Restoring San Joaquin River Could Take Decades

[WhiteTara]

http://abclocal.go.com/kfsn/story?section=local&id=4555773

But at least they are starting to restore the river. The dam on the Klamath River is being removed too. This is exciting news for the water ways in this part of the country.

The project is expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and take many years to complete. The historic agreement puts an end to an 18 year long legal battle. The deal will pump water back into parts of the river bed that have been dry for decades. Restoring what was once California's second longest river will be a long journey toward an undetermined destination.

The wildness of the San Joaquin River was tamed in the 1940's when Friant Dam was built to create a reservoir to feed hungry farmland and growing cities. The San Joaquin once brought steamboats to the valley and supplied native americans with all the salmon they could eat.

Don't look for this 21st century restoration to bring back those times.

snip

Restoration of annual salmon runs is a daunting ambition. Rechanneling and revegetating the San Joaquin river along with redistribution of water flows are complex and problematic challenges. It will take decades and hundreds of millions of dollars to accomplish the task ahead .

[XemaSab]

1. I think people make restoration out to be more complicated than it is

There's good riparian veg right below the dam, and willows all the way down through the dry channel.

I think that river knows how to restore itself given proper flows.

[hunter]

3. The problem is a lot bigger than that.

First of all you have to do it in a way that doesn't upset Central Valley farmers.

A lot of people from other parts of the United States don't know this, but California's Central Valley is like Republican Kansas on steroids. Politically, parts of the Central Valley are about as far from San Francisco as you can get. You drive along the highway it's all God Bless America, Abortion Kills, Get U.S. out of U.N., Guns are Freedom, Yellow Ribbons, and U.S. flags. Or else it's Mexico.

[XemaSab]

4. You don't have to tell me...

I spent 14 months of my life living outside Fresno, and a year in Redding.

I still maintain, however, that there's nothing wrong with the San Joaquin River that a massive structural failure of Friant Dam wouldn't fix. :hide:

[hunter]

5. Redding.... shudder.

Years ago my wife was interviewing for a job there. The nice woman interviewing her said, "We don't see many of your people up here..."

We skipped the free lunch, checked out of the motel, and headed on home.

[hunter]

2. The San Joaquin River was entirely destroyed by man.

There is very little left of the original river ecology -- what remains of the river itself has been turned into a complex water delivery system for human uses. But this is still good news. These small sorts of restorations are a good thing.


Original channel of San Joaquin River north of Dos Palos, California near
confluence of San Joaquin and Chowchilla Rivers and diversion of the
San Joaquin River to the Eastside Bypass (Tara Smith, April 2006).

[Porcupine]

6. Or one week with a truckload of Semtex

:evilgrin:

Now where's that Hayduke fellow when you need him. Oh, yeah; fictional.

The San Juaquin will not be restored in the lifetime of anyone alive today. There are too many people who have planted their asses and their homes in it's flood basin. A channel is not a river.

[Dead_Parrot]

7. Dare I ask...

If the Friant dam, or the dam on the Klamath River, are/were viable for hydropower?

:hide:

[hunter]

8. The turbines associated with Friant Dam are rated at 26 megawatts.

It's just one part of a highly developed and complex power system.

"In total, the upper San Joaquin River basin has 19 powerhouses with an installed capacity of almost 1,300 megawatts (MW), which represents approximately 9 percent of the hydropower generation capacity in California."

http://www.usbr.gov/mp/sccao/storage/docs/initial_alt_info/ta_iai_02_vol2_hydropower.pdf

[Dead_Parrot]

9. 1.3GW of renewable, on-demand energy?

Oh no, we can't have that. Let's rip those fuckers down.
:eyes: