The Delta and the Path to Sustainability
This unique place — a maze of winding waterways, broad channels, meandering sloughs, sunken islands, wetlands, and more than 1,000 miles of aging earthen levees — stretches nearly 50 miles north to south from Sacramento to Tracy and 25 miles east to west from Stockton to Antioch. Taken as a whole, the Delta constitutes an irreplaceable natural and national treasure, comparable in ecological significance and beauty to the magnificent Florida Everglades. And like the Everglades, the Delta has grown over time to serve many competing needs, a massive task that is managed with increasing difficulty.
The Delta is a major way station for countless species of migrating birds that twice yearly traverse the Pacific Flyway. Two-thirds of California’s salmon also pass through Delta waters, and hundreds of other native plants and aquatic species of environmental significance live there. Additionaly, the Delta is the hub of California’s public water supply, providing drinking water to 25 million people. Billions of gallons of water from Northern California’s watersheds are channeled through the Delta to pumping stations that serve the San Francisco Bay Area, Southern California, and millions of acres of farmland in the San Joaquin Valley, fueling California’s economy. This distinct area also serves as a thriving recreational playground and is a route of railroads, gas pipelines and highways of statewide importance. It is the place where over half a million people live and work. Just since the 2000 census, the towns and cities of the Delta have collectively grown by 18 percent.
This densely utilized complex of natural and manmade features has always been exceedingly fragile and the Delta’s ability to simultaneously serve all these roles is now in jeopardy. Fish populations are at or near record low numbers. The declining environment has triggered new state and federal restrictions on the ability of the statewide water system to transport water across the Delta. The result is the prospect of shortage or near-shortage water conditions for many parts of the state for years to come absent a comprehensive solution. The stakes are high, both for the environment and the state economy.
Scientific studies suggest the Delta’s survival depends on finding a more sustainable approach to managing the Delta. As the 21st century gets under way, new realities are unfolding. Climate change, earthquake risk and rising sea levels are not just theoretical concerns. They are emerging challenges that could profoundly alter the Delta.
Equally important, our consciousness of the critical need to protect the natural environment has grown. The existing system was built in another era when there were different public expectations and less knowledge of how the Delta would evolve. Our challenge today is to protect the environment and secure reliable water supplies for the state’s economy. And for the first time, there is agreement that the status quo will no longer work in the Delta. State and federal leaders, water districts, farmers, environmental groups and Delta communities are all searching for sustainable solutions.
Today’s Delta in Distress
The Delta’s earthen levees, some built in the 19th century, are no match for today’s conditions (see “In the Beginning…” below). Concerns about levee breaches have increased in recent years, and due to subsidence of the Delta’s peat soils some islands are now 15 feet or more below sea level, making the potential for catastrophic flooding and loss of life and property very real. The 2005 tragedy of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans raised concerns about the levees several notches and the concerns weren’t just about weather-born damage.
One of California’s most recent levee breaks occurred on a sunny, ordinary day at the Jones Tract in 2004. Repairs tallied $90 million and brought home the painful realization that had a major flood or earthquake been the trigger, the losses could have totaled billions of dollars. Such a widespread event would have also disrupted the Delta’s two major export pumps and their ability to provide reliable, clean water for months if not years.
Coincidentally, 2004 brought to a head the declining state of the Delta’s ecosystem — routine fish surveys that year found that nine of the Delta’s native fish populations were either seriously decreasing or near extinction, including the Delta smelt, a species protected under the federal and state Endangered Species Acts. Though a number of factors played a role in the decline, water project operations in the Delta were at first singled out as a major contributor.
Other contributors disrupting the Delta ecosystem are now raising concerns. One is the growth of invasive aquatic and plant species that increasingly compete for the food supply. Another is the infusion of wastewater discharges, including more than 1 billion gallons of municipal wastewater daily from over 300 sources. Heated water from power plants, runoff including herbicides and pesticides from local farms and urban lawns, petroleum product runoff from roads, vehicles and marine shipping, and excessive low dissolved oxygen levels during the summer months in the Stockton Ship Canal are other stressors on the system.
Between 2007 and 2008, federal courts and the California Fish and Game Commission imposed substantial limits on the amounts of fresh water exported through the Delta. And Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger created an independent blue ribbon task force charged with developing a long-term plan for a revitalized Delta.
In the Delta Vision report issued in late 2008, the task force presented a series of bold recommendations that included reducing or changing the patterns and timing of water diversions to accommodate the spawning of endangered fish as well as the building of new facilities to convey and store fresh water. The report also called for a new independent governance system to coordinate the actions of about 200 local, state and federal agencies in the Delta while urging state legislators to make major financial investments in the Delta’s revitalization to achieve these goals.
The Way Forward: the Bay Delta Conservation Plan
Guiding the Delta’s environmental revitalization process is the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP), launched in 2006. This is the largest and most ambitious habitat and natural communities conservation plan ever attempted in the U.S. It’s being prepared through the collaboration of state, federal, and local water agencies, state and federal fish agencies, and independent environmental organizations. The BDCP is funded by water users and public input is welcomed.
The plan takes a holistic approach to solving ecologically conflicting demands while eliminating more costly, often less effective, project-by-project, species-by-species permitting. Where feasible the BDCP proposes elements that complement other existing land uses. To address the challenges of habitat restoration, the plan seeks to reduce or eradicate invasives, toxic pollutants, including agricultural pesticides and herbicides, and other impairments to water quality. At the same time the BDCP will modernize the water conveyance system so as to put the Delta more in harmony
with the natural tidal movements in the estuary. This will likely mean physically separating portions of the water conveyance system, routing an agreed upon share of water to the pumps south of the Delta
by means of a canal, a large underground tunnel, or some combination of the two.
The chosen system must be resistant to earthquake and flooding damage and have the capacity to move water during periods of maximum flows in wet seasons.
The BDCP calls for water users who rely on the state and federal water projects to pay for its implementation along with mitigation of any environmental impacts. A joint Environmental Impact Report and Environmental Impact Statement (EIR/EIS) is scheduled to be ready for public comment in 2010. The plan, once approved, is to be implemented over the next 50 years.
In The Beginning
When first explored by the Spanish in the 1770s, the Delta presented a landscape very different from what exists today. Virtually free of human activity, it was an ever-changing patchwork of low-lying marshes covered with native tules and other grasses, and shifting channels, through which fresh waters en route to San Francisco Bay and the Pacific meandered. The Delta peat soils were produced from decaying marshland tules over the last 6,000 years. A wondrous diversity of land, air and sea wildlife lived here, each occupying its own niche in the food chain. But change was soon to come.
Beginning in the 1850s, disappointed gold prospectors began farming some of the drier, higher islands. When the peaty soil was found to be extraordinarily deep and fertile, developers began more extensive and unregulated reclamation projects, eventually using huge clamshell-type dredges to transform the adjoining marshes into a series of improved channels and islands, surrounded by compacted earthen levees. The soils of the Delta islands subsided or dropped through a combination of farming practices and natural organic oxidation.
Today, the Delta’s farmers and farm workers raise such crops as asparagus, pears, corn, grain and hay, sugar beets and tomatoes. Others living near the Delta work in the shipping industry or provide services to recreational fishermen and boaters. Theirs is a unique life, but scientific experts predict that some islands will be lost to rising sea levels before the end of the century, no matter what decisions are made in Sacramento about how best to revitalize the Delta.