If the estimates of 30 million acre feet (Folsom holds 1,2 million) are accurate, and a way can be found to access it regularly and safely, this find could solve many of the water problems drought years often bring us.
Creation of a reservoir
By Tom Philp -
Published 12:00 am PDT Sunday, May 13, 2007
The seeds of a Sacramento Valley water conflict were planted, oh, a few million years ago. Blame it on two volcanoes. One was Mount Yana, the other Mount Maidu. They once towered over the Valley, equals to today's Mount Lassen. But, they were unstable. And volcanic mudflows, lasting perhaps a million years, leveled these massive mountains.
When nature was done spreading these volcanoes across the landscape, they had become a hidden labyrinth of nooks and crannies below the Earth's surface. And they became ideal repositories for water. Year after year, as Sierra snowmelt and Valley rains percolated into the ground, the sediments of these two long-dead volcanoes became a living aquifer.
The existence of this geologic formation of an underground reservoir -- the Lower Tuscan Formation -- has been known for years. But nobody until recently began methodically looking at just how big its footprint spans beneath the Valley floor, just how much water it holds. That changed when a state geologist, Toccoy Dudley, began snooping around. He discovered what he thought was a potentially huge cache of water many times the size of Shasta Lake.
The news made some folks in the Valley very excited. Others became very nervous. The discovery of the Lower Tuscan created a buzz in the water world of California. And political fault lines began to appear. Questions of who might pump the water, who might sell it and who might try to take over the resource began to surface. There are no solid answers. The initial human instinct is to defend one's turf, but from whom?
"It is all about fear," said David Guy, the outgoing head of the Northern California Water Association. "Fear of the unknown. You can't see groundwater. It is sacrosanct. There is a whole other level of religion on groundwater that you don't have on surface water. Most people, groundwater is their only source ... the last supply. People rightfully guard it very jealously."
Here is what is so screwy about how Californians manage our water. Every last molecule of water in a river is subject to scrupulous management by the state. The state says who can use the water and how much, and the state can take the water rights away if water is being wasted. It's a public resource. If the water happens to be below the ground, however, none of the same rules apply. Groundwater is very much private property. The courts can get involved if property owners sue one another, and a judge is forced to divvy up the supply. And a local government can try to monitor and oversee the groundwater uses, if it dares to try. But the Sacramento Valley is all too typical for California of the primitive understanding and management of groundwater. For a state that is a pioneer on resource issues in so many ways, this isn't one of them.
