Jerry Brown still refuses to take position on peripheral canal, water bond

It is noteworthy that the old farts still call it a “peripheral canal”. It is unlikely that the end product will resemble a canal as we know them today. Furthermore, it is likely that most of it will be built under ground and some of it UNDER rather than around the current system. I and others in the know have come to refer to the plan at The Delta Conveyance System.

Kevin commented;

"It is noteworthy that the old farts still call it a “peripheral canal”."

Well count me in on that. Why i would continue to use the term "peripheral canal" is because that best describes the location and purposes of the structure's design. It is peripheral because it goes along the outer fringes of the delta ecosystem, and a canal because it's main purpose is to transfer large amounts of water from the northern rivers to the San Joaquin agribusinesses. We can always come up with newer and fancier names like "Delta Conveyance System" or something else to confuse the public to what is being done with their tax dollars supposedly for their benefit.

However, we all know that the true beneficiaries of the peripheral canal will be none other than the San Joaquin agribusiness corporations that would be siphoning the water through the canal and onto their regularly drought-stricken fields. To clarify, the summer season in CA's San Joaquin Valley is regular drought conditions, one of the few places in the U.S. that is guaranteed almost zero rainfall from May until September, yet these agribusiness corporations still insist upon growing the most water dependent crops they can manage, all the while sucking the rivers of the north dry in ther process of excessive irrigation needed to keep their crops alive through regular drought conditions all summer long. They have already sucked out their own grounwater, causing major subsidence there, and drained the once mighty San Joaquin River to a fertilizer choked trickle of nothingness. The San Joaquin agribusinesses' sights are now set on the Sacramento River watershed.

Some folks may think that it is "crazy" to expect San Joaquin agribusinesses to recognize the factors of dry summers being a regular occurence that may indicate poor choices of crops that require excessive irrigation, and that the farmers and the fish would all benefit from changing their crops to a more drought tolerant variety that does not require excessive irrigation all summer long.

Would counter that it is indeed VERY illogical to expect a regularly dry summer climate to provide San Joaquin agribusinesses with enough water to grow the choices of crops in that region. Maybe they feel that relocating entire river systems to go against gravity by means of a peripheral canal system will buy them a few extra years of growing crops inappropriate for their region?

IF it were up to me, i would propose that other farmers with more insight into ecology would be allowed to grow drought tolerant crops in the San Joaquin Valley instead of the current agribusiness models that attempt to turn physics and reality upside down by growing water dependent crops in a regularly dry habitat. So if the current land "owners" in San Joaquin agribusinesses are unable or unwilling to alter their crops to more drought tolerant species, the land should be taken from them by eminant domain (or long term squatter occupations!!) and given to more insightful farmers who would make the leap into growing drought tolerant crops. Then all the excess water once used for irrigation could remain in the northern rivers, and farmers would remain employed in San Joaquin Valley. This is for the lands not yet retired from that other negative side effect of excessive irrigation, selenium contamination.

Some background on selenium contamination in San Joaquin's Westlands district;



Tom Stokely: Ending Selenium Pollution of the San Joaquin River and Bay-Delta"


Submitted by Tom Stokely on Wed, 05/19/2010 - 3:44pm




"Imagine that a heavily subsidized industry puts thousands of pounds of toxic pollutants into groundwater and surface water and then argues that while they have had 14 years to avoid meeting water quality standards, they want almost another decade because they don’t have the public financing or the technology to treat their pollution. Well, it’s all right here in California’s western San Joaquin Valley.

Located between Los Banos and Firebaugh along the west side of the San Joaquin River, Grasslands-area irrigators could be permitted to continue dumping agricultural drainage water highly contaminated with selenium into the river via its tributary Mud Slough in violation of state selenium water quality objectives. Their disposal system is called the Grasslands Bypass Project. Despite the toxic character of the runoff, the Grasslands irrigators have been exempt from meeting water quality objectives for selenium since 1996!

Selenium is a trace element that humans, other mammals, and birds, all need in small amounts to maintain good health, but too much at even modestly elevated levels can cause horrific health and reproductive problems. Symptoms of selenosis (disease caused by too much selenium in the diet) can include garlic breath, gastrointestinal disorders, hair loss, nail loss, fatigue, irritability, and neurological damage. Severe selenosis can result in pulmonary edema, cirrhosis of the liver, and death.

C-WIN recently wrote and submitted comments representing a coalition of 18 good government, tribal, angling, and environmental groups including C-WIN, opposing a water quality basin plan amendment to extend for 9 years and 3 month their Grasslands Bypass Project.

The Bypass project shunts polluted drainwater around the lands of the Grasslands Water District and uses a portion of the San Luis Drain, which formerly sent Westlands Water District’s polluted farm runoff to Kesterson Wildlife Refuge where so many migratory bird deformities were discovered in the 1980’s, to move the sewage to the San Joaquin River via Mud Slough. While Kesterson no longer receives toxic runoff, the selenium built up in the aquifers downslope of Westlands and its neighbors, and now drains into Mud Slough, the San Joaquin River, the Delta and the San Francisco Bay

Back in early 2001, the Grassland drainers promised they would meet the state’s San Joaquin River and Mud Slough water quality objectives for selenium by October 31, 2010. These objectives are 5 parts per billion (ppb) over a 4 day average. Unfortunately, agricultural drainage discharged from the San Luis Drain into Mud Slough contains 54 ppb (30 day average) of selenium. If the basin plan amendment is approved, selenium contamination of the slough and the river would be allowed to continue largely unabated until December 31, 2019.

Basin plan amendments to the Sacramento/San Joaquin water quality control plan must first be considered by the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board, followed by its parent agency the State Water Resources Control Board. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will have final say over whether the unproven treatment technology proposed by the Grasslands drainers will be allowed to justify over 9 more years of toxic discharges to the San Joaquin, the Delta and San Francisco Bay.

Birds, frogs, snakes, fish and other critters in and near the Grasslands reuse area where drainage water is concentrated are bioaccumulating high levels of selenium, so much so that the eggs of shorebirds actually have higher levels of selenium than were found in the same bird eggs at Kesterson in the 1980’s! Selenium is also bioaccumulating in clams, open water birds, and other estuary species in Suisun Bay and San Francisco Bay. The legacy of the Kesterson poisoning continues, too quietly.

Because of the Grasslands Bypass Project and other interim actions taken by western San Joaquin Valley irrigators, it has been tempting to believe that the selenium problem went away when Kesterson was sealed and agricultural drains of the Westlands Water District to the south of Grasslands were plugged in the late 1980s. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Plugging the drains simply made the perched water table rise up in west side soils, along with its witch’s brew of selenium, mercury, salt, boron and other harmful substances until it is now within a few feet of the soil surface. Much of the Grasslands Bypass Project’s supposed progress results from diverting the pollution around neighboring farms, wildlife refuges, and duck clubs, and either passing on the pollution directly to the river, the Delta, and the Bay or storing and concentrating it in the west side’s shallow groundwater. These practices will only hasten ruination of these lands for any future cultivation, either irrigated or dry-land (that is, rainfall-only) farming. There is no way to irrigate these poisonous lands without mobilizing selenium and other contaminants.

This selenium contamination will be with us for a long time, anyway. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) determined that even if new selenium were not added to the aquifers of the western San Joaquin Valley by ceasing irrigation, it would still take 63-304 years to drain the accumulated selenium IF the San Luis Drain were completed to the San Francisco Bay, and the Grasslands drainers were allowed to increase their dumping rate over eight times the current amount of selenium discharged from Mud Slough to the Bay/Delta every year! With all federal and state water plans in California calling for more (not less) water to irrigate these poisonous lands, it’s clear that current policies are creating a trans-generational Superfund site of selenium and other toxins in the aquifers of the western San Joaquin Valley.

These heavily subsidized farmers do not have public funding or technology to treat their contaminated waste, such as through a reverse osmosis system. If regulators decide to allow the Grasslands drainers by approving the basin plan amendment, they would willfully ignore the significant impacts downstream. For example:

- Continued discharges of selenium into the San Joaquin River will doom efforts to restore salmon and steelhead. Dr. Dennis Lemly, Research Professor of Biology at Wake Forest University in Winston/Salem, North Carolina, determined that these selenium discharges kill up to half of all juvenile salmon and steelhead in the San Joaquin River—and there aren’t very many to begin with!
- Ending irrigation on these toxic farms was not even considered, even though the USGS has stated, “Land retirement is a key strategy to reduce drainage because it can effectively reduce drainage to zero if all drainage-impaired lands are retired.”
- Mud Slough produces half of the methylated mercury in the San Joaquin River system, but only 10 percent of the flows during the non-irrigation season.
- Mud Slough produces about a third of the salt load found in the San Joaquin River at Vernalis, further stressing the Delta and Suisun Bay.
- Bureau of Reclamation economic analyses show that the proposed reverse osmosis and other treatment systems will cost more than the benefits, and that land retirement is the most cost effective option.

What other industry gets this kind of break from pollution laws? If the rest of us polluted even a small amount of ground or surface waters, you bet that the various regulatory industries would come down hard on us because we don’t have powerful lawyers and politicians on our side."

selenium article found here;
http://www.c-win.org/blog/ending-selenium-pollution-san-joaquin-river-and-bay-delta.html


There comes a time when our society can admit that we made some mistakes and can alter our lifestyle to be more compatible with natural water systems as indigenous peoples here had plenty resources from rivers kept in their natural form.