Sacramento’s Story of Water

by Chris Lopez of Grow Water www.GrowWater.org Sacramento lies at the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers, and is the capital city of the state of . The current population of Sacramento County is around 1.5 million who consume between 110- 270 gallons of water per person per day. Historical rainfall averages between 17 ½ - 19 inches of rain per year, which falls primarily between the months of October through April. This is a stark difference in when compared to the nearby Sierra foothills, which receive between 30-65 inches of rain per year as well as varying degrees of snowfall, which does not occur at the lower elevations of the . The , and its watershed, is California’s most precious resource. “The future of California is joined at the hip with the Sacramento River” says University of California geologist, Dr. Jeff Mount. The Sacramento River has always been a “river of life” and never more so than right now. Located in central , the Sacramento River is the largest river system and basin in the state. The 27,000 square mile watershed includes the eastern slopes of the Coast Ranges, , and the western slopes of the southernmost region of the Cascades and the northern portion of the . The Sacramento River, stretching from the Oregon border to the Bay-Delta, carries 31% of the state’s total runoff water. Primary tributaries to the Sacramento River include the Pit, McCloud, Feather, and American rivers. The Sacramento River Watershed provides drinking water for two-thirds of the State including , supplies farmers and ranchers with the lifeblood of California’s agricultural industry, and is a vital organ for hundreds of wildlife species, including four separate runs of Chinook salmon. The Spanish explorer named the Sacramento Valley and the Sacramento River. A Spanish writer with the Moraga expedition wrote: "Canopies of oaks and cottonwoods, many festooned with grapevines, overhung both sides of the blue current. Birds chattered in the trees and big fish darted through the pellucid depths. The air was like champagne, and we (the Spaniards) drank deep of it, drank in the beauty around us. “Es como el sagrado sacramento! (It's like the Blessed Sacrament.)” The valley and the river were then christened after the "Most Holy Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ," referring to the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist.

The city itself was developed around a wharf, called the Embarcadero, on the confluence of the and Sacramento Rivers that had developed prior to his retirement in 1849 as a result of gold discoveries at Sutter's Mill in Coloma. John Sutter, Sr. had replaced himself with his son, John Sutter, Jr., who noticed growth of trade at the Embarcadero and considered it a viable economic opportunity; the port was used increasingly as a point of debarkation for prospecting Argonauts heading eastwards.

Sacramento Valley Watershed

The Sacramento Valley has always faced water management challenges and likely will for years to come. The valley’s semiarid climate, its ambitious, evolving economy and development, and its continually growing population have combined to make shortages and conflicting demands the norm, and the remnants of the areas floodplains, and vernal pools are being developed at ever increasing rates. Over the past two centuries California has, in general, tried to adapt to these challenges through major changes in water management. California has, in fact, been called “the most hydrologically altered landmass on the planet.” That is a bold statement, but is nonetheless the absolute truth. The hallmark of the Sacramento valley’s native waterscape and ecology was its remarkable biological diversity and abundance. The Sacramento and American rivers were ideal for colonization by anadromous salmon and steelhead. Each year, millions of adult salmon and steelhead spawned in California’s rivers and streams, carrying with them enormous volumes of ocean nutrients that enriched the state’s inland ecosystems. The Great Central Valley, with its extensive lowland floodplains and riparian forests, was home to vast herds of tule elk, antelopes, black bears, grizzly bears, deer, and wildcats to small rodents such as gophers, wood rats, and squirrels. The river banks sheltered large numbers of beavers and river otters. Waterfowl included ducks, geese, cranes, herons, pelicans, and swans. The uplands, away from the marshland and where the foothills of the Sierras begin (and where Fair Oaks now lies), teemed with quail, mourning doves, flickers, woodpeckers, roadrunners, hawks, owls, eagles, turkey vultures, and even condors. At least 26 species of fish lived in the American River alone, most notable of which were the salmon, sturgeon, chub, tule perch, sucker, and trout. Seasonal wetlands supported massive bird migrations. The Bay, at twice its current size, was one of the most productive estuaries in the lower 48 states. Upstream, the Sacramento– San Joaquin Delta was a 700,000-acre mosaic of tidal freshwater marsh, tidal channels, floodplains, and natural levees. The biological productivity of the inland waters of California, when linked to the productivity of the Pacific Ocean, supported a large population of Native Californians with diverse and complex cultures. Before the arrival of Europeans, California had more than 300,000 inhabitants who spoke between 80 and 100 languages, making it among the most densely populated regions of North America (Anderson 2005; Lightfoot and Parrish 2009). This diverse human landscape, as well as the natural waterscape of California itself, would change irrevocably—first with Spanish and Mexican settlements and later (more dramatically) with the discovery of gold and the economic transformation that ensued.

The original inhabitants of the Sacramento area were the , or plains , who occupied the land for at least 7,000 years. Recent evidence may date back much longer, but evidence is inconclusive as of this writing. With the arrival of the Hispanics, Europeans and other explorers beginning in the late 1500s, and the following waves of non-native peoples, came diseases, destruction of traditional food sources, slavery and genocide. By about 1890, the population of Nisenan, as with most California Indians, had been nearly decimated. The few survivors worked on farms and in mines and clung to remnants of their culture.Though they have no written record of their past, archeological studies show that the Nisenan lived in villages near the banks of the American River, which they called Kum Sayo, (“Roundhouse River.”) Forty archaeological sites have been recorded on the banks of the American River from its mouth to the junction of the middle and south forks, now inundated by Folsom Lake. These sites vary from large villages to bedrock mortar sites. A permanent village called Yolimhu was located on the south side of the American River, just south of where modern Folsom is located. For thousands of years, the Nisenan learned to live with the variable nature of the Sacramento and American Rivers as they drained the Sierras. They knew and harvested the seasonal plentitude of the wildlife and were able to move their camps to avoid the extremes of the summer heat or winter floods in the valley. Through time, the location of the river would shift and villages would be moved to new areas near the water.

The Spanish settled in 1769, conscripting thousands of Native Californians into labor, dividing the lands into missions, pueblos, and ranchos and establishing California’s first system of water rights. Most diversions were small and for use on lands adjacent to the river or stream from which the water was diverted. Substantial alteration of California’s hydrologic systems would await American takeover.

Early water management was largely undertaken by uncoordinated individual, corporate, and local actions, with little federal or state intervention. John Marshall’s discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1848 and the ensuing Gold Rush brought evermore irreversible changes to the area. What began as simple panning for gold carried downstream by California’s rivers quickly evolved into industrial-scale extraction. As the easy gold was sluiced, sifted, and panned out, the gold miners found that they had to move water from the rivers to the gold itself. These “hydraulic miners” diverted water from streams high in the , carrying it (sometimes for many miles) through wooden flumes, dropping it through penstocks to generate hydraulic pressure, and then using the pressurized water to blast away hillsides containing ore. The miners then washed the debris through sluices to separate the gold from its surrounding sediment. By 1880, the gold country had 20,000 miners and more than 6,000 miles of ditches, flumes, and canals. The industry generated more than $5.5 billion in wealth (in current dollars), roughly one-quarter of one year of California’s agricultural production today (Hundley 2001). The of the Sierra Nevada was the first large-scale effort to industrialize California’s water resources, with profound consequences for the economy, the environment, and the laws that govern water use (Isenberg 2005).

The Gold Rush also produced California’s first significant experiments with local and collective flood management. Hydraulic mining generated more than a million acre-feet of debris that washed downriver during winter and spring torrents, entering the Sacramento Valley and eventually moving as a wave through the Delta and into (Gilbert 1917). The debris choked the river channels, reducing their capacity to carry flows and forcing water and sediment onto the lowland floodplains. These floodplains, which included the newly established capitol of Sacramento, were prone to seasonal inundation even under normal conditions. Hydraulic mining amplified these inundations until even modest flows caused flooding. In January 1850, a major flood devastated the city. Rain from heavy storms had saturated the grounds upon which Sacramento was built, and the American and Sacramento rivers crested simultaneously.

The economic impact was significant because merchandise stationed at the Embarcadero was not secured and washed away in the flood. Sacramento rallied behind Hardin Bigelow, who led efforts to implement emergency measures to protect the city from another disaster of that nature. Responsibility for construction of protective levees and dams won him support, and he was elected first mayor of the city. A second major flood in March 1850 was averted by Bigelow's efforts. However, in 1860, successive storms flooded both Northern and Southern California, causing widespread death and destruction and turned the Central Valley into an “inland sea” more than 200 miles long and 60 miles wide (Kelley 1989). When the floodwaters subsided, mining debris covered the orchards and fields of the Sacramento Valley and provided vivid evidence that flooding would be a major problem for water management. In response, landowners along the Sacramento River and its tributaries built small embankments between themselves and the river. These small levees failed regularly and flooded both fields and homes. Recognizing the need to form local governments to address flood problems, California legislature, in 1868, authorized the creation of local reclamation districts, which allowed landowners to join together and levy property assessments to fund construction of land reclamation and flood control projects. This legislation spurred the formation of hundreds of reclamation districts throughout the state, forming a key element in the growth of agriculture on the state’s floodplains. Unfortunately, the taller and stronger levees made possible by this collective action reduced natural attenuation of flood waves and channeled floodwaters, which would overflow or breach smaller, weaker levees. Flooded landowners responded in kind, forcing the floodwaters onto their neighbor’s properties. In times of major floods, each district essentially relied on adjacent districts having levees weaker than their own. The resulting escalation of levees proved to be ineffective for the Sacramento Valley, with some landowners finding demolition of a neighbor’s levees during a flood to be more economical than raising the height of their own levees (Kelley 1989). The flood problems of this early era plague California to this day, and Sacramento is listed as the second most flood susceptible city in the after New Orleans.

Development in the rivers’ natural floodplains, combined with the construction of riverbank levees, denied the winter and spring floodwaters their natural outlets. The same development placed thousands of lives and millions of dollars of investment at annual risk of catastrophic loss. In addition, the channelization of rivers for flood control and mining debris removal destroyed seasonal and riparian wetlands and shallows that provided habitat for native fish and wildlife dependent on these wetlands. By the 1880s, farmers, cities, and their state legislative representatives recognized that local solutions were inadequate (and perhaps even dangerous) to address regional flooding problems. The Laissez-Faire Era of California water development and flood control policy was poised to give way to a new era of management, characterized by efforts to organize at the local level. Enter the birth of California’s extremely complex (and confusing) water rights system.

Surface Water Rights

California has a unique system of surface water rights that combines a traditional riparian system with the appropriative system found elsewhere in the West. The result is a confused approach to water rights that often leads to more questions that certainty and is currently under vast scrutiny. For purposes of California law, surface water includes underflow of streams, underground streams, and any other subsurface flow that is identified with a defined bed, bank or channel. Therefore, wells extracting water near a surface water supply may, in fact, be pumping "surface water" for purposes of a water rights analysis. On many other streams in California, the surface water rights are a tangle of various categories of rights that are virtually impossible to distinguish from one another. Often, historical practice is far more relevant in determining how water is actually allocated than are the underlying water rights. Nevertheless, that historical practice is founded on basic water rights law, which recognizes four basic types of surface water rights: Riparian, Pre 1914 Appropriative, Post 1914 Appropriative, and Prescriptive.

Groundwater Rights

There is currently no comprehensive, statewide regulatory scheme governing the extraction or use of groundwater. Though California recently passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, it has yet to take effect, and is a critical issue statewide as our current drought has driven groundwater extraction to unprecedented levels, causing land subsidence, deeper well drilling, salinity increases in agricultural areas, and the need for evermore water importation. In Sacramento, groundwater use varies tremendously. Some districts rely 100% on groundwater, while others utilize surface waters. Compounding the issues associated with increased, unregulated groundwater extraction, is the recent finding of wells and groundwater basins contaminated with hexavalent chromium in the Rio Linda/ Elverta Water District ( which also supplies water to Granite Bay) as well as in nearby Davis, California. The source and scope of the contamination has yet to be determined.

The American River:

The American River runs from the crest of the Sierra Nevada mountain range to its confluence with the Sacramento River in Sacramento, California. The Sacramento River continues to eventually empty into the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean at San Francisco, California. The American River flows entirely within California.

Like most major western U.S. rivers, the American River has been extensively dammed and diverted for hydroelectricity production. Since the was centered in an area that included the American River basin, it was one of the earlier California rivers to be populated. Water was used to drive grist mills. The Natoma Company completed its Folsom Powerhouse by 1895 and began delivering power 22 miles (35 km) away to the city of Sacramento to power a streetcar system.

Currently, five power plants on the Middle Fork are owned by the Placer County Water Agency, eight plants are owned by Sacramento Municipal Utility District ("SMUD"), El Dorado Irrigation District and PG&E each own one plant (Akin Powerhouse and Chili Bar Powerhouse, respectively), and one plant is owned by a small private concern (Rock Creek Powerhouse). The SMUD plants are run on a peaking basis, although recreational boating and environmental flow requirements constrain their operation slightly. None of these upstream plants are constrained by flood control requirements plants on the upstream tributaries, the needs of water supply and flood control largely govern their operation.

Delta Tunnels: Governor Brown and California’s largest corporate agribusinesses have proposed building two underground 45-mile and 40-foot wide tunnels to divert the Sacramento River before it reaches the Delta and maximize water exports from the San Francisco Bay Delta to the southwest . The project is similar to the previously proposed Peripheral Canal, which was rejected by voters in a statewide referendum in 1982. Tunnel proponents have come up with the Bay Delta Conservation Plan as a way to mislead people about the actual impact that the twin tunnels would have on the San Francisco Bay Delta. Diverting the Sacramento River, which constitutes 80 percent of the freshwater flow into the San Francisco Bay Delta, would have a devastating effect on its fragile environment and salmon populations, which nearly collapsed in 2008 after record high levels of water exports. That’s why environmental and fishing groups across California strongly oppose these tunnels. Furthermore, diverting the Sacramento River away from the Bay Delta could cause sea levels in the greater to rise even higher than already anticipated due to climate change. (Restore the Delta)

Where Would it Go?: The Kern County Water Agency and the Westlands Water District, despite already receiving the majority of the water exported from the Bay Delta, are demanding more water. These agencies, located in the dry southwest side of the San Joaquin Valley, represent and provide water to California’s most powerful corporate agribusinesses and oil companies. Not only do these agribusinesses grow and export overseas water-intensive crops such as cotton and almonds, they sell taxpayer-subsidized water, originally intended for farming, for private profit. In addition, oil corporations in Kern County need billions of gallons of water for hydraulic fracturing (fracking) operations that are slated to expand in the region.

The Future: The story of water in Sacramento is incredibly complex, and constantly evolving. The past four years of withering drought has underscored the need for more intensive conservation measures, but it is a slow moving process. Sadly, there are currently no incentives offered for rainwater harvesting systems, rain gardens, or greywater systems, though some are in the works, and details are forthcoming.