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By Root 1671 0

equivalent of Pearl Harbor. In June, the State Water Contractors, an organization representing all the customers of the State Water Project, issued a report predicting a shortfall, by the year 2010, of 4.9 million acre-feet state-wide—the domestic consumption of twenty million people. The deficit within the State Project service area alone would be about 1.9 million acre-feet. Without more construction, the San Joaquin Valley would receive 733,000 fewer acre-feet than it was counting on. The South Coast cities and irrigation districts, which signed contracts to buy 2,497,500 acre-feet from the State Water Project, could be guaranteed a firm yield of only 1,120,000 acre-feet. Only in wet years could each region hope for more; during extended droughts they would receive even less. Meanwhile, a state report on groundwater pumping was describing the overdraft as “potentially critical” in eleven subregions of the Central Valley, most of which were in the service area of the State Water Project. What made things worse was that the valley’s ancient saltwater aquifer, lying below the fresh water, could eventually rise to take its place.

Those figures, if they were accurate, bespoke calamity from both regions’ points of view. What was startling, therefore, was the fact that the report said virtually nothing about sending more water from northern California southward. Its solutions—which it admitted were only halfway solutions—were for the most part the same ones that had been proposed by the environmental lobby, and which the water lobby had scorned just a few years earlier. The Imperial Valley farmers, according to the report, could conserve about 250,000 acre-feet if they lined their earthen canals and improved their irrigation practices; the water could then be sold to Los Angeles. The occasional surplus Colorado River flows below Parker Dam, as long as they lasted, could be stored in groundwater basins near Los Angeles and San Diego. Reusing treated sewage water (the report didn’t go so far as to advocate drinking it) could save a few tens of thousands of acre-feet. Delta channels could be widened and levees rebuilt to allow slightly greater flows. The state could buy the surplus water in the Central Valley Project, for as long as that lasted. It was nickel-and-dime stuff, no heroics; the water savings might amount to 1.6 million acre-feet, which would only make up a third of the projected statewide shortfall. Only two new reservoirs, both off-stream and judiciously located south of San Francisco, were even mentioned, and the report didn’t even advocate that they be built; it merely called for “investigations.” (Initial investigations by the Department of Water Resources suggested a per-acre-foot price range of $310 to $400 from one of the reservoirs, Los Banos Grande; since that was fifteen to twenty times the cost of Oroville water, it was hard to imagine who in his right mind would buy it, at least as long as there was groundwater to overdraft.) Not a word was said about the Peripheral Canal.

Ironically, the State Water Contractors’ report was accompanied by a rather lengthy history of the State Water Project, written by the first head of the Department of Water Resources, Harvey Banks, which called the project “a high water mark symbolizing the results of the collective efforts of people of many points of view to resolve their ward with a program of statewide benefit.” Reviewing the history of the project, it was hard for some to see how Banks managed to arrive at such a conclusion. To begin with, Californians had been sold a pig in a poke: a project whose cost was deliberately and extravagantly understated, and whose delivery capability was much less than they had been led to believe. Completing just the first phase of construction had required federal cost-sharing at San Luis Dam, nearly half a billion dollars in tidelands oil subsidies, and several hundred million dollars in scavenged new revenue bonds. Then, when spectacular agricultural and urban growth had occurred on the promise of water the project couldn’t deliver,