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A new look at risk revives an old plan: California policy-makers lay groundwork to reintroduce proposals for water-conveyance canal

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on November 19, 2008 at 7:53 am

From Engineering News-Record:

A proposal to build a 42-mile long, 400-ft-wide water conveyance canal soundly rejected by California voters in 1982 is rising from the mists of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta again. It is driven this time, in large part, by a heightened appreciation for risk and the physical fragility of the state’s water supply. Consider it a legacy of Hurricane Katrina.

“Not long ago, risk was a dirty word, but things have changed,” says Martin W. McCann Jr., project technical director of the “Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Risk Management Strategy” study, one of several concurrent studies analyzing water issues in the state. “Now, [risk] is becoming every man’s tool. But it’s a unique expertise. We need to find the balance in how and when to use it.”

McCann, who also is a dam safety expert and an associate professor at Stanford University, spoke on Nov. 7 about the DRMS study, a project of the state’s Dept. of Water Resources, at the American Society of Civil Engineers’ 138th Civil Engineering Conference in Pittsburgh. He was part of a panel on risk-assessment evolution and expectations.

How experts define and plan for risk mitigation on infrastructure facilities is changing in the post-Katrina world. The emergence of new disciplines developed while studying and recovering from the disaster in New Orleans has led to techniques for evaluating the fragility of infrastructure and weighing that against the probability of failure and its consequences.

At the direction of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R), California launched at least four studies to attack the problem of its water supply and the protection of the ecosystems in the delta. The reports are coming in and are refocusing attention on the need for what is euphemistically called a “dual-conveyance” water delivery system. The first conveyance system is the waterways of the delta; the second is a revitalization of plans for a bypass, or peripheral canal.