The Delta is a political swamp (pun intended) due to long-standing environmental issues, such as "rare and endangered" fish, "salt water intrusion" and sensitive habitats at the edge of the historical marsh (Jepson Prairie).
The mavensnotebook.com lady used to say that the multilayered and crisscrossed layers of federal, state and local water bureaucracy, including water rights courts, makes it impossible to systematically understand water in California most of the time. Lots of rumored corruption.
Los Angeles has a long, notorious history (see the Jack Nicholson movie "Chinatown") of pretty much stealing water from other parts of the state to the north (and arguably, the Colorado River).
In the Owens Valley (eastern Sierra Nevada, Highway 395, Mt. Whitney region), there was a series of assassinations of small farmers/ranchers that refused to sell out to the LA Water district.
I was in the Rio Vista area about a week ago, and ran across an employee at the Ryde Hotel who said he heard from old timers that the Delta region has been mostly undeveloped since Prohibition because some super rich old money family (Comstock silver, 1800s) had purchased a large oil/gas field there, that has mostly gone unexploited.
fwiw, the bakery in downtown Rio Vista has excellent Cambodian soup (similar to Vietnamese Pho).
The old China "town" area in Locke, just upstream from Walnut Grove, is rumored to be up for world heritage site designation soon.
There are two famous river crossing ferries still operating (by the State of California Transportation Dept.) upstream from Rio Vista that I keep trying to take, but they are intermittent and when I've gone lately, they had just closed for the day.
Many areas of the delta are surprising (very lush compared to most of California) and driving/cycling/boating in that area is like time travel due to the lack of modern development.
This is an excellent story about a small landowner and recreational business dude in the Delta beating the vast legal death machine of the State of California:
The state has sold close to $24B in "water" bonds in the last decade and with that has built basically no storage as the population doubled since the Oroville Dam finished under then Gov. Reagan.
Global warming has basically nothing to do with why CA's one party state will have a never ending drought emergency. Everything to do with having come of age during a (for the West) relatively water abundant 100 year period. Go back 2000 years, 300 year droughts are the norm not an aberration
1. built a massive levee around sacramento (or just the downtown area?) high enough to impound 100 feet of water. that would presumably require a large aqueduct many miles up the american river (near folsom dam?) to feed water into the capitol pool or whatever you want to call it.
2. flood the entire sacramento and central valley to a depth of 100 feet, which would create a lake about 400 miles long and about 50 miles wide at the widest point. not sure where all that water would come from. a huge pipeline from the columbia river?
According to lore, the largest and most powerful political lobby in the Delta region are the pear growers that have a monopoly on canning Fruit Cocktails for national and world distribution. Holy Maraschino Cherry!
They insist on public resources to maintain the aging levees far beyond any reasonable profit level or public benefit from the agriculture. Most of the delta should probably be returned to marsh for wildlife, fish, ecotourism and pre-emptive flood protection for upstream communities.
All of the farmland in the Delta is extremely lush, ancient marsh, almost like peat moss. The problem is that all the levees were built by hand, mostly by Chinese workers, about 100-125 years ago. The land surface on most of the farms has subsided as much as 50 feet below water level on the non-land side of the levees. The water pressure differential can be extreme, and cause severe flood risk to Delta farmers during large storms and high water in case of levee failure.
If you look at old CA maps you will see Lake Tulare. It is interesting we did have a 'reservoir' at one point. This may be a more pratical solution along your thought lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulare_Lake
That was where the Kern River came out of the southern Sierra Nevada. It only overflowed into the San Joaquin River in high flood years, iirc.
Diversions for ag and municipal water use take almost all the water except during floods.
There are already plans to divert flood water from the Kern and/or other rivers in that area into newly discovered underground gravel formations, which should be a good method since evaporation is minimal and there are very small costs to engineer, build and maintain the diversion structures compared to a conventional open-air reservoir.
Flood designated farm fields during high water in the winter above the gravel beds, then the water from the flooded fields will seep down into the gravel beds where it can be pumped out during dry periods.
How ridiculous is it to think about pumping some of that river flow over a different hill into a better location for a reservoir? Leaving aside questions of whether such a project could ever get approved in California, or completed there prior to the heat death of the universe.
iirc, the Sites Reservoir design plans to use "cheap" daytime energy to pump water up from a small, existing reservoir and then release it for "less cheap" nightime hydro electric generation. I think the elevation difference will be around 200-300 feet. They might have plans to use solar electricity to pump the water up during the day eventually.
The whole project seems pretty weird, I've never heard of that large of an offline/offstream water storage project, but I'm no expert.
It's a water battery. Not uncommon for any area that has two reservoirs in close series. They do it with Lake Burton and Lake Rabun in Georgia. Way more environmentally friendly than building a giant acid battery.
When/if built, Sites Reservoir will take pumped water from the existing (Tehama-Colusa?) canal that runs to the southwest from near Red Bluff along the east side of the Sacramento Valley.
The Sites Reservoir will be located just over the first range of hills west of the town of Maxwell (on I-5), east of Ladoga/Stonyford.
I have some cell phone pictures of that area from last spring when I did a test run of my new 4x4 AT tires on my camper van, as well as the area around Stonyford and parts of the Mendocino National Forest (the only National Forest in California that does not have one paved road across it! OHV heaven.).
The spring wildflowers south of the little town of Sites on Huffmaster Road (dirt) were stunning, even in a drought year. There is a valley with a few ranches about 5 miles long that will be covered with water. Should be nice for boating/fishing when filled. Some new lakeside homesites might be developed.
They do "big ass tunnels" in that area despite the earthquake threat, so maybe we don't even need to pump it "over" something, just... y'know, *through* a mountain.
What, are we Homo Sapiens sapiens or not?! We do not kneel prostrate before the Earth's whims! If subjected to them, we struggle, and often win!
Jerry Brown tried to get "Delta bypass" peripheral canal/tunnels built for something like 40 years. The politics are very bizarre, and the project has never been approved. The current version is for one tunnel.
Dan Walters is one of the best senior political reporters in California:
Having lived in Elk Grove for about 10 years I would have loved to have seen this with the exception of my private range next to Walnut Grove . . . I get it, it would be ugly but very effective, and the nuts in CA probably would twist off if someone proposed it. The Delta is one of the most fascinating areas in that it produces some of the finest fruits in the world, the best pears and the Bing cherries are to die for. Fun blog BJ, thanks.
I was just thinking about the hydrologic cycle today as I saw a thunderstorm in the distance. I could be wrong, but wouldn't the condensation of water vapor into rainfall take heat out of the atmosphere? Is there a built-in feedback loop that dampens atmospheric warming?
Yes and no. It converts thermal energy into kinetic energy, but the law of conservation of energy still applies to a closed system. The Earth isn't a completely closed system, but there's not a lot of ways energy is bled off into space outside of radiative balance or internment of stored chemical energy into the soil in the form of hydrocarbons.
What's preventing us from refilling aquifers if they already act as large reservoirs. What are the practical implications against why we aren't already doing this?
Rain refills aquifers naturally. Everywhere where there's a "water table" is an aquifer. When we withdraw more water from the aquifer through wells than is recharged by the rain, the water table goes down.
Urban land development also interferes with aquifer recharge, because no rain can get through the impervious surfaces (roofs, roads) we create. Only very recently have aquifer recharge elements started to be implemented in many urban areas. They have been very common in Florida since the 1970s, since they are very conscious of their aquifer health there being that they're only a few feet from the water table. Groundwater recharge elements which infiltrate stormwater into the ground are just now catching on in places like Atlanta and Nashville, but they're difficult to design safely and can lead to problems. It's basically like a septic field for stormwater. Early pilots of those sorts of design elements in Japan in the 1980s caused long dried out creeks to appear again as the groundwater table rose.
The Delta is a political swamp (pun intended) due to long-standing environmental issues, such as "rare and endangered" fish, "salt water intrusion" and sensitive habitats at the edge of the historical marsh (Jepson Prairie).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jepson_Prairie
Expecting the bizarro political forces in California to be able to do the right thing to conserve fresh water is almost beyond comprehension.
I used to read this blog a lot, but farcebork stopped sending me notifications for unknown reasons.
https://mavensnotebook.com/2022/06/23/delta-independent-science-board-delta-conveyance-project-update-on-environmental-documents/
The mavensnotebook.com lady used to say that the multilayered and crisscrossed layers of federal, state and local water bureaucracy, including water rights courts, makes it impossible to systematically understand water in California most of the time. Lots of rumored corruption.
Los Angeles has a long, notorious history (see the Jack Nicholson movie "Chinatown") of pretty much stealing water from other parts of the state to the north (and arguably, the Colorado River).
In the Owens Valley (eastern Sierra Nevada, Highway 395, Mt. Whitney region), there was a series of assassinations of small farmers/ranchers that refused to sell out to the LA Water district.
I was in the Rio Vista area about a week ago, and ran across an employee at the Ryde Hotel who said he heard from old timers that the Delta region has been mostly undeveloped since Prohibition because some super rich old money family (Comstock silver, 1800s) had purchased a large oil/gas field there, that has mostly gone unexploited.
fwiw, the bakery in downtown Rio Vista has excellent Cambodian soup (similar to Vietnamese Pho).
The old China "town" area in Locke, just upstream from Walnut Grove, is rumored to be up for world heritage site designation soon.
There are two famous river crossing ferries still operating (by the State of California Transportation Dept.) upstream from Rio Vista that I keep trying to take, but they are intermittent and when I've gone lately, they had just closed for the day.
https://dot.ca.gov/caltrans-near-me/district-4/d4-projects/d4-solano-delta-ferry
Many areas of the delta are surprising (very lush compared to most of California) and driving/cycling/boating in that area is like time travel due to the lack of modern development.
This is an excellent story about a small landowner and recreational business dude in the Delta beating the vast legal death machine of the State of California:
https://twitter.com/bucklerisland
Hrm. I appear to live in the region labeled "Sorta Fucked".
Alas.
So, if I were going to take out a mountain to get more rain through, would I want to aim for one more to the *north* of Albuquerque, or south?
We really need another moon anyway. It'd look super cool.
The state has sold close to $24B in "water" bonds in the last decade and with that has built basically no storage as the population doubled since the Oroville Dam finished under then Gov. Reagan.
Global warming has basically nothing to do with why CA's one party state will have a never ending drought emergency. Everything to do with having come of age during a (for the West) relatively water abundant 100 year period. Go back 2000 years, 300 year droughts are the norm not an aberration
There might not be any more good places to build dams left.
So many reasons to put 100' of water overtop Sacramento.
No more "good places to build dams?" Comedic gold.
Proves "non-ethical zombie preppers" wasn't a one off.
Smart and funny, now I have to buy the author a beer.
jokes aside, you have two choices, both dumb:
1. built a massive levee around sacramento (or just the downtown area?) high enough to impound 100 feet of water. that would presumably require a large aqueduct many miles up the american river (near folsom dam?) to feed water into the capitol pool or whatever you want to call it.
2. flood the entire sacramento and central valley to a depth of 100 feet, which would create a lake about 400 miles long and about 50 miles wide at the widest point. not sure where all that water would come from. a huge pipeline from the columbia river?
According to lore, the largest and most powerful political lobby in the Delta region are the pear growers that have a monopoly on canning Fruit Cocktails for national and world distribution. Holy Maraschino Cherry!
They insist on public resources to maintain the aging levees far beyond any reasonable profit level or public benefit from the agriculture. Most of the delta should probably be returned to marsh for wildlife, fish, ecotourism and pre-emptive flood protection for upstream communities.
All of the farmland in the Delta is extremely lush, ancient marsh, almost like peat moss. The problem is that all the levees were built by hand, mostly by Chinese workers, about 100-125 years ago. The land surface on most of the farms has subsided as much as 50 feet below water level on the non-land side of the levees. The water pressure differential can be extreme, and cause severe flood risk to Delta farmers during large storms and high water in case of levee failure.
If you look at old CA maps you will see Lake Tulare. It is interesting we did have a 'reservoir' at one point. This may be a more pratical solution along your thought lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulare_Lake
That was where the Kern River came out of the southern Sierra Nevada. It only overflowed into the San Joaquin River in high flood years, iirc.
Diversions for ag and municipal water use take almost all the water except during floods.
There are already plans to divert flood water from the Kern and/or other rivers in that area into newly discovered underground gravel formations, which should be a good method since evaporation is minimal and there are very small costs to engineer, build and maintain the diversion structures compared to a conventional open-air reservoir.
Flood designated farm fields during high water in the winter above the gravel beds, then the water from the flooded fields will seep down into the gravel beds where it can be pumped out during dry periods.
How ridiculous is it to think about pumping some of that river flow over a different hill into a better location for a reservoir? Leaving aside questions of whether such a project could ever get approved in California, or completed there prior to the heat death of the universe.
You can pump water, but it's very expensive to do so, and you have to get it from somewhere.
iirc, the Sites Reservoir design plans to use "cheap" daytime energy to pump water up from a small, existing reservoir and then release it for "less cheap" nightime hydro electric generation. I think the elevation difference will be around 200-300 feet. They might have plans to use solar electricity to pump the water up during the day eventually.
The whole project seems pretty weird, I've never heard of that large of an offline/offstream water storage project, but I'm no expert.
It's a water battery. Not uncommon for any area that has two reservoirs in close series. They do it with Lake Burton and Lake Rabun in Georgia. Way more environmentally friendly than building a giant acid battery.
Yes, the concept seems promising.
Similarly, people seem to hopeful about the development of large iron-air-pellet batteries, close to zero pollution?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/startup-claims-breakthrough-in-long-duration-batteries-11626946330
Sites Reservoir is already mostly, sorta, kinda in final-ish regulatory approval (after 20 years of bureaucratic bs), about 100 miles to the north.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sites_Reservoir
When/if built, Sites Reservoir will take pumped water from the existing (Tehama-Colusa?) canal that runs to the southwest from near Red Bluff along the east side of the Sacramento Valley.
The Sites Reservoir will be located just over the first range of hills west of the town of Maxwell (on I-5), east of Ladoga/Stonyford.
I have some cell phone pictures of that area from last spring when I did a test run of my new 4x4 AT tires on my camper van, as well as the area around Stonyford and parts of the Mendocino National Forest (the only National Forest in California that does not have one paved road across it! OHV heaven.).
The spring wildflowers south of the little town of Sites on Huffmaster Road (dirt) were stunning, even in a drought year. There is a valley with a few ranches about 5 miles long that will be covered with water. Should be nice for boating/fishing when filled. Some new lakeside homesites might be developed.
They do "big ass tunnels" in that area despite the earthquake threat, so maybe we don't even need to pump it "over" something, just... y'know, *through* a mountain.
What, are we Homo Sapiens sapiens or not?! We do not kneel prostrate before the Earth's whims! If subjected to them, we struggle, and often win!
*ahem* :D
Jerry Brown tried to get "Delta bypass" peripheral canal/tunnels built for something like 40 years. The politics are very bizarre, and the project has never been approved. The current version is for one tunnel.
Dan Walters is one of the best senior political reporters in California:
https://www.modbee.com/opinion/article174606976.html
Having lived in Elk Grove for about 10 years I would have loved to have seen this with the exception of my private range next to Walnut Grove . . . I get it, it would be ugly but very effective, and the nuts in CA probably would twist off if someone proposed it. The Delta is one of the most fascinating areas in that it produces some of the finest fruits in the world, the best pears and the Bing cherries are to die for. Fun blog BJ, thanks.
I saw the email stating that some new discussion about an alternative is going on in the HWFO slack channel?
I uninstalled slack on the old Win10 PC (running on fumes) I'm typing this on.
Can you post a summary? Thnx
I was just thinking about the hydrologic cycle today as I saw a thunderstorm in the distance. I could be wrong, but wouldn't the condensation of water vapor into rainfall take heat out of the atmosphere? Is there a built-in feedback loop that dampens atmospheric warming?
Yes and no. It converts thermal energy into kinetic energy, but the law of conservation of energy still applies to a closed system. The Earth isn't a completely closed system, but there's not a lot of ways energy is bled off into space outside of radiative balance or internment of stored chemical energy into the soil in the form of hydrocarbons.
What's preventing us from refilling aquifers if they already act as large reservoirs. What are the practical implications against why we aren't already doing this?
Rain refills aquifers naturally. Everywhere where there's a "water table" is an aquifer. When we withdraw more water from the aquifer through wells than is recharged by the rain, the water table goes down.
Urban land development also interferes with aquifer recharge, because no rain can get through the impervious surfaces (roofs, roads) we create. Only very recently have aquifer recharge elements started to be implemented in many urban areas. They have been very common in Florida since the 1970s, since they are very conscious of their aquifer health there being that they're only a few feet from the water table. Groundwater recharge elements which infiltrate stormwater into the ground are just now catching on in places like Atlanta and Nashville, but they're difficult to design safely and can lead to problems. It's basically like a septic field for stormwater. Early pilots of those sorts of design elements in Japan in the 1980s caused long dried out creeks to appear again as the groundwater table rose.