In California, when the issue is water, the ironies seem to string out in seamless succession. Bill Warne, the man who built the California Water Project, was in government service nearly all his life, and never made a great deal of money. In his mid-70 in the early 1980s, Warne was doing consulting work; he also owned a small almond orchard outside of Sacramento. The consulting work was lucrative, but unpredictable.
The almonds, on the other hand, were a good, reliable source of income. Or they were until Tenneco, by far the largest almond grower in the state, made a bid in 1981 to control the market—the same kind of power play that Prudential made with olives. “The bastards really went for our throats,” Warne admitted ruefully during an interview in early in 1982. “They beat the hell out of the rest of us in the market, and that includes me.” Of course, one could just as well have said that Warne beat the hell out of himself. It was his project that irrigated Tenneco’s almond orchards; it was his aqueduct that flowed practically within view of his small almond ranch, destined for the huge factory farms in the desolate southern reaches of the valley.
Because of the hot climate down there, the crops grown on irrigation water have always been, in large part, specialty crops: almonds, pistachios, grapes, olives, kiwis, melons, canning tomatoes. And because the national acreage given over to such crops is comparatively small (California accounts for most of it), a single big grower who doesn’t mind being a little ruthless can whiphand the market pretty much as he pleases.
Bill Warne’s project had become a Frankenstein’s monster. But its maker still refused to turn against his creation. “The moment we began settling California, we overran our water supply,” he said. “We’ve never gotten to the point where you could just stop. And we never will.”
Whether or not that is true, it was hard to imagine, by 1985, how the State Water Project would ever be completed. The old warhorses, the Bill Warnes and Pat Browns, might still be talking about the “unconscionable waste” of water flooding down the Eel River each winter (as Warne did, to whoever would listen), or saying that “the Columbia doesn’t need all that water that flows down there— it’s ridiculous, between you and me,” (as Pat Brown did during an interview in 1979), but those who followed them in public office and were faced with the nitty-gritty problem of diverting the Eel, or the Columbia, or any so-called “surplus” water that could be found, discovered that it was like uncovering a nest of killer bees.
Jerry Brown’s successor, George Deukmejian, was elected with large infusions of cash from the growers in the San Joaquin Valley, where he is from. As expected, Deukmejian, a deeply conservative Republican, proved himself ideologically double-jointed on the issue of water development; while wading through the state budget with a machete, he made a wide circle around the Peripheral Canal, which he wanted to build but call something else, and he spoke approvingly of plans to send a lot more water southward. The reaction from northern California politicians, who, in the meantime, had managed to seize control of the speaker’s chair in the legislature, and, through Congressman George Miller (who represents the Delta) of a key committee in Congress that can probably thwart much of what Deukmejian hopes to build, was so intemperate that the governor, after a year in office, was hardly mentioning the canal anymore.
Deukmejian may merely have decided to lie low, but by 1985 the people who will feel the impending shortages most acutely—the growers and the cities of the South Coast—appeared to have given up on the idea; either that, or they were mollifying their opposition while they stealthily plotted some hydrologic equivalent of Pearl Harbor.
In June, the State Water Contractors, an organization representing all the customers of the State Water Project, issued a report predicting a shortfall by the year 2010 of 4.9 million acre-feet statewide—the domestic consumption of twenty million people. The water deficit within the State Project service area alone would be about 1.9 million acre-feet. Without more construction, the San Joaquin Valley would receive 733,000 fewer acre-feet than it was counting on. The South Coast cities and irrigation districts, which signed contracts to buy 2,497,500 acre-feet from the State Water Project, could be guaranteed a firm yield of only 1,120,000 acre-feet. Only in wet years could each region hope for more; during extended droughts they would receive even less.
Meanwhile, a state report on groundwater pumping was describing the overdraft as “potentially critical” in eleven subregions of the Central Valley, most of which were in the service area of the State Water Project. What made things worse was that the valley’s ancient saltwater aquifer, lying below the fresh water, could eventually rise to take its place.
Those figures, if they were accurate, bespoke calamity from both regions’ points of view. What was startling, therefore, was the fact that the report said virtually nothing about sending more water from northern California southward.
Its solutions—which it admitted were only halfway solutions—were for the most part the same ones that had been proposed by the environmental lobby, and which the water lobby had scorned just a few years earlier. The Imperial Valley farmers, according to the report, could conserve about 250,000 acre-feet if they lined their earthen canals and improved their irrigation practices; that water could then be sold to Los Angeles. The occasional surplus Colorado River flows below Parker Dam, as long as they lasted, could be stored in groundwater basins near Los Angeles and San Diego. Reusing treated sewage water (the report didn’t go so far as to advocate drinking it) could save a few tens of thousands of acre-feet. Delta channels could be widened and levees rebuilt to allow slightly greater flows. The state could buy the surplus water in the Central Valley Project, for as long as that lasted…
It was nickel-and-dime stuff, no heroics; the water savings might amount to 1.6 million acre-feet, which would only make up a third of the projected statewide shortfall. Only two new reservoirs, both off-stream and judiciously located south of San Francisco, were even mentioned, and the report didn’t even advocate that they be built; it merely called for “‘investigations.” (Initial investigations by the Department of Water Resources suggested a per-acre-foot price range of $310 to $400 from one of the reservoirs, Los Banos Grande; since that was 15 to 20 times the cost of Oroville water, it was hard to imagine who in his right mind would buy it, at least as long as there was groundwater to overdraft.)
Not a word was said about the Peripheral Canal.
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