The case for the canal, though one wonders why it has to keep being made.
Debate revived
25 years after voters defeated the 'peripheral canal,' proposal resurfaces as an option to save the Delta
By Jerry Meral - Special to The Bee
Published 12:00 am PDT Sunday, August 5, 2007
More than 50 years ago, the California Department of Fish and Game recommended that the giant state and federal water projects divert the water they export from the Sacramento River near the town of Hood, south of Sacramento. Fish and Game opposed allowing Sacramento River water to enter the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and be diverted near Tracy. The reason: Diverting the water from dead-end channels in the south Delta would make it impossible to successfully screen out fish sucked in by the massive pumps.
Half a century later, Fish and Game is being proven right. Delta smelt and other native fish species are threatened with extinction, because the Sacramento River diversion -- the "peripheral canal" -- was never built. Today, biologists continue to call for the diversion facility to be built, so that fish can safely bypass the intake pumps on their way to the sea or as they renew their lives in the Delta.
Now there are other, more urgent reasons to divert water from the Sacramento River rather than the southern part of the Delta. More than 20 million Californians in the Bay Area, Central Valley and Southern California drink and farm with water from the Delta supplied by the state and federal water projects. Seawater entering the Delta from the San Francisco Bay and chemicals leached from the organic Delta soils contaminate the water before it reaches the state and federal pumps. Diverting the water from the Sacramento River north of the Delta would eliminate most pollutants, and improve the quality of the water by more than 50 percent.
It has long been known that a major earthquake could crumble many old, fragile Delta levees. The likelihood of massive levee collapse, which would lead to water supplies being cut off to cities and farms, has increased because of predictions of a major earthquake. A huge flood from upstream rivers could have the same effect. Rising sea level due to global warming makes all these problems worse. The Department of Water Resources estimates that massive levee failure could eliminate the Delta water supply for a year or more. It might never recover if there were multiple levee failures.
