TRINITY RIVER FILE PHOTO/NORTH COAST JOURNAL
Water’s for Fighting How California and the feds sold off more water than north state rivers usually hold By Grant Scott-Goforth
W
hen’s the last time you visited the Trinity River? Late spring, when the bathtub rings begin to appear on rocks near Kimtu, when crisp, warm air and cold, fast flows combine to beckon swimmers? Late August, when the canyon walls are bleached, baked and orange-hued from overhead wildfire smoke? Winter, when the water pours into the river from every stream, rivulet and stone, carving an ever so slightly deeper canyon, clearing sediment from holes and thrusting boulders downstream? The Trinity never would have carved its way out of the mountains in such spectacular fashion without the Trinity Alps’ snowmelt and dozens of tributaries that feed it every year; never would have been home to hundreds of thousands of salmon, and the animals and native people who relied on them. But although the Trinity flows mightily into the Klamath River each year, much of the river’s water is siphoned off, part of California’s massive restructuring of the state’s natural water flows. Only in the last two centuries has the flood of human ingenuity — sometimes praised, sometimes scorned — changed how California uses and understands water, from the Trinity to waterways far beyond.
A surge of European immigrants
flocked to California to seek gold in 1849, but it was water that soon became one of the state’s most valuable resources. Who got the water — and who didn’t — could spell the difference between growth and stagnation, between plenty and poverty. The winners and losers depended on who had water rights — the legal right to use a waterway or divert some of its flow elsewhere. There are two basic forms of water rights. Riparian water rights are based on English common law and basically say, “If a stream runs through your property, you can use it.” That principal can make sense in wet climates, but it doesn’t help farmers who don’t own riverfront land. Appropriative water rights are more common in the Western U.S. (Oklahoma and California are the only Western states that continue to recognize riparian rights.) These rights say water can be moved as long as it’s being put to good use, whether for farming, fishing, mining or municipal use. Appropriative rights, which began being granted in California in 1914, are typically secondary to riparian rights. “California has an almost unpredictable mix of those two,” said UC Berkeley Water Center Executive Director Carolyn Remick. That combination, along with
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statewide exchanges and deals over the last 100 years, make for a convoluted rights system overseen by the State Water Board. As California grew, the State Water Board awarded water rights to the state and federal governments to build two vast water projects, promising even more water from the north state’s rich runoff to be delivered through a network of dams and canals. When environmental consciousness began to roil over lost fish and dewatered streams, lawsuits and government rulings began narrowing the spigot, allowing less and less water to be siphoned away for agriculture and increasing the water given to fish and the environment. Today, powerful water brokers have made contracts that promise far more water than nature can deliver — particularly in the face of growing populations and climate change. Much of that water moves through the two major projects that define California’s waterscape. The Central Valley Project, run by the federal government, and the State Water Project collect water behind dams and move it through rivers, pipes, pumps and canals. These storied channels, carved out of the dry California earth, feed one of the richest agricultural plains in the United States. What started as collaborations among small
farmers grew into powerful irrigation districts that supply large ag producers. And all the while, farmers, fishermen, tribes and local governments have been fighting over the right to store, release and reroute water. The result: a torrent of lawsuits when the water dries up. This year, which set dryness records in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins, the Hoopa Tribe and fish advocates joined the federal government in fighting off a lawsuit over Trinity River water brought by powerful Central Valley irrigators. The Trinity River is split in two ways: The Bureau of Reclamation controls storage of Trinity water and has stategranted rights to sell it to irrigators, cities and industrial users. But there are certain guarantees for downstream flows to protect fish and tribal fishing, based on orders from the Bureau’s parent, the U.S. Department of the Interior. Those guarantees were made when the dams were built to ease concerns about the Trinity being sucked dry, and flows increased in later years when environmental impacts came into sharper focus. In this way, the state’s water is tangled up in a net being pulled from many sides, and a new, governor-approved proposal for the Sacramento River Delta has people from Hoopa to Stockton up in arms.