Marin Independent Journal

Future of Delta a topic of debate among water managers
By Don Thompson
Associated Press

Thursday, November 11, 2004 - SACRAMENTO - University of California at Davis geology professor Jeffrey Mount envisions an earthquake, a moderate one of the sort that regularly strike California.

But this one topples a dozen or more levees that hold back San Francisco Bay's salt water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, causing what he estimated might be a three- or four-year disruption in the flow of freshwater to the giant pumps that slurp Northern California water to slake Southern California's thirst.

A mini-version of Mount's scenario came without warning or discernible cause in June, when a levee breach west of Stockton tipped the state's fragile water balance. Water managers flushed the Delta with reservoir water from as far north as Redding to keep the ocean at bay, water they otherwise would have saved to help struggling fish this fall. Wind and water pressure threatened to collapse other levees, which would have triggered worse disruption.

Other water experts attending a two-day flood management conference yesterday downplayed Mount's disaster sequence - not because it couldn't come true, but because it isn't new.

The state has faced the possibility for years, since farmers walled off wetlands with makeshift levees a century ago and 130,000 acres of the Delta's 700,000 acres began subsiding, increasing water pressure as the land sank below sea level. Rising sea levels from global warming, highlighted Monday with a report on the melting arctic ice cap, are a new threat but an incremental development.

"There are important policy issues in the Delta, but we are not facing an imminent crisis," said Tim Quinn, vice president for state water project issues with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

Curt Schmutte, who oversees Delta levees for the state Department of Water Resources, said encroaching seawater from collapsed levees could be driven back naturally by winter rains and spring snow melt, allowing at least partial pumping to continue while repairs were made.

With experts unable to agree even on the severity of the threat, they split as well on the path to solutions during the conference sponsored by the nonprofit Water Education Foundation.

Quinn endorsed the go-slow pace of CalFed, the California Federal Bay-Delta Program, which has tempered decades of water wars by requiring a consensus among the myriad affected interests. Best to follow CalFed's "no regrets" policy, Quinn said: "Don't make big, stupid decisions."

Mount, a member of the state Reclamation Board, said radical action is needed: "I've seen no evidence it is even remotely possible to sustain the direction we are going in the Delta."

It would take $1 billion in repairs to stitch the Delta's levee system together for another 100 years - far more than the $90 million just allocated by Congress, Mount projected. Some Delta islands may have to be abandoned in 20 to 40 years as the land there continues to subside, he said.

Schmutte, too, said it may be necessary to flood some islands or cover the vulnerable peat soil with rice straw to prevent more subsidence, and to rebuild other islands to sea level to relieve the water pressure and earthquake risk. It would cost millions of dollars more, he said, to strengthen levees to withstand earthquakes.

The alternative is to continue "doing what we've been doing for the last 50 to 100 years: stay the course and hope for the best," Mount said. "We cannot walk away from the Delta. All of us are dependent on it."

The worst possibility is making policy in response to crisis, Mount and Quinn said in rare agreement, as when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger overflew June's levee breach and promised financial help for the flooded farmers. "The next thing you know, you're paying $80 million to protect $20 million worth of land to let things go back to business as usual," said Quinn, an economist.

Yet it was vital to protect adjacent Highway 4 and water and gas pipelines that link the Central Valley and Bay Area through the flooded region, said Marci Coglianese, mayor of Rio Vista.

Widespread disruption of the state's water flow could revive political pressure for a freshwater canal bypassing the Delta, Quinn said. The proposal was rejected by voters in 1982, and Quinn said his agency, the nation's largest urban water district, wants to avoid a repeat of the "political quagmire" and resulting north-south split.