Dear Governor

IN 1998, the private water speculator Cadiz, Inc began selling the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California on the idea of a groundwater project in the Mojave Desert. As enthusiasm for it grew, by November 1999, the US Bureau of Land Management and Metropolitan had produced a draft environmental impact statement as to what they imagined that the Cadiz project would entail, its risks, its benefits and its costs.

For the next two years, hydrologists and geologists from the US National Park Service, the US Geological Survey and San Bernardino County vetted the claims of the draft EIS and returned their comments.

In September 2001, a final Environmental Impact Statement was published. The collective commentary was so withering and the risks revealed by independent scrutiny so overwhelming that in 2002 the Metropolitan board voted to abandon the project.

Internet searches for the massive four-volume review, once posted on-line, now result in a series of dead links.

The print edition resides in all its girth in the public library of Needles, Calif., and a few other desert public offices.

It didn’t matter. The project was dead, right?

Wrong. Resumption of the project by Cadiz, Inc last autumn along with a fresh batch of claims that make pumping the Mojave’s groundwater sound positively beneficial for the desert inspired this writer to obtain hard copies of the 2001 Environmental Impact Report.

Its contents varied so markedly from the latest round of Cadiz assertions that, at the risk of being a buzz kill, the only rational response was to come back to Cadiz, Inc and its new partner, the Natural Heritage Institute, and comb through their fresh assertions, claim by claim. This is that effort.

Copies of the following Cadiz claims and often pointed questions about their accuracy will be going by e-mail to Cadiz, Inc and its partner, the Natural Heritage Institute, at the time of posting.

Any and all responses from Cadiz and the NHI, either as comment on line, or privately relayed, will be posted as they come in.

8/5/2009 UPDATE: The Los Angeles Times reports that Cadiz CEO Keith Brackpool and former Assemblyman and Cadiz employee Richard Katz were on Mayor Villariagosa’s recent trip to Iceland. To read more about Cadiz’s pay-to-pump approach to groundwater development, click here.

8/5/2009 FURTHER UPDATE: A few nicely crafted non-answers from the Natural Heritage Institute just in, posted in green after the jump.

Click here for the Questions for Cadiz

Category: groundwater
Tags: Cadiz Inc. > chance of rain > Emily Green > Natural Heritage Institute