Excellent, balanced perspective on what is needed for water storage and flood protection; good, smart management and responding to the issues with intelligence and leadership, not ideological wrangling.
An excerpt.
Dan Walters: There's plenty of water -- we just need to manage it intelligently
By Dan Walters -- Bee Columnist Published 12:01 am PDT Wednesday, July 12, 2006
The governor of California stood atop a levee Tuesday and warned that the state is threatened by disastrous flooding, a day after his own water agency framed the potentially severe effects of global warming on water supplies.
The juxtaposition illustrated anew the two salient facts about water in California: Managing the flow of water through the state is vital to its economic, social and environmental health, and there's little agreement on how it should be managed.
All Californians should know that their water doesn't come from a faucet, but is collected, stored and distributed through monumental arrays of dams, reservoirs, canals and pipelines that supplement nature's own impressive water systems. Were it not for those man-made waterworks, California could not exist as a state of 37 million people.
It's an imperfect system, to be certain, but it has worked admirably, and as the state's population continues to grow, as the nature of the economy changes and as, perhaps, global warming changes precipitation patterns, California must expand and refine its waterworks. To do nothing in the face of that change is to move backward.
