H2 WOES Managing Water Resources

by Donald Huntington

Someone said that we all live and die by threes since most of us would die in three minutes without air, three days without water, and three weeks without food.

So, except for oxygen, fresh water is the most basic human need. Besides preventing dehydration, we also require clear water for food preparation and for hygienic and sanitation purposes.

An Exceptional Resource
Most of us take pure water for granted. Last year I went on a trip to interior Haiti, however, and learned how precious a commodity fresh water really is. During those days we had only Cokes and bottled water to drink. Water for bathing was hauled in from a very polluted nearby river.

About five days into the experience we exhausted our supply of bottled water and so I stood one morning in front of the bathroom mirror faced with the dilemma of either taking a chance with the polluted river water or brushing my teeth with Coke.

Of course, the Haitian people, themselves, for the most part, were down in the river washing with, bathing in, cooking with, and drinking from the waters of the stream that flowed through their villages and pastures. It should come as no surprise that life expectancy in Haiti runs almost 30 years less than in America.

More people on this sad planet have water of the quality found in Haiti rather than like the pure water most of us have flowing from our taps in East County. My children grew up in the Republic of the Philippines and shortly after returning to the United States they astonished their host when we were at dinner in someone's home by asking her if the water that came out of the faucets in her bathroom was drinkable.

On a personal basis we take clean water for granted, but on a corporate level California water is a resource over which battles are waged. The conflict is more civil now but is hardly less acerbic than in the early days of our State when people maintained that whiskey was for drinking and water was for fighting.

For almost 350 years people in California have been attempting to resolve water problems by setting up projects to move the water from one place to the other. As difficult as it is to believe, the history of California water projects is 80 years older than the story of the California Gold Rush; the San Diego Mission undertook the first water diversion project in 1769.

Since that early beginning the state, sometimes working with the federal government, has poured millions of man-hours and billions of dollars into public works projects having to do with the movement and storage of this precious resource.

Limited Resources and Limitless Demands
State water resources are allocated for three general purposes — urban, agriculture, and environment.

In 1995 urban areas were consuming 11 percent of all water resources. This is expected to rise to 15 percent by the year 2020. However, at the same time agriculture uses accounted for 43% of all Californian water. By 2020, this is expected to decline by the same four percent that urban use is predicted to rise.

Use of water resources for environmental purposes will remain constant at 46 percent over the whole period of time.

Water resources for us residents in East Contra Costa County are pieces belonging to a statewide resource management system. We can see the problem of California water by stepping back and looking at the issues from a perspective broad enough to include in the entire state. From there it becomes obvious that water allocation is made difficult by four factors, including:

• Low rainfall
• Dense population
• Large acreage planted in crops
• Sunny weather

Environmentalists, state agencies, farmers, and representatives from city and federal governments are working together to find balance in saving ecosystems, farms, wild and scenic rivers, and quality of life in population centers. At the same time they are putting into effect flood control programs that in some important ways will aid all of these interests.

The federal government also has a hand in the planning and conserving of water in our state through an organization called CALFED. This is actually an umbrella organization composed of two dozen water and environmental agencies.

Besides being comprised of 24 sub-agencies, CALFED is itself divided into two primary agencies, called the DWR (California Department of Water Resources) and the Federal Bureau of Reclamation.

Dividing the Resources by Geographical Area
State water resources stretching from San Diego to Humbolt Counties are managed by the DWR, which divides California into ten areas, called “hydrologic regions.” Each hydrologic region represents a river basin drainage area containing the watershed of one or more rivers.

Not all hydrologic regions are created equal. As shown in the table below, a region situated in the Sierras or along the Northern California coast might contain a vast amount of water. Another hydrologic region in an arid region, such as LA or Orange County might have an insignificant amount of water.

Water management from one year to another is controlled by a lot of highly informed guesswork. Scientists spend the fall and winter months carefully scrutinizing snowfall levels and precipitation amounts. Complicated algorithms have been constructed and refined to make the guessing as good as possible.

The engineers controlling the allocation of water must make difficult choices between the need to leave enough space in reservoirs to handle the flow of water coming in from winter storms and spring runoff, but still end the rainy season with reservoirs full for the approaching dry months.

Desalinization of sea water remains the holy grail of unlimited fresh water resources. The technology has been developed and plants have been built. They only operate during droughts, at this time, because the process remains very expensive.

So What's the Big Problem?
The 1990 US Census reported at least 81,251 Californian households may have a vulnerable source of water, which includes water taken from shallow wells, creeks, lakes, or cisterns. There is also an incalculable number of homes receiving municipal water supplies through a delivery system that has been compromised by decaying pipes and valves.

A government study published in 2001 by the California DHS (Department of Health Services) uncovered the grim reality that 250,000 state residents didn't have enough water and that five million of us are drinking water from unfiltered or actually contaminated sources.

Without proper treatment, there is an inherent risk of waterborne illness from these types of surface waters because of possible contamination from urban runoff, agricultural activities, and animal waste.

To be specific, the following numbers were reported:

Contaminated drinking water is responsible for horrible medical conditions including:

• Cholera
• Typhoid fever
• Dysentery
• Kidney failure
• Giardia

Most of us probably don't recognize that last condition. Giardia refers to the cysts that are passed in the feces of infected humans and animals. Scientists now recognize that these comprise the most common source of waterborne diseases.

Preparing for the Worst
The Contra Costa Water District (CCWD) pumps water out of the Delta to supply water to over 430,000 residents. The water is delivered to customers or stored in the Los Vaqueros Reservoir, which can currently store up to 100,000 acre-feet of high quality water for emergency use.

Before the reservoir became available, the county would have run out of water in three days if the San Joaquin or Sacramento Rivers ever became contaminated to the point that Delta water would become unsafe for drinking. But now, if the Delta water disappeared, the Los Vaqueros Reservoir could provide clean water for as much as six months.

The other service the dam supplies relating to drinking water is to provide a source of water for late summer months when water from the Delta becomes brackish and the expense of processing the water for human consumption gets too high.

Besides getting water out of the Delta, Los Vaqueros Reservoir is filled by run-off from 18,500 acres that constitute its watershed. To protect the purity of the water, the CCWD purchased 99 percent of all the land within the watershed.

More than Just Insurance
The perimeter of the reservoir is protected by a fence creating a buffer a couple hundred feet above high water, preserving about 20,000 acres of wildlife, including wetlands and habitats for wildlife, especially for several creatures on the endangered species list, such as fairy shrimp and red-legged frogs. Herds and flocks are permitted to continue to graze on the land, as they have since historical times.

The Water District also maintains an Interpretive Center on the site that is open to the public Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Visitors to the center are able to read weekly reports of wildlife spotted in the watershed.

The Los Vaqueros Reservoir is open 365 days a year to provide a recreational-use program that allows shoreline angling and boating. Boats are restricted to those that can be rented from the reservoir's concessionaire marina, which also sells fishing supplies, snacks, and hot food. Hikers can walk on more than 55 miles of maintained trails on the 20,000 acres of protected watershed on the reservoir property.

The other CCWD water storage facility in East County is the Contra Loma Reservoir in Antioch. This reservoir was built by the Federal Central Valley Project but is operated by CCWD.

Because high levels of fecal coliform were measured in the reservoir when it was used for swimming in the summer, CCWD and the US Bureau of Reclamation constructed a $2.2 million swimming lagoon at one end of the reservoir, complete with sandy beaches for happy children and marked lanes for serious adult swimmers.

Los Vaqueros Reservoir Expansion
The water plan that is currently drawing most of the attention is a proposal to increase the size of the Los Vaqueros reservoir. The plan became a lot more certain since we passed Prop N in March authorizing the funds to make this happen. The proposition not only passed, but it passed by a whopping 62 percent.

The water district says the plan makes perfect sense. And numerous elected officials, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Ellen Tauscher, and Rep. George Miller, and other key state legislators, have gone on the record as agreeing.

The idea of replacing the Los Vaqueros Reservoir strikes many of us, on first thought, as a totally outlandish idea. Everyone who sees Los Vaqueros for the first time is amazed by the size of the artificial lake that the looming immensity of the earthen dam is holding back. To imagine that that whole thing should be destroyed in order to create something even more immense is just mind blowing for some of us. Especially considering that the dam isn't even a decade old.

And the scale of the expansion is equally shocking. If completed, the project would create a body of water as much as five times the volume of the current one, since the current 100,000 acre-foot reservoir would be replaced by one with as much as 500,000 acre feet. (The minimum size would be 300,000.)

Something for Nothing
We CCWD ratepayers shouldered the entire $450 million cost for the original reservoir project, which comes out to about $1,000 per customer. In the proposed expansion scenario, the state and other regional interests will provide all the funds for enlarging the reservoir. The money will be taken from sources such as other area water agencies and especially from a state account designed to support fisheries.

The expansion plan will not only use funds from these sources to pay the total 1.5 billion dollar cost for the project, but CCWD will get back a 200 million dollar rebate, which would be the equivalent of almost half of the money it spent building the original dam. Not only will our rates not rise, if the project goes forward, there is a good chance that our rates will actually go down.

If everything goes well, construction on the dam will probably begin by 2008 and be completed by 2013. More trails will be built on the expanded site and a swimming lagoon is planned to be constructed next to the reservoir.

Things to Think About with Vaqueros Expansion
There are a lot of challenges with the project, of course. Six years ago CCWD could gain permission to flood the Los Vaqueros Valley only by providing planned offset for destruction that the floodwaters would visit on local flora and fauna. A thousand oak trees were planted and thousands of acres were designated as mitigation areas to offset the loss.

As part of the proposed expansion the Water District is planning to buy up to 9,000 acres to set aside in order to mitigate the habitat that will be lost beneath the swelling waters.

Some local people oppose the plan seeing it only as a thinly-veiled attempt to get water from our area for thirsty farmers in the Central Valley, and for businesses and residents in the Los Angeles Basin.

Such people apparently will resist all attempts to provide help for other parts of California and would rather let fresh water run into the Pacific Ocean than to support a plan, such as the Los Vaqueros expansion, that might provide a way to help Central Valley farmers and Southern communities without diminishing our own resources.

Anyway, it turns out that such objections are moot since the CCWD will retain operational control of the dam, on one hand, and binding language in both the 1988 ballot measure, as well as this March's Measure N, commits the Water District to reserving the water for local use.

Why Do They Want to Do That?
CALFED has identified three goals for the Los Vaqueros enlargement process:

• to improve Bay Area water quality
• to improve Bay Area water supply reliability
• to contribute to the enhancement of the Bay-Delta environment

CCWD has stated its own goals, which includes these three, plus two others:

• to allow CCWD to retain control over the watershed and reservoir operation
• to reimburse the current reservoir project debt (up to $200 million).

We should all be grateful for the ability to turn on a spigot and fill a cup, a pot, or a pool with clean, healthy water.

Fresh water on demand is a blessing not enjoyed by the majority of people on this planet. It isn't a blessing we could even enjoy ourselves without a great deal of effort by a lot of people to keep the channel of distribution full and running clean between that spigot and the source of water that it comes from.