Shopping at the science store
US Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) has joined California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in an attempt to return inconvenient data to the science store, reports the New York Times today. They are not happy, not happy at all, with “biological opinions” of federal scientists to do with the health of California fisheries. They would like to hire expertise more to the liking of powerful Central Valley constituents served by water pumped from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta — and more to the liking of one constituent in particular, Beverly Hills billionaire Stewart Resnick.
9/25/2009 Update: Senator Feinstein responds to her critics in the San Francisco Chronicle. Link after the jump.
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Delta divided
ON A DATE synonymous with American heroism in the face of emergency, yesterday the California State Legislature undertook to solve the state’s water crisis by midnight — and failed.
Looming over negotiations was California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose threats to veto any legislation that did not include new dams and reservoirs in spite of the state’s budget crisis only sound like they come from a comic book. This one, from yesterday, comes from the Associated Press: “Don’t send me Mickey Mouse bills. Send me the big stuff.”
With no way to find billions to pay for the “big stuff,” or new water to fill new reservoirs, last ditch efforts to move a sweeping package of water bills failed. Aquafornia, the newsfeed of the Water Education Foundation, has the latest reports, starting …
Peripheral canal drilling could start next month
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 …
Calls to California Legislature to save Delta salmon
Delta salmon. Photo: California Department of Water Resources
FOLLOWING Saturday’s editorial pointing to a tide of water bills about to surface in Sacramento, today the San Francisco Chronicle carries a guide to those bills along with calls to protect the Bay-Delta’s historic salmon fisheries.
Samples, links below along with a guide to the bills.
From “As the Delta goes, so go our salmon:”
“The estuary is dying. California has long viewed the delta as a massive reservoir it could endlessly plumb for agriculture and development. Water “wasting” to the sea is seen as a massive leak. In reality, the delta is an ecosystem – it is our Everglades, our Chesapeake Bay. An estuary’s lifeblood is its freshwater inflow mixing with saline tidal flows to create a rich, brackish water that nourishes salmon, crabs, sole, oysters and shrimp. As the estuary dies, so do California salmon.”
From “Limit …
NOAA moves to avert fish extinction in Bay Delta. “What is at stake here is not just the survival of species but the health of entire ecosystems and the economies that depend on them.”
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