California’s broken system for water delivery

From Mike Taugher of the Contra Costa Times:

Near the end of a 117-mile canal that takes delta water to the heart of one of California’s richest agricultural regions, thousands of farmworkers and their supporters gathered in mid-April to demand more water. The main artery connecting the vast farms of the western San Joaquin Valley to the heart of California’s water delivery system — the delta — is going dry, leaving the nation’s largest irrigation district without much of its most unpredictable commodity, water.

For farmers and their employee, the effects are dramatic. Unemployment in Mendota, the southern terminus of the Delta-Mendota Canal, is at 40 percent. Fields are drying up and the possibility is real that some farms might go out of business.

But even among the thousands of protesters who were preparing for a four-day march, one was as likely to find employees of farms with plenty of water as not. Those who retain historic water rights on the San Joaquin River do not have to depend on delta pumps, and they have full shares. Farmers with several water sources, those with their own reserves and those with older, more senior water rights will fare better than those who do not.

And so it is in a California drought. At stake are the survival of species, the fate of millions of acres of agricultural land and, some argue, the state’s economy, not to mention the livelihoods of delta residents and the safety of drinking water in parts of the Bay Area.

Read more from the Contra Costa Times by clicking here.

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