Can California fish catch break with giant tunnels?
SAN FRANCISCO — Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan to route much of California’s mightiest river into two massive tunnels poses new perils for salmon and other struggling native species, but could give them a couple of breaks as well, experts and project supporters and opponents say in the wake of two newly issued wildlife rulings on the $16 billion project.
Ultimately, water experts say, whether Brown’s two 35-mile tunnels hurt salmon, whales and other imperiled species depends, as always, on the intent and smarts of the officials who manage the Sacramento River’s delta with the San Joaquin River, that fought-over, over-tapped spigot for the U.S. state with the most people, most crops and the biggest estuary on the West Coast.
“People just don’t trust that it will be operated as planned,” Peter Moyle, a professor emeritus and fishery expert at the University of California at Davis, notes of Brown’s tunnels project.
The giant tunnels would make it easier to ship water from California’s wetter north to cities and farms in the San Francisco Bay and Central and Southern California, even during droughts. They got an initial, crucial OK from federal fish and wildlife officials last week.
Moyle’s career has followed decades of decline of native fish in California’s Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers and their Delta, now re-engineered with dams, pumps, levees and canals to supply at least part of the water supply for two-thirds of the state’s people. The complex north-south water delivery system has helped put threefourths of the state’s salmon and trout species on the path to extinction within 100 years, according to a study Moyle and others released earlier this year.
Another Delta native fish, the small and silvery Delta smelt, is so near extinction, scientists talk of freezing samples to preserve its genes. In the 1980s, the smelt were so plentiful that researchers once sampled them by the pickup load, Moyle said.
Brown’s father, the late Gov. Pat Brown, helped put in the water projects the younger Brown now wants to modernize. He is pushing to get the tunnels approved before he leaves office next year.
Moyle is on the side of those open to letting Brown’s administration and a bloc of influential local water districts put in their tunnels. If nothing else, getting their way will incline supporters to follow through on separate, longstanding pledges to restore a big part of the Delta as fish habitat, he hopes.
“Personally, I feel we don’t have a choice but to trust them,” given the bad state of much of the Delta, Moyle said.
Brown and officials from various local water districts — most of them in Central and Southern California, but a few in the San Francisco Bay Area — want to run two, four-story-high tunnels underground to take water from the Sacramento River just above its delta with the San Joaquin River. Backers say the tunnels would take no more water from the Delta than present, although the tunnels would have the capacity to divert nearly the full flow of the Sacramento during summers or droughts.