PATHS TO PEAKS

Who uses water? The answer isn't simple

William Tweed

I've been writing about water and climate in my last few columns, and I'm going to address these issues one more time before we move on to some other subjects in coming weeks. Today, I want to answer an excellent question that has come my way.

Now that it's clear to almost everyone that there is not enough water in California to meet all our demands, everyone is looking for someone or something to blame. The basic argument here is that: "if only ____ didn't use so much water, then there would be plenty for the rest of us."

I've seen this phrase completed many different ways, but here in Central California, where the political thought tends to lean heavily toward the conservative side, the most common target has been "the environment." More than a few local residents argue that "if it weren't for all the water that goes to the environment, we'd all be just fine."

I've even seen this one in print in the form of the argument that the environment receives more water in California than either our cities or our farms. Is this true?

Mark Twain, in one of his famous quotes long ago, remarked that lies often take the form of "lies, dammed lies, and statistics." The "fact" that the environment receives more water than farms falls into this last category. It is true, but only in a very distorted way.

According to the California Department of Water Resources (all the numbers I quote in this column come from this source), if one looks at the entire state of California, then net average water use by the environment does exceed that going to agriculture. The figures for the period 1998 through 2005 are 31 million acre feet each year to the environment and only 27 million acre feet to agriculture.

But, and this is a very significant but, almost all of this water "going to the environment" falls as rain in the remote watersheds of the northern Coast Ranges that flow directly into the Pacific Ocean. In fact, 87 percent of the water in California categorized as "going to the environment," flows within this one region.

The reasons for this are simple. It usually rains more along the North Coast than anywhere else in California, and capturing and moving water away from the many rivers of this mountainous region have always been seen as physically difficult and prohibitively expensive.

So what about our region? In the San Joaquin Valley, how much water is consumed for environment purposes?

The Department of Water Resources divides the San Joaquin Valley into two hydrological regions. In the south, we find the Tulare Lake Basin, the region that includes the watersheds of the Kings, Kaweah, Tulare and Kern rivers. To the north, we have the area drained by the San Joaquin River and its major tributaries including the Merced, Stanislaus, and Tuolumne rivers. The two regions work quite differently.

Let's look first at the Tulare Lake Basin. This is where we live. How much water is consumed here by the environment versus the share given over to agriculture?

The answer is about what you would expect. In average times, in the Tulare Lake Basin, 95 percent of net water use is by farmers, about 4 percent by cities, and less than 1 percent goes to the environment.

In the region drained by the San Joaquin River, the net numbers are 81 percent to farming, 5 percent to cities, and about 13 percent to the environment. The environmental number is higher here because this is the water that flows downstream to the Sacramento/San Joaquin River Delta and keeps that region from being invaded by salt water from San Francisco Bay.

Desperate for more water, local residents often forget that if we divert too much of the water that flows into the Delta before it gets there, then the Central Valley Project and the California Aqueduct will be pumping salt water in the canals upon which we base our valley economy.

So, how much total water is going to the environment in the two halves of the San Joaquin Valley combined? According to the best numbers I can find, the actual net amount is about 7 percent. At the same time, agriculture is consuming 88 percent of the water while our cities take the balance.

As I said earlier, all this is for the period 1998-2005 when our climate was providing more water than recently, but still you get the idea. Like it or not, Central California is not investing huge amounts of water in the environment or "wasting" it either, if that is the way you prefer see it.

If you don't believe me, take a drive on State Route 152 toward Los Banos and see how much water is flowing down the San Joaquin River toward the Delta and San Francisco Bay. What you'll find, of course, is that the river is bone dry, just as it has been consistently for most of the last 40 years.

Whatever your politics, we're not going to solve our water shortage just by focusing on getting water back from environmental uses, or from any other single user for that matter. We're all in this together.

Three Rivers resident William Tweed writes about the natural world of Tulare County. His column, copyrighted and printed by permission, appears every other week in Paths to Peaks.