Peripheral canal drilling could start next month
Posted on | July 16, 2009 | 2 Comments
SACRAMENTO — State water officials plan to drill into channel bottoms at 16 locations throughout the Delta as they explore possible intake sites for a peripheral canal, reports the Stockton Record.
The drilling could begin as soon as next month.
The California Department of Water Resources said it needs data about channel soils to help plan where a canal would begin, as well as tunnels for various proposed alignments. The state has been surveying private lands for some time, a Water Resources spokesman said today, but this stage of the project requires notification and a public comment period, which ends July 26.
To keep reading, click on the state seal. Story via Aquafornia.
See past stories on the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, Peripheral Canal and concerns from environmentalists and fisheries by using the search key at the bottom of the page, or going to AP and Onwards: Press from the West.
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July 16th, 2009 @ 12:47 pm
Do you know if any enviro groups have signed on? Last I knew, some fisheries biologists were supporting a REVISED sort of P-canal. But, of course, this raises the specter of another north-south war.
July 16th, 2009 @ 2:29 pm
As far as I can gather from a storm of stories last week, environmentalists and fisheries are adamantly opposed to this for a number of reasons, the chief one being that there seems little other reason to build a peripheral canal other than making bigger and more frequent water diversions. So even if the migrating fish aren’t chewed up in pumps, they will suffer from a host of other problems to do with fresh stream flow being reduced in the delta, concentrate pollution, warmer waters etc.
To read more, I recommend going to Press from the West section, then clicking on July, and looking at a host of articles from the San Francisco Chronicle last week that characterized the drought driven fast tracking of this project as the death knell for Pacific salmon and life on the Delta.
Or you could simply search on salmon. I do not mean to make more work for the reader, but these pieces are uniquely passionate, eloquent, in short, quite magnificent, and thus deserve reading.
On the other hand, I know that many water managers have felt that the Peripheral Canal should always have been built and that this is a case of California doing something long overdue. The case for the Peripheral Canal would have to be part of an over-arching Bay-Delta conservation plan. From memory, Mike Taugher of the Contra Costa Times did a very fine piece recently looking how the case for the PC is hardwired into the conservation plan and the plan’s likelihood of success. He sounded skeptical.