Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [304]
For many years, the planners in the state and federal water bureaucracies talked about the need for a “master drain” to carry the perched water out of the San Joaquin Valley. It is more accurate to say that their reports have talked about it, while the officials, whose main concern was building more dams to satisfy the demands of the irrigators, ignored the need for drainage because neither they nor (they guessed) the public and the farmers could face the cost. “In the early and mid-1970’s,” says van Schilfgaarde, “the state’s position was that no drainage problem exists. The early reports all said that the State Water Project makes no sense without a drain, because it would add inevitably to the perched water problem. But the public doesn’t read reports, so no one mentioned them. Then, a few years ago, when the problem began threatening to become critical, there was suddenly an awful drainage problem that threatened the future of agriculture in California.”
Today, three decades after the first reports spoke of the need for a huge, valley-wide drainage system, no such system exists. A modest-sized spur, called the San Luis Drain, was partially completed as a part of the Westlands Water District, which, by introducing a prodigious amount of new surface water into a relatively small area, threatened to waterlog the lands downslope. But the water carried off by the San Luis drain has nowhere to go until a master drain is built. For a while, it was dumped into a man-made swamp called Kesterson Reservoir, near the town of Los Banos, which slowly filled and evaporated according to the intensity of the valley heat and the irrigation cycle. From the air, the reservoir, when it was full, was an attractive sight to migrating waterfowl, which descended on it by the tens of thousands as their ancestors once descended by the many millions on the valley’s primordial marshes and shallow lakes. The presence of all of those coots, geese, and ducks at Kesterson Reservoir gave the Bureau an idea about how to solve one of the most daunting problems associated with the master drain: its enormous cost. By the time the San Luis Drain, a modest portion of the proposed master drain, is completed, its price tag will be more than $500 million. In 1984, Interior Secretary William Clark made an offhand projection that solving the drainage problem valley-wide could end up costing $4 to $5 billion. That comes to about $5,000 an acre to rescue the affected lands, which is more than any of the land is worth. The farmers, a number of whom are corporations or millionaires, are understandably loath to pay the bill. If one wrote off a third of the cost as a wildlife and recreational benefit, however, it would be easier to swallow. That is exactly what the Bureau and California’s Department of Water Resources, in a 1979 interagency study entitled “Agricultural Drainage and Salt Management in the San Joaquin Valley,” proposed to do in the case of the master drain, which, in that report, was projected to cost $1.26 billion in 1979 dollars. Ascribing annual benefits of $92 million to the master drain, the Bureau and the state’s Department of Water Resources elected to write off about a third of that total, or $31.7 million, as a nonreimbursable benefit, payable by the taxpayers, for the creation of artificial marshes. If one were to divide the number of ducks which might be expected to use those man-made wetlands into $31.7 million, they would become very expensive ducks indeed. When the Bureau’s dams went up, regulating the rivers and allowing the marshlands to be dried up—about 93 percent of the Central Valley’s original wetlands are gone—it conveniently ignored the economic value of the millions of ducks whose habitat would be ruined. But later, when it became convenient to overvalue their worth, economic alchemy turned them into gold.
Due to a distressing twist of fate, however, the Bureau and California may consider themselves lucky if they succeed in writing off