AquAlliance Notes on “Scope and impact of Delta twin tunnels is starting to hit home”

Posted on by
Click to see editorial by Stuart Leavenworth, March 17, 2013:
California and the federal government created a quagmire of unrealistic water expectations and resulting environmental disasters over many decades. The ensuing biological collapse of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta* during the first years of the 21st century led to the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP), a state and federal permitting process under their respective endangered species acts. The BDCP process was initiated by large water buyers such at Westlands Water District (Westlands) and Metropolitan Water District (MWD). It started in 2006 as another attempt to continue sending more water south of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta with the additional goal to create “a long-term conservation strategy that sets forth actions needed for a healthy Delta.”
It was unfortunate to see that instead of reining in expectations for water that doesn’t actually exist and evaluating genuine alternatives for a secure water supply for California’s people, economy, and environment, the process started with a conclusion: build a peripheral canal or tunnels (see AquAlliance response). To sit at the BDCP table, the applicants, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the California Department of Water Resources, required the steering committee participants to agree to a canal or tunnels outcome (Points of Agreement 2007). This turned a planning process into a rubber-stamp sham. Adding insult to injury, at no time has the public been informed about the actual source of the water from the Sacramento River watershed or of the impacts to the watershed. All we know, even with the March 2013 release of four chapters of an administrative draft plan, is that the two proposed tunnels have grown from 33 feet in diameter to 40 feet each and could divert almost 3/4ths of the Sacramento River’s average annual flow.
Stuart Leavenworth’s editorial below followed the release of the latest BDCP documents. As the readers will see, he grasps the ludicrousness of building the “peripheral” tunnels, but he misses two important points:
1. He doesn’t think the tunnels will drain the north state (he points out that a colleague of his differs in opinion).
2. He also thinks that “the law” will protect endangered species and water quality as if it has already. We are sorry to point out that BDCP was started explicitly because existing laws haven’t been followed or enforced without lawsuits, which has caused the collapse of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and the San Joaquin River’s ecosystems and species.
 * Click here to view an interactive map of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta