when the young fish are growing.
Other studies have noted that the biggest driver of species abundance in the delta is precipitation, which may explain why the smelt population has plummeted over the past four years of drought after rebounding in 2011—a wet year.
According to biologist Peter Moyle at the University of California, Davis, who has studied the delta ecosystem and smelt since the 1970s, precipitation levels can drastically transform the delta ecosystem’s complex food web. For instance, the invasive Asian clam—introduced to the delta in the 1980s—increases during droughts and competes with the smelt for food.
Dry conditions, Mr. Moyle adds, also make the water clearer and render the translucent smelt more vulnerable to predators. Toxic fertilizers from delta farmers and contaminants from Sacramento urban users grow more concentrated when there is less water.
“The chances of recovery are low,” Mr. Moyle tells me, noting that last month’s survey captured smelt scattered in disparate areas of the delta (state data show that the government-survey trawls kill more adult smelt than the pumps do). So the tiny fish may have to swim great distances to find a mate. Another problem is that the few remaining females and males may be at different stages of development and unable to mate.
Mr. Moyle predicts that the smelt will disappear from the delta within the next two years—but strictly speaking, they won’t be extinct: The Fish and Wildlife Service maintains a “refuge” population at a fish hatchery near Shasta Dam that can recolonize the delta when water is abundant again. Environmentalists claim that the fish have a right to return. UC Davis also raises hundreds of smelt for experiments and conservation at a lab south of Stockton. Long live the smelt.
Even if the delta smelt were eliminated from the delta forever, the federal government would continue to restrict pumping to protect other fish: the longfin smelt, steelhead and Chinook winter-run salmon. And green groups would continue petitioning the government to expand its list of endangered species. Parched Californians may soon wonder when it’s their turn for such concern.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/forget-the-missing-rainfall-california-wheres-the-delta-smelt-1430085510

BYRON -- There's only one place left on Earth where imperiled Delta smelt are thriving, where their water remains cold and clean.




In the wild, the fish is on the brink of extinction. This month, in their April trawl survey, state Fish and Wildlife scientists caught only one of the pinky-sized, politicized fish with an outsized role in California's water wars, an alarming indication of just how few smelt are left. And the drought may inflict the final blow.



But here in this UC Davis-run hatchery, large tanks are filled with thousands of baby smelt -- where, for now, they'll stay, generation after generation -- because the Delta's warm, brackish and polluted water is too inhospitable.





The fate of this fish -- wild or forever captive -- throws into question the future of one of the world's most contentious plumbing systems: the 700,000-acre Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the nexus of water moving from the state's north to south.



In the fourth year of a historic drought, biologists are issuing desperate pleas to devote Delta water for those few wild creatures that remain -- not just Delta smelt, but also longfin smelt, Sacramento splittail, Sacramento perch, river lamprey, green sturgeon, Central Valley steelhead trout and spring and winter runs of chinook salmon. It's not just about saving a single species, they say, but about saving a precious ecosystem.
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But farmers say it's time to concede the fish is a lost cause -- and to supply more of the Delta's water to help humans.



Amid the crisis, there's this question: Do these cultured captive fish represent a new beginning in the wild, or an experiment in futility? The future of the Delta smelt -- and its impact on California's water supply -- is the latest installment of this newspaper's series "A State of Drought."



The fish itself is unremarkable -- short-lived, tiny and so translucent it's almost invisible. It lacks the charisma of a bald eagle, grizzly bear or bison. Until now, it's been durable, surviving millions of years through droughts far worse than this one. It was once the most abundant fish in the Delta.
This countdown toward extinction represents the failure of what was once the largest estuary between Patagonia and Alaska.

"The policy of the people of United States is not to let any species go extinct," said fish biologist Peter Moyle, associate director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis.

"But the situation is pretty grim," he said. "And if it's unfavorable for the smelt, it's probably unfavorable for other species, as well."

The fish exerts such force on the Delta's waters that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service regulates how and when pumping can be done to protect it and other imperiled endangered species. Since the smelt is protected under the Endangered Species Act, a federal court order can -- and has -- reduced pumping to farmers and cities in Southern California. Yet this protection hasn't been enough for a species that lives in the pipeline of California's critical hydraulic system.

In March, when the California Department of Fish and Wildlife conducted one of its monthly spring trawl surveys for adult smelt, it found only four females and two males hidden in the grasses of a vast network of man-made islands and channels at the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. April's survey found a single fish. While these surveys are merely a sampling of the population, they are a shadow of previous counts: In 2012, the March survey tallied 296 fish, while the April catch was 143. When smelt numbers get too low, it makes it harder for males and females to find each other, said UC Davis' Moyle. Another species, the longfin smelt, was also found in record-low numbers.



The impact of the drought is adding fury to hard and long-established arguments over the Delta smelt.

Efforts to stave off the fish's demise have been pointless and magnify the human suffering of the drought, said Chris Scheuring, attorney for the California Farm Bureau Federation.

"A lot of water has been thrown at the problem, to no apparent effect," he said. "Twenty million Californians depend on a water supply kept away from them by one small, little population of fish."

Good riddance, wrote Fresno-based Harry Cline of the Farm Press Blog. Turning off the pumps that serve the state and federal water projects wasted about 800,000 acre-feet of water in 2013 "based on the science of four buckets of minnows. That is enough water to produce crops on 200,000 acres or 10 million tons of tomatoes; 200 million boxes of lettuce; 20 million tons of grapes."

California needs to redouble its efforts to save those smelt that remain, counters conservation biologist Jon Rosenfield of the Bay Institute. Fish need far more freshwater inflows to oxygenate their water than they've been getting, as they also struggle against rising temperatures, salinity, pollution and predators, he said.

In early April, there was more bad news for Delta fish, with the State Water Resources Control Board's decision to reduce Sierra runoff to the estuary because of the drought, denying fish the pulse of cold, fresh water that helps them get through the year.

"This decision represents a major failure to protect the fish and wildlife that belong to all Californians," Rosenfield said. Failing to protect native species is asking for a wave of extinctions to commence, he said.

In desperation, UC Davis fish biologists have created what's widely regarded as the most sophisticated fish breeding programs in the nation. There's a smaller backup population at a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hatchery below Shasta Dam.

The goal is to save the Delta smelt's diverse gene pool before it is gone forever.

So the little fish has joined the ranks of other animals that owe their existence to captive-breeding efforts, including the Arabian oryx, the black-footed ferret, the red wolf, the Guam rail and the California condor. A UC Davis captive breeding program of the Amargosa vole, one of the most endangered mammals in North America, has been so successful that this week more than two dozen voles were released back into the wild.

Here at the little-known Fish Conservation and Cultural Laboratory, this "refuge population" of fish is thriving and reproducing. Unlike the Delta outside, the water here is reliable and abundant. It's chilled to 52 to 60 degrees. It's disinfected and filtered of dangerous pollutants. Six times a day, the fish are fed a diet of live zooplankton, brine shrimp or special dry food, at a taxpayer cost of $2.5 million a year.

The lab started with 160 wild smelt in 2006 and has bred 250 pairs every year, yielding distinct "families" of fish with thousands of offspring.

To ensure future genetic diversity, each fish is tagged and its fins are clipped, then sent to a UC Davis lab for DNA sequencing. The results guide matchmaking and identify the optimal crosses for reproduction.

"You always want to keep as much variation as you can. You don't know what genes it will require in the future," said former lab Director Joan Lindberg.

The lab then conducts tedious artificial insemination: Each female fish is squeezed, creating a pool of eggs around the size of a quarter. Then the sperm from the males is added. The fertilized eggs, safe in a small bowl of water, are incubated until they hatch 40 days later.

It's likely that these captive fish will be the only survivors of their species. Moyle advised the state's Delta Stewardship Council that wild smelt could be gone within the next two years.

Farmers and cities may then petition to have smelt "delisted" as an endangered species, contending that no protection is needed for a dead fish, said Scheuring, the farm bureau's attorney.

"If the Delta smelt go extinct, in the short run that could improve the pumping operations of water for humans," he said. "It will free the pumps to start pumping a fair amount more."

Environmentalists would, in turn, argue that other species also deserve protection, and would fight more pumping. There are at least seven strong candidates for Endangered Species Act protection, including sturgeon and some salmon. "They're queued up," Moyle said.

If smelt can't live in the wild, is there any point to the Davis lab?

Yes, biologists say, because humans have a moral obligation to save a species we ourselves exterminated.

"It is absolutely worth saving the historical legacy of this fish. If we don't have them, we will never have them again," said Casey Dillman, a fish scientist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

The survivors in the UC Davis hatchery provide biologists a potent reason to keep fighting for Delta restoration. If reintroduced, the resurrected fish also might be protected by the Endangered Species Act -- and could assert the same legal claims as their wild ancestor.

But as long as the Delta stays hot and dry, even the most carefully cultured fish can't replace the dying wild populations, said lab Director Tien-Chieh Hung.

"We know if it doesn't get better, there will be no point to putting them back," he said. "All we can do is keep them -- and when ready, we can reintroduce them and hope they survive better."

Until then, the tiny fish, a symbol of both loss and hope, will continue to swim -- generation after generation, perhaps forever -- in safe captivity.