CA Canals Sinking Because Of Groundwater Pumping; Agribusiness - Public Should Pay To Fix It

[hatrack]

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The Friant Kern Canal — the waterway that is furthest along in repairs — will eventually cost nearly $1 billion to fix. The 152-mile-long canal pulls water from the distant San Joaquin River through monocropped acres of vines, trees and vegetables. It is an essential artery for agribusiness, and so growers and their irrigation districts — and the politicians who represent them — want the expenses to be partially covered with taxpayer money.

But there’s an issue with the sales pitch. Proponents claim that repairing the canal is vital for the millions living in nearby towns and cities. This is technically true for some canals and some communities, but in the San Joaquin Valley, 90% of Friant Kern’s water is used for irrigation, meaning that very little goes to the majority low-income Latino farmworker towns most vulnerable to the impacts of drought. Nearly all of these towns rely on groundwater, not surface water, and projections show that the over-extraction of that resource is only getting worse. There’s no clear evidence that the proposed canal fixes will directly benefit these vulnerable communities’ water access. “The same political power that caused the problem is the same political power that is continuing to over-pump groundwater,” said Jennifer Clary, the California Director of Clean Water Action, a nonprofit advocacy group. “These canals have been flowing past at-risk communities for decades.”

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The Friant Water Authority is responsible for getting Sierra Nevada snowmelt to roughly 15,000 farms and a handful of towns across a million acres of industrialized farmland. But over the decades, those surface water supplies have decreased. To continue growing crops like table grapes, almonds and pistachios — which fetch high prices around the world — agribusinesses, particularly large corporate growers without surface water rights, dug deeper wells and pumped ever more water. This caused the land to sink, and, ironically, the canal the industry depends on to sink along with it.

The impact of overpumping is landscape-scale and nearly beyond perception, save for certain visual clues. The county bridge, once high above the canal, now barely clears the water. The Friant-Kern Canal is one of three state and federal canals impacted by such woes. It’s also in the worst shape: About 60% of its carrying capacity has been lost, meaning that farms past the pit get less water, and the water ends up costing more for others. There have been attempts to fix this. In 2018, a state proposal would have funded $750 million in repairs along the Madera and Friant Kern Canals. It failed. Critics maintained that the infrastructure’s real beneficiaries — private agribusinesses — should pay for it, not the public.

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https://www.hcn.org/issues/54.1/south-water-who-should-pay-to-fix-californias-sunken-canals

[NNadir]

1. A more serious issue is the damage done to groundwater by fracking in the San Joaquin Valley.

Beside the issue of ground water depletion, pollution of ground water permanently by these dangerous fossil fuel mining activities while we all await the "renewable energy" nirvana in California (and elsewhere) that did not come, is not here, and won't come is a very serious matter. Kern county holds major oil/gas fields.

About 10% of sea level rise is attributable to the volatilization of ground water mined for agricultural purposes.

While we can all feel free to bash "agribusiness" the bottom line is that they are in the business of providing food for something like 8 billion people. The destructive mining of ground water is another way, besides waiting forever and forever and forever with "by 2000," and "by 2010" and "by 2020" and "by 2030" and "by 2040" and "by 2050" statements for the magical outbreak of the so called "renewable energy" nirvana is another way we are screwing future generations, asking them to do what we were too bourgeois to bother to do ourselves.

The coastal and interior mountain ranges of California, between which the highly productive San Joaquin is situated offer remarkable features for the possible restoration of groundwater using desalination via a system of heat networks, and heat exchangers but it won't happen. When the San Joaquin is strip mined of ground water, it will be a great desert to trash with wind turbines, I guess.

This is the world for which many of us cheer.

It is easy to pick out "bad guys," and wag our fingers at them but if we really, really, really, really wanted to do that, find bad guys, the use of a mirror would be a good place to start.

History will not forgive us, nor should it.

[2naSalit]

2. Nope...

The system was built w/taxpayers funds so those who use it should pay to maintain it.