April 2, 2006
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Rick E. Martin / Mercury News
The Friant Dam east of Fresno has been diverting 95 percent of the San Joaquin River water to California agriculture since it was built in 1944.
- Video: “Tales of the San Joaquin” (RealVideo 450Kbps)
- Video: “Tales of the San Joaquin” (QuickTime, 14 MB)
- Photo gallery: The San Joaquin River (Flash)
Rebirth of a river
Some wait with delight, others with dread for new divvying up of San Joaquin River water
Mercury News
LOS BANOS – As a boy in the 1940s, Walt Shubin built a canoe and paddled the San Joaquin River. He camped on its banks, caught 30-pound salmon and spent countless hours exploring its bends and turns.
“To me, it was a national treasure,” said Shubin, now 75. “Next to Yosemite it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.”
That world ended in 1944 when the federal government built Friant Dam and diverted 95 percent of the river’s waters to farmers from Fresno to Bakersfield.
Today that water nourishes a million acres in America’s top agricultural region. But California’s second-longest river is polluted, stripped of salmon. Its decline has degraded water supplies from Silicon Valley to Los Angeles. In many stretches, like the one Shubin walked recently near Los Banos, it is bone-dry.
Yet, like spring, the river has a chance to begin anew.
In a historic legal settlement expected this month, environmentalists, farmers and federal water officials say they will unveil an agreement to release billions of gallons of water back into the San Joaquin.
The settlement is expected to bring widespread changes, from increasing the number of fish in San Francisco Bay to improving drinking water quality.
“There should be Sierra snowmelt flowing into the delta, and instead there is polluted farm runoff. Which would you rather drink?” said Barry Nelson, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco.
The settlement ends an 18-year legal battle that began when NRDC and other environmental and fishing groups sued the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which operates Friant Dam. In 2004, they won a court ruling requiring enough water to be put back into the river to restore fish.
For farmers, the ruling was a political shock wave that some say threatens their very existence. Others see it as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to restore balance.
“I don’t know of any project to restore a major river and a major salmon run like this anywhere in the West,” said Peter Moyle, a fisheries biologist with the University of California-Davis.
“This is a river that has been dried up in long stretches for 60 years. It can literally be brought back to life again.”
Restoration will require an estimated $650 million to rebuild levees, plant trees and remove barriers on 100 miles of river from Fresno to Merced. That work could take a decade, although Moyle predicted salmon will return in two or three years once water flow increases.
There are precedents: In 1996, the Solano County Water Agency agreed to put water back into 22 miles of Putah Creek near Davis. Salmon came back the first year. Native plants and trees grew. Songbirds returned. Community groups began cleaning up the creek, and school children studied it.
“Suddenly the creek has become an asset,” Moyle said, “when before it was a place full of dirty water where you didn’t want your kids to play.”
Huge projects
• California trying to turn back clock
The San Joaquin is not the only California river to be massively re-engineered.
Much of the Golden State receives only about 15 inches of rain a year — the same as Morocco — and couldn’t have grown without some of the most ambitious water projects ever built in the United States.
Nearly a century ago, San Francisco submerged scenic Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park to expand its water supply. And Los Angeles built a canal 220 miles through the desert, draining much of the Owens River.
The San Joaquin’s story is similar: Friant Dam diverted so much water that the river dries up completely for 20 to 70 miles downstream in most years.
Now it will be the first major river in California where society attempts to turn back the clock on a huge scale, even if not all the way.
The river runs 350 miles. It begins as melting snow at 13,000 feet near Mount Ritter in the Sierra south of Yosemite. Tumbling through waterfalls and granite canyons, it historically flowed into the San Joaquin Valley, meandering north past present-day Modesto to empty into the delta near Stockton.
The river was so wide and deep that steamboats plied it from San Francisco to Fresno in the 1870s.
But everything changed in the 1930s when growers between Fresno and Bakersfield suffered a major drought. Wells ran dry; thousands of families faced bankruptcy. When the state’s attempt at a water project stalled, President Franklin Roosevelt approved construction of the Central Valley Project, a vast system of dams and canals to move water 500 miles from Northern California rivers to farms and cities.
The two linchpins were Shasta Dam, near Redding, and Friant Dam, near Fresno.
When Friant was finished and the spigots opened, farm towns all across the San Joaquin Valley celebrated.
“It was a very big deal,” said Harvey Bailey, a farmer who owns 1,100 acres of orange groves with his brother, Lee, in tiny Orange Cove, 30 miles east of Fresno. “There was a parade, with horses and floats.”
Bailey, 11 years old at the time, remembers how his parents took him to the ribbon-cutting and how the farm economy boomed.
Today, the region produces more oranges than any place in California. Bailey’s are such high quality he sells them to Japan, Korea, even Florida.
Outside the town of 8,000 people, neat rows of orange trees, thick with glistening fruit like a scene from a Steinbeck-era packing crate label, stretch for miles. Snow-capped peaks in Kings Canyon National Park dot the horizon.
Bailey’s family has farmed in Orange Cove since 1910. Virtually all the town’s water — and its jobs — rely on San Joaquin River diversions.
In August, 2004, when U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence Karlton of Sacramento ruled that state law requires Friant Dam to release enough water to restore salmon, a sense of dread gripped Orange Cove and dozens of other little towns.
“That ruling grabbed the valley’s attention,” said Ron Jacobsma, general manager of the Friant Water Users Authority, a group of 22 irrigation districts representing 15,000 farmers who depend on the river’s water. “People were very concerned it could result in a large loss of water to our region, and over time we’d end up back where we were in the 1930s.”
After the judge threatened to decide how much water should go back into the river, farmers, environmentalists and Bureau of Reclamation officials began settlement talks. Details are secret, but some reports say 200,000 acre-feet a year will be restored. That’s nearly 15 percent of the river’s average flow — enough for 1 million people’s needs a year. And it’s enough to bring back several thousand salmon in a decade, said Moyle of UC-Davis.
Orange farmers like Bailey say they’ll try to get by with less. Bailey is installing drip irrigation at $1,500 an acre. He hopes to buy water from other districts. But he worries.
“We’ve got competition from Spain, Australia, South America,” he said, “and their costs are lower.”
The farmers find themselves at a crossroads of changing values. When FDR dried up the river to save farm families, California had no Silicon Valley and little tourism. Agriculture was king. Today, the public demands wildlife restoration and high-quality drinking water.
“This water developed a whole economy,” said Bailey. “The benefits far outweighed the downside. People are part of the environment, too. We’ve got just as much right to be here as the fish do.”
Nearly 200 miles north in Silicon Valley, the fate of the San Joaquin River has a direct impact on the drinking water of nearly 2 million people.
The Santa Clara Valley Water District draws half its water from the delta, half from local wells. With most of the San Joaquin’s water rerouted to farms, the delta has become unnaturally salty, particularly in summer.
Meanwhile, pesticides, manure and fertilizers from fields along Interstate 5 drain into the river. Bill Sweeney, the former California director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in a famous 1984 speech called the San Joaquin River “the lower colon of California — a stinking sewer.”
Rainfall, and water flowing into the river from tributaries, wash it all into the delta. Meanwhile, delta water is delivered to San Jose drinking water treatment plants through the South Bay Aqueduct.
Although San Jose’s drinking water meets all public health standards, the Santa Clara Valley Water District spends millions treating it to remove contaminants. Of particular concern are trihalomethanes, substances formed when chlorine disinfectants react with decaying organic matter, such as leaves and peat. Studies have linked trihalomethanes to higher rates of miscarriage and cancer risk.
Although the water district has not violated any state or federal drinking water standards since 1990, it has come close in a few years, and now is spending $251 million for a high-tech ozone system to produce even cleaner water.
Restoring the San Joaquin “is an upside for us,” said Walt Wadlow, chief operating officer of the water utility for the district.
“The higher the quality of water you start with, the better the quality of the water you can deliver.”
River’s ugly fate
• Sewage, trash, pollutants flow in
Near the San Joaquin River’s end at Stockton, where water from tributaries flows in, the river revives. But it’s not a pretty sight.
The air smells pungent from a nearby sewage plant. A meandering series of wetlands 150 years ago, the San Joaquin is narrowed now by barren levees of dirt and broken concrete. One bank is littered with old clothes, empty paint cans, a broken microwave oven and a car half-submerged in the brown-green water.
Veterinarian Carrie McNeil spends her days testing delta water as director of Deltakeeper, a Stockton environmental group.
“That’s horrible,” McNeil said, drifting by in a boat last week. “There are places like this all over. The spirit of some of our rivers, the way they begin up in the Sierras — it’s just sad to see how they end up.”
Apart from the trash, the San Joaquin is classified under the Clean Water Act as impaired because of high levels of pollutants, including two types of pesticides and mercury from old Sierra mines.
“It’s a chemical soup,” McNeil said.
Everyone agrees there’s a lot of work ahead to nurse the San Joaquin back to health. In the 21st century, the river has to maintain farm towns, restore fish and provide cleaner drinking water.
“We view this as historically precedent-setting if we can work it out,” Jacobsma said. “You have parties that have been at each other’s throats for 18 years. For them to come together and find common ground that hopefully will meet everyone’s goals is something you don’t see every day.”
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- Video: “Tales of the San Joaquin” (RealVideo 450Kbps)
