OPINION
California’s Climate Change
A state worried about drought now frets about too much water.
Feb. 15, 2017 7:21 p.m. ET wsj.com
When it rains in California, it pours. Five years of drought have given way to floods, mudslides and now a massive failure at the state’s second biggest reservoir. While spending billions annually to fight climate change, Democrats in Sacramento have left the state ill-prepared for local weather fluctuations.
Nearly 200,000 people in Northern California were urged to evacuate their homes this weekend after Oroville Dam’s main and emergency spillways caved amid a storm surge. The emergency spillway, which hasn’t been used since the dam was finished in 1968, was needed to prevent flooding after a football-field-sized crater developed in the main spillway.
It’s unclear why the spillways eroded. Both were designed to handle flows 20 to 40 times stronger than those which occurred when they started to crumble. Green groups are blaming the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for re-licensing the dam in 2005 without requiring fortifications, which regulators said were unnecessary. So much for progressives’ belief in regulatory infallibility.
The storms pummeling the state this year also contradict forecasts of a new climate normal of persistent drought. California is on track for its wettest winter on record. Snowpack is running about 180% of the statewide average and more than double the norm in the Southern Sierras. Rainfall around Los Angeles is twice the historical average, and groundwater basins in the Central Valley are beginning to refill. This sudden turn of climate events is consistent with California’s cyclical weather patterns.
Yet the state lacks sufficient infrastructure to store the excess precipitation. California’s largest reservoirs are nearing capacity, which has required regulators to release billions of gallons of water to prevent flooding. More than 4.4 million acre-feet of water—enough to irrigate about 1.5 million acres of land or sustain four million households annually—have been discharged from Shasta and Folsom Lakes this year.
Some of the releases can be stored or used downstream, but millions of acre-feet of water will invariably flow out to the San Francisco Bay. The pumps at the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta are limited by mechanical capacity and species protections. During the spring, melting snowpack in the Sierras—which supply more than half of California’s annual precipitation—will supercharge reservoir releases.
Yet plans for additional surface storage—Temperance Flat Dam, Sites Reservoir and Shasta Dam expansion—have been at a standstill for years. The projects would cost about as much as the high-speed rail from Shafter to Madera and about half as much as California’s Medicaid expansion on an annual basis.
The real impediment is green folly. Soon after California voters approved a water bond in 2014, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service dashed raising the Shasta Dam, claiming it would harm endangered species’ habitat. Yet the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation says more water storage could restore threatened salmon downstream.
President Trump on Tuesday approved Governor Jerry Brown’s request for emergency aid, but he ought to finance Oroville Dam repairs in part from the state’s $8 billion rainy day fund. California’s politicians should worry less about the uncertain temperatures in 2100 than its water needs in the here and now. |
