Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [327]
During the next several years (I know this because I recently read five years of Fridays over a weekend), Zeke Grader sounded more and more like John the Baptist, although he must have felt more like Sisyphus. Fridays has only a few thousand readers, most of whom are West Coast fishermen or fisheries biologists—who needed no convincing that the drought could mean disaster for the salmon if extraordinary measures weren’t taken to protect them. That is the sometimes fatal weakness of anadromous fish: By insisting on spawning in rivers and estuaries, they are like an army trapped in a mountain cul-de-sac, easy pickings for forces, natural or unnatural (which is to say, human) that are far beyond their control. But after years of intense drought, as Grader noted again and again, the Bureau of Reclamation and Department of Water Resources—which essentially run the Sacramento River watershed—were still allocating water as if these were normal times. They had taken nearly all of the salmon habitat; now they were taking most of the water—and the fish with it.
The most significant statistics from the drought—which Zeke Grader, to my knowledge, was the first to elucidate—really had nothing to do with precipitation and everything to do with what happened to the precipitation after it fell.
In 1987, which was categorized as a “critically dry” year—the driest of five classifications—the Central Valley Project and State Water Project gave their agricultural customers (who consume 95 percent of the CVP supply and around 65 percent of the SWP’s average yield) every acre-foot of their water entitlements, based on the “carryover” they held in storage. The water managers could have argued, in 1987, that they were blindsided by the suddenness of the drought, but in 1988, another critically dry year, agriculture got full entitlements again. In 1989, a year classified as “dry,” nearly all CVP and SWP customers received full water deliveries again. It wasn’t until 1990, a desolately dry year despite some late rains in May, that the two huge water agencies began cutting back their agricultural customers. But even in that year a big block of users with water rights predating the Central Valley Project received normal-year water supplies.
One consequence of this policy (or lack of a policy) was that carryover storage in Shasta Lake dropped so low that, in February of 1991, the Bureau predicted that the reservoir—by far the largest in California—would be the world’s biggest mudflat by fall of that year, down to 2 or 3 percent of its capacity of 4,500,000 acre-feet. The Bureau was rescued, barely, by another late spell of wet weather in March, but had those storms not come through there would have been no CVP water for anyone—fish, fowl, humans, or crops—by summer’s end.
From the fisheries point of view, though, the most devastating consequence was that most of the runoff that reached the California Delta in those years never reached the Bay; it was immediately diverted across the Delta by the projects’ huge batteries of pumps. In fact, from 1987 through 1989, Delta exports increased every year as river flows and reservoir storage dropped abysmally. In those three years, runoff to the Delta averaged nine or ten million acre-feet, while Delta diversions climbed from 5.2 million acre-feet in 1987 to 6.1 million acre-feet in 1989—a level barely surpassed in the wettest years.
On the other hand, the four runs of salmon, whose young rode out to sea on twenty to thirty million acre-feet of runoff before the great projects