{"id":460751,"date":"2010-03-22T17:46:15","date_gmt":"2010-03-22T21:46:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/waterfront\/?p=715"},"modified":"2010-03-22T17:46:15","modified_gmt":"2010-03-22T21:46:15","slug":"water-for-the-delta-has-this-failed-to-work-or-have-we-failed-to-try","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/460751","title":{"rendered":"Water for the Delta: Has This Failed To Work? Or Have We Failed to Try?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Senior Attorney and California Water Legislative Director for EDF<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The State Water Resources Control Board begins a public hearing today <\/a>to determine how much water the Bay-Delta Estuary needs. The hearing has generated a great deal of testimony and exhibits. In particular, the State and Federal Water Contractors' \u2013 including, San Luis & Delta-Mendota Water Authority, State Water Contractors, Westlands Water District, Santa Clara Valley Water District, Kern County Water Agency & Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (\u201cContractors\u201d) \u2013 submission <\/a>makes a number of interesting points. In particular, the Contractors make the surprising assertion that: \u201cThe flow-centric approaches of the past have failed and will, if continued, fail in the future.\u201d While increasing freshwater flows for ecological purposes has been discussed and debated for many years, as the data demonstrates — it is not a strategy that has been implemented, at least not with a great deal of regularity.<\/p>\n

Indeed to the contrary, since salmon were listed almost twenty years ago, combined federal and state diversions out of the Delta steadily increased. According to DWR\u2019s Dayflow database figures, combined exports increased from roughly 5 million acre feet in the late 1980s to 6.5 million acre feet in 2005 and 2006 (with a dip down to a bit more than 4 million acre-feet during the drought of the early 1990s). Diversions out of the Delta did not go down from this historically high level of diversion until 2007 primarily as a result of, as DWR has repeatedly indicated, the recent drought.<\/p>\n

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For this reason, the Contractors\u2019 conclusion that \u201cthe flow centric approaches of the past have failed,\u201d appears to be premature. We have spent the last seven decades experimenting with how well the system does when water is steadily extracted from it. Given the broad consensus regarding the severe degradation of Bay-Delta salmon and other fisheries, its perhaps not surprising that fisheries are not rebounding after a couple of years of court-ordered minimum flows in the middle of a drought. Perhaps we should actually try providing freshwater flows to the ecosystem in a sustained and meaningful way and see what the science reveals.<\/p>\n

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Senior Attorney and California Water Legislative Director for EDF The State Water Resources Control Board begins a public hearing today to determine how much water the Bay-Delta Estuary needs. The hearing has generated a great deal of testimony and exhibits. In particular, the State and Federal Water Contractors' \u2013 including, San Luis & Delta-Mendota Water […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4273,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-460751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4273"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=460751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460751\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=460751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=460751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=460751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}