T
he brown water of the Sacramento River lumbers quietly downstream along the levee bank, swirling eddies and occasional surges of turbulence revealing the power of this greatest of California’s waterways. It is nearly 100 degrees in the town of Hood, about 20 minutes south of Sacramento, and the heavy sun crushes the midday hours into idleness. The streets are quiet, except for the occasional passing of a car on Highway 160, the rushing of the trees and the corners of a sign on a gate flapping in the hot wind. It reads: “STOP THE TUNNELS.” Many more of the same signs are posted along the levee roadways throughout the Delta, for a huge development plan is underway in Sacramento that, if implemented, will change this quiet agricultural region forever. Nothing is final yet, but Gov. Jerry Brown, along with many colleagues and agricultural water users south of Stockton, hope to build a new water-diversion system: a pair of giant tunnels, each 40 feet wide and 39 miles long, that are capable of carrying away two-thirds of the Sacramento River’s water. Brown and Co. say the $25 billion-plus plan will secure water for Southern California cities and Central Valley farmers, and also restore the Delta’s troubled ecosystem. But here in the Delta area of Sacramento County, most people want the tunnel project stopped. They say it will suck the Delta dry, destroy farming business in Northern California and kill the ecosystem. Doug Hemly operates several hundred acres of pear orchards along Highway 160, and lives just miles south of the proposed location for the three intakes that would feed the tunnels. His grown children help operate the farm, and before him four generations of ancestors did much the same. The Hemly home is 164 years old—built in 1850 by his great-grandfather. Now, the twin tunnels threaten to demolish it. “One of the plans I’ve heard involves taking the house,” said Hemly, 67. “Everyone is confused by what they’re doing,” he said. “No one understands how you can improve the health of the Delta by taking water out of the Delta, rather than let it flow downstream through the Delta. “Everyone here is scratching their heads about this.”
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The Gov. Jerry Brownsupported Bay Delta Conservation Plan proposes to take two-thirds of the water from the Sacramento River near the town Hood in Sacramento County, then divert it to a reservoir some 39 miles away near Tracy. Next, it would pump water to south-state farmers and cities. California would need to build two tunnels to accomplish this, which would take about 10 years to construct and cost at least $24 billion. Residents are worried about eminent domain and say tunnel construction will destroy their communities— and the Delta itself.
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PROPOSED TUNNELS CLIFTON COURT FOREBAY RESERVOIR
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Tunnel of no love The Hemly household isn’t the only Sacramento County home that may need to be demolished if the tunnels are built. “They’re talking about moving out the whole town,” said Terry Mulligan, a resident of 30 years near Hood.
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not going to be an opportunity for anyone to chime in on the matter. Unlike the proposed Peripheral Canal of the early 1980s, the twintunnels project—which some believe may cost $50 billion in the long run—will move forward without the chance for a public vote. “The Delta community has been left out of the planning process,” Hemly said. “Yet we are
Red fish, blue fish, dead fish oR new fish?
“ THI S IS N ’ T aN EN g IN EERIN g P L a N . IT’S a C O N S ERvaTIO N P L a N.” Nancy Vogel spokeswoman, Bay Delta Conservation Plan More than three decades ago, Mulligan’s home was on the list of doomed properties when the infamous Peripheral Canal project was alive—before voters shot it down in 1982. “They’re going to be displacing a whole lot of dirt. They’re going to be trucking it in and out of here on these little levee roads. There will be a lot of traffic. I’m afraid they’re going to foul up the whole area.” Debbie Elliot of Courtland foresees years of dust, traffic and noise just to build the tunnels, which would start in Hood and lead almost 40 miles to the Clifton Court Forebay reservoir, basically a holding tank for the existing water pumps that serve the San Joaquin Valley. “I’m not sure we can live with the impacts of this,” she said. “If they do this, we’re looking at 10 years of construction. I’m imagining an industrial wasteland here.” Though Delta communities are generally aligned in opposition to the tunnels, there is
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the only ones who stand to lose out and who are facing a negative event—us and the fish.” The Department of Water Resources is leading the push for the tunnels, which are just one part of the Gov. Brown-approved Bay Delta Conservation Plan. Nancy Vogel, a spokeswoman with the department, says the BDCP is being mischaracterized by its opponents. “This isn’t an engineering plan,” she said. “It’s a conservation plan.” In fact, one of the BDCP’s main objectives—as mandated by a 2009 state law called the Delta Reform Act—is to help restore the Delta’s struggling ecosystem. In theory, the tunnels would do this by sending freshwater from the north Delta directly to the existing pumps near Tracy, an hour south of Sacramento. This would reduce the intake of water from the southern Delta, which serves as crucial fish habitat. The other major goal of the BDCP is to boost water security. For example, even if a natural disaster destroyed the southern Delta’s
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levees and caused a sudden flood of saltwater into the region, the northern intake of the tunnels would guarantee that fresh, drinkable water continued southward. “I know this is hard for people to wrap their heads around, but putting the intakes north of the Delta could help struggling species, like the Delta smelt, chinook salmon, Sacramento splittail, sturgeon, etc.,” Vogel said. As things are now, at certain times of the year, the water pumps about an hour south of Sacramento can actually make the San Joaquin River flow backward. Salmon juveniles, swimming down the Sacramento River on their journey to the sea, regularly follow this wayward current. It leads them into backwaters and sloughs, from which they usually never escape. Many are eaten by predators. Others are drawn directly toward the pumps and squashed against the screens placed there to keep the fish out. Biologists have blamed this reversedcurrent phenomenon as a serious detriment to fish populations. Vogel says the tunnels will reduce, though not eliminate, the reverse flow. But there’s still one major, critical question: Will more water be leaving the Sacramento River each year than currently if the tunnels are implemented? Biologists are at work trying to understand how much water the species that live in the Delta need to survive, if not thrive—but as of now, Vogel said “nobody knows” how much water the tunnels will take. Hemly wants several uncertainties addressed before the state moves forward with any Delta-management plan: How much water is there, who owns it, how much will be sent to Los Angeles and how much help does the ecosystem need? “After we have those questions answered,” he said, “we can decide what to build.”
Before the gold rush, so many salmon swam upstream to spawn every year in the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers that, according to accounts from explorers and settlers, the water between the Carquinez Strait boiled with fish in the autumn, shore to shore. More than 1 million fish per year made the annual migration. But in the 1950s and ’60s, after two powerful pumps were installed in the southern Delta, a clear correlation began to emerge, linking increased water-export rates and a steady decline of the remaining salmon. By the 2000s, more than half of the Delta’s water was being exported. In 2005, the pumps diverted away almost 7 million acre feet of water. The fall-run salmon population promptly crashed, bottoming out in 2009 to its all-time low of 39,000 adults. Abrupt pumping restrictions enforced after the salmon crash, combined with productive ocean conditions, seem to have had an effect, and the fall-run chinook has partially bounced back. “Having 39,000 fish come back was really shocking, especially after having 750,000 in
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