Salmon win water to reestablish a historic run, and we are reminded to save all the water falling from the sky from the visionary folks who established the water storage plans for California.
An excerpt.
Settlement Will Provide Water for Parched River
After a long fight, the San Joaquin will get enough year-round to revive a salmon run.
By Bettina Boxall, Times Staff WriterAugust 20, 2006
FRIANT, Calif. — "Remember this, water is California's most valuable possession — we need every drop that falls on the mountains and on the plains."The speaker was Gov. Earl Warren.
The year was 1949. The occasion was the opening of two giant valves at the base of Friant Dam, for the first time sending the cold, Sierra-fed waters of the San Joaquin River pouring into an irrigation canal big enough to float a destroyer.
In few places in California was Warren's mandate taken to heart as conscientiously as at Friant, northeast of Fresno.
By the time the 151-mile canal running to Bakersfield, the Friant-Kern, was inaugurated two years after Warren's speech with a fly-over of 100 planes and flotilla of bathing beauties in cruising power boats, one of California's greatest rivers was in its death throes, swallowed virtually whole by the nation's biggest irrigation project.
About 60 miles of the San Joaquin, the state's second-longest river, shriveled to dust as its mountain waters were rerouted to a million acres of farmland up and down the arid eastern flanks of the San Joaquin Valley. A chinook salmon run of tens of thousands was wiped out.
The lower stretch of the San Joaquin filled with runoff and farm drain water so tainted that it came to be known as the "lower colon of California."
Now, thanks to a settlement in a tortured, nearly two-decade-long court fight, the San Joaquin is about to get some of its water back. The agreement, in the final stages of approval, is designed to resurrect the salmon run and return year-round flows to the river for the first time since Harry Truman was president.
