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Securing Reliable Water Supplies for Southern California

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Securing Reliable Water Supplies for Southern California Securing Reliable Water Supplies for Southern California Prepared for the Southern California Leadership Council Future Issues Committee Gregory Freeman January 2008 I. Introduction Southern California is a semi-arid desert in the midst of an extended dry spell. Despite recent rain in California, water shortages may be a reality as soon as the summer of 2008. The area’s four main sources of water – the Colorado River, the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, local groundwater, and the Owens River Valley – are all under extreme stress. Southern California residents and policy makers, lulled into complacency by the ongoing successes of the region’s water engineers and agencies, need to understand the looming water challenge. Most important, they need to understand the background, the stakes, and the potential solutions. Challenges Southern California is a home to an enormous population. Roughly 21 million people live in Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, San Bernardino, Riverside and Ventura counties, more people than live in the entire state of New York. The area is growing, and will add 5.6 million new residents by 2030. This burgeoning population will depend on better management of local resources, increased conservation and imported water supplies, all of which are under pressure. (Local groundwater sources would be rapidly depleted if they were not replenished with imported water.) Southern California’s main water agency, the Metropolitan Water District (MWD), imports water from the Colorado River and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The City of Los Angeles independently imports water from the Owens River Valley. All three sources are under strain from population growth, climate change, and the need for environmental restoration and preservation. The entire Colorado River system is in the midst of an 8-year drought that has seen water levels at the two main storage facilities, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, fall below 50 percent capacity. Even in wet years, California will no longer be able to count on surplus water (above its 4.4 million-acre feet per year allotment) from the Colorado River since the other states with claims on Colorado River water have grown rapidly. The Delta is in perilous condition, with Southern California’s water supply threatened by possible levee collapse (after heavy rains or an earthquake); ecosystem deterioration (due to urban and agricultural runoff); environmental needs (to protect endangered fish); and climate change (increased salinity due to rising sea levels as well as predicted reduction in the annual snowpack). Historically, the City of Los Angeles has relied principally on its Owens Valley resources and treated MWD as an insurance policy, but that could change now that it has had to reduce its take from the Owens River to settle environmental litigation. Even without invoking its preferential rights (which entitle it to much more of MWD’s water than it has historically taken), L.A.’s increased reliance on MWD heightens the importance of securing sufficient Bay Delta and Colorado River water supplies for distribution by MWD throughout Southern California. LAEDC Consulting Practice 1 Urgency Water remains the sine qua non of Southern California’s existence. Economic development and job creation will be secondary considerations if Southern California cannot guarantee safe, reliable and competitively priced access to water. There are numerous strategies that will help secure water supplies, but there is no single ‘silver bullet’ solution. A diversified portfolio of strategies such as more aggressive conservation; development of alternative sources; and improved resource management is the best long-term approach. In the near term, however, there is a critical opportunity to improve the reliability of Southern California’s water supplies by focusing on the sustainability of the Delta. The Delta is in crisis. While a comprehensive solution to the myriad problems that ail the Delta is years away, there are some near-term opportunities for improvement. These include emergency preparedness to limit the potential losses that could follow a flood or earthquake; protection of endangered fish that force the periodic shutdown of the pumps that supply water for the state and federal water projects; and, critically for Southern California, the construction of an alternative conveyance system. For the first time since the Pat Brown era, there appears to be a potential alignment among the state’s political leadership on the shape and urgency of a solution. Opportunity All of the key players are engaged on the water issue (a rarity in itself), creating what one industry expert describes as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to take positive action. When Governor Schwarzenegger addressed the SCLC in August, he spoke passionately about water and indicated he planned to make the issue a top priority for his administration. More recently, he proposed a series of physical improvements for water conveyance and environmental restoration in the Delta, along with additional surface storage. The State Senate and Assembly’s Democratic majorities disagree with the governor on water storage, but there appears to be tentative agreement on the broad outlines of the physical improvements for the Bay Delta. Water policy in general and the Bay Delta issues in particular, can be hugely contentious. The last proposal for a peripheral canal was rejected by state voters in 1982 after an acrimonious campaign. And competing interests – environmentalists, farmers, water districts, and state and federal agencies – have hamstrung attempted progress on the Bay Delta for more than 10 years since Governor Wilson brokered the Bay Delta Accord of 1994. Focused business leadership could help broker a deal to “fix” the broken Delta, thereby increasing the reliability of water supply and continuing environmental restoration. The deal should also improve water quality for both humans and the environment. However, it will be critical not to overreach. Thus, new conveyance must be appropriately sized (i.e. small enough) so that it would preclude a later political decision to drain the northern rivers for the benefit of Southern California (a lingering fear that contributed to the defeat of the peripheral canal in 1982). LAEDC Consulting Practice 2 II. Southern California’s Diverse Water Supply Local Sources Despite Southern California’s semi-arid climate, 40 percent of the region’s water supply is taken from local aquifers. Local water agencies can maintain this surprising rate of withdrawal without risk of depletion because they actively recharge local groundwater supplies during periods of winter rain and supplement with imported water (particularly during wet years) and reclaimed wastewater. This allows the local aquifers to act as de facto reservoirs, augmenting (and vastly exceeding) the region’s surface storage capacity. The other 60 percent of Southern California’s water supply is imported from far-flung sources. Los Angeles Aqueduct The City of Los Angeles, lacking adequate local water resources, pioneered large scale water transfers in the Western United States by importing water from the mountains in Central California. The Los Angeles Aqueduct, represented by the red line running north-south on Figure 1, is actually two aqueducts. The Los Angeles Owens River Aqueduct was designed by William Mulholland and opened in 1913. It carries water 233 miles from the Owens River (at a point of diversion north of Bishop, California) to the City of Los Angeles. The Second L.A. Aqueduct, built in 1970, parallels the Owens River Aqueduct for 137 miles starting at the Haiwee Reservoir south of Owens Lake. Both aqueducts are operated by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Colorado River Aqueduct The Colorado River Aqueduct transports water from the Parker Dam on the Colorado River (at the southern end of Lake Havasu on the border between California and Arizona) to to coastal Southern California. The 242-mile long aqueduct was completed in 1941, and is represented in Figure 1 by the red line running east-west, just north of the Salton Sea. The aqueduct was built and is operated by the Metropolitan Water Department of Southern California in order to deliver its allotment of Colorado River water to its coastal service area. These transfers depend on storage in Lake Mead (behind the Hoover Dam in Nevada) and Lake Powell (behind the Glen Canyon Dam on the Arizona-Utah border). Both lakes have receded to barely half of their capacity as the Colorado River Basin entered its eighth year of drought. State Water Project Most of the precipitation in California (75%) falls north of Sacramento, yet most of the demand (75%) is south of the state capital. The State Water Project (SWP) is a massive water conveyance system designed to redress this imbalance by moving surplus water from the north to deficit areas in the south. Designed and operated by the California Department LAEDC Consulting Practice 3 Figure 1 SoCal Water Supply Los Angeles Aqueduct State Water Project Colorado River Aqueduct Local Colorado River of Water Resources (DWR), the project’s main components are the Oroville Dam, the San Luis Reservoir, and the 444-mile long California Aqueduct. The California Aqueduct (the bright green line in Figure 1) runs from the Delta to the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley, where it is lifted almost 2,000 feet over the Tehachapi Mountains. From there, it splits into two branches, one feeding into Lake Perris LAEDC Consulting Practice 4 (the easternmost green dot on the yellow region of the map); the other supplying Pyramid Lake and Castaic Lake (the green dot on the northern end of the yellow area). The SWP project accounts for about 25% of Southern California’s imported water. The pumps that lift the water over the Tehachapi Mountains are the single largest consumer of electric power in the state, which increases the cost of water imported into Southern California. LAEDC Consulting Practice 5 III.
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