A Dam Shame
Photo: Wendy Goodfriend / KQED
By Carolee Krieger, Executive Director, California Water Impact Network
Drive up either I-5 or Highway 99 in the San Joaquin Valley, and you’ll see them. Sometimes it’s a single slogan, hand-scrawled on a 4x8 sheet of plywood. Or it could be a series of smaller signs, positioned one after the other for a mile or so along the roadway, evoking the Burma-Shave arrays of the 1930s and 1940s. Occasionally, it will be a large billboard.
But if the configurations are different, they all promote the same message: build more dams. Sometimes the language is couched as an attack against “radical environmentalists,” or as a paean to the family farm. But they all demand more water for agriculture via the damming or diversion of California’s rivers.
To a degree, the clamor is understandable. Drought continues to punish California, and no end is in sight. Farmers – like everyone else – are struggling with dwindling water supplies. But more dams and reservoirs aren’t the solution to our problem.
There already are nearly 1,500 reservoirs in California’s water grid, the system that supplies cities and farms through an interconnected infrastructure of impoundments, groundwater basins, and conveyance facilities. The bottom line: almost every river in the state that can be dammed has been dammed.
So what’s left? Projects that will cost astronomical amounts of money and entail massive environmental damage – but will yield relatively little water. Here are a few examples:
Temperance Flat
This proposed impoundment on the upper San Joaquin River would feature a 665-foot-high dam, flood 5,000 acres of scenic public land, render two large hydroelectric plants inoperable, adversely affect 11 known sensitive, threatened or endangered wildlife species, degrade downstream fisheries and wetlands and inundate miles of recreational trails – all for a negligible gain in storage.
Proponents claim it would add 1.3 million acre-feet of capacity to the state’s water grid. But what they don’t discuss is its true potential yield. As the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation acknowledges, existing dams on the San Joaquin River and the impacts of ongoing climate change mean the true annual storage for the project would likely range from 70,000 acre feet in a wet year to 21,000 feet in a dry or critically dry year. Given that statewide water use currently stands at 42 million acre-feet, such an increase in supply amounts to a drop in the bucket.
The Bureau of Reclamation estimates the Temperance Flat project will cost between $2.5 billion and $2.6 billion. That’s excessively optimistic, given ambitious public works projects never come in on budget. Indeed, costs typically climb exponentially as planning and construction proceed. Case in point: the new San Francisco Bay Bridge, which was built following the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The first cost estimate, released in 1995, was $250 million. The final price tag: $6.5 billion.
Sites Reservoir
This “offstream” project west of the town of Colusa would store water diverted from the Sacramento River in a 14,000-acre reservoir carved out of the rural Antelope Valley. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2023, with completion expected by 2030. If the project becomes operational, between 470,000 to 640,000 acre-feet of water will be shunted annually from the Sacramento River to the reservoir. The primary beneficiary will be the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which serves multiple cities and water agencies in the South State.
But by any evaluation, Sites is a public policy boondoggle, an environmental disaster, and an egregious waste of public funds.
First and foremost, Sites does nothing to protect ratepayers from drought. Yes, it increases potential storage – but when rain and snow are scant, there’s little if anything to store. Even modeling presented by Sites proponents confirms this. By their estimates, only 50,000 acre-feet of water would have been released from Sites during the 2014-2015 drought – and given ongoing climate change, we can expect periodic droughts will be the default state for the West. California’s reservoirs already are standing at historic lows; we don’t need to spend billions of public dollars for another empty bathtub.
Moreover, Sites water will be exceedingly expensive – at least $700 an acre foot as assumptions now stand. And that figure will only climb. Sites supporters acknowledge the project will cost at least $3.9 billion, up 30% from previous estimates. But remember – this latest number doesn’t reflect inevitable future inflation. Also, the estimated price tag doesn’t include the costs required to transport the water from the reservoir through the Sacramento/San Joaquin River Delta and the California Aqueduct. Sites, in short, is another Bay Bridge when it comes to public expenditures
Environmental impacts? Water diversions to Sites will have a disastrous effect on Sacramento River salmon and other native fish. Inundation of the Antelope Valley will eliminate critical wildlife habitat, adversely affecting myriad species.
Finally, Sites won’t be able to hold on to much of the water it does manage to store. This large, relatively shallow reservoir will be situated in a portion of the state that’s hot and dry for much of the year. About 30 thousand acre-feet of water – or 7 percent of the reservoir’s annual average storage – will disappear due to evaporation. That is water that’s lost forever – water that could’ve supplied ratepayers, supported struggling fisheries, or sustained our dwindling wetlands.
Pacheco Reservoir Expansion Project
Silicon Valley is a leading economic powerhouse for the nation and encompasses some of the world’s priciest real estate. So what the Valley’s movers and shakers want, they usually get – even when it comes to water, our most precious public trust resource. But promoters of the Pacheco Reservoir Expansion Project have crossed a bridge too far.
Pushed by the Santa Clara Valley Water District, this project would expand the existing Pacheco Reservoir in the Diablo Range from 5,500 acre-feet to 140,000 acre-feet. Just for starters, the ecological impacts from this exponential increase in capacity would be massive.
As confirmed by research from the Center for Biological Diversity, the project would submerge or degrade almost 2,000 acres of undeveloped land that’s rich in native plant and wildlife species; of particular concern are imperiled amphibians and reptiles, including California red-legged frogs, California tiger salamanders, foothill yellow-legged frogs and western pond turtles. Local steelhead populations, already severely depleted by the existing dam and small reservoir, would suffer further losses. The expanded reservoir will also intrude on Henry Coe State Park and despoil more than 40 identified Native American archeological and cultural sites.
Though initial costs were pegged at $1 billion, a Santa Clara Valley Water District member later estimated the price at $2.5 billion. From a practical perspective, that must be considered a minimum figure. And who will pay? Proponents point to public funding from Proposition 1, a water bond that passed in 2014. But that will cover only a fraction of the cost. Local ratepayers will bear the brunt of the expense through higher – make that much higher – water bills.
All these projects showcase an approach to water management that is antiquated, wasteful, and destructive. Moreover, new dams can’t put more water into the system; they are a mid-20th century response to a 21st century problem. We can’t dam our way to more water – we can only manage what we have more efficiently and equitably. We already know the solutions: full and accurate quantification of both groundwater and surface water, conservation, wastewater recycling, stormwater capture, aquifer recharge, and limited desalination.
On the whole, there’s more reason to be heartened than discouraged. Local and state agencies are slowly moving toward sane and sustainable water development and management, and a proposed initiative to build more dams in California will likely be withdrawn because it’s not attracting enough signatures to make it to the ballot.
But as the San Joaquin Valley signs demanding more reservoirs confirm, desperation breeds misinformation. We must oppose the dangerous narrative that we can dam our way to a better future – and make this case with lawmakers in Sacramento and Washington, and with ratepayers throughout California.