(originally at surf putah – promoted by Brian Leubitz)

One of the upsides to the unusually dry winter and spring that we’ve had this past year in California is that it gives us a bit of much-needed breathing room to try and figure out how we’re going to avoid becoming Katrina West the next time the floodwaters get high enough. My fears back in the fall about the levees not being repaired by the time the rain started falling in earnest thankfully proved wrong. That being said, water control is always an issue in this state, and the scale and complexity of the problems we face pretty much guarantee that it’s always on the table for discussion, somewhere or another. In recent water-related news:

West Sacramento’s levees have seepage problems of the same sort that threaten the houses sitting behind the Natomas levees, and thus might not be as stable as previously assumed. The good news is that those problems were discovered when the city proactively started taking core samples from its levees. Far better to find out in advance than just keep building houses behind them and find out when the levee blows in the middle of the night in some winter storm.

On the west side of Yolo County, I agree with County Supe Matt Rexroad that having a flood control expert on hand is a good thing for Yolo County and the city of Woodland, even if we might not necessarily agree on the best means to solve the problem. Woodland got pretty close to flooding last year, it’s a good idea to have a full-time expert working on it.

Moving south towards the delta,  the Chronicle reported a couple of days ago that Judge Frank Roesch has ordered that the pumps in Tracy that send water to East Bay and SoCal communities and farms either find a way to operate them without killing endangered species or shut down. This is on top of the ongoing discussions of how to come up with a framework to deal with the gordian knot of delta levees, water exports and floodplain development that Cal Fed hasn’t been able to solve.

Going east towards the foothills, Bayne of Blog recently blogged about Sacramento Congressman Dan Lungren moving towards calling for to be drained and restored. Usually a cause of environmentalist groups going back to ur-naturalist John Muir himself, the conservative Republican congressman seems to honestly be interested in the possibility of restoring the scenic valley in his district. While San Francisco officials oppose the move, UCD science blog Egghead reports that a recent Masters Thesis by UCD Geology grad student Sarah Null argues that the same water flow could be maintained without the dam.

While it’s not actually Central Valley levees under discussion, meterology blogger Jeff Masters over at Weather Underground has a couple of posts up (1, 2)reviewing what went wrong with New Orleans’ levee system that are worth a read. The Army Corps of Engineers do not come out looking very good, to say the least. Always worth a read.

Finally (ok, this last bit’s a bit of a stretch, but the rice is grown with irrigation, so it kind of relates), Hank Shaw from the Stockton Record has coverage of the pre-match trash-haiku’ing between Mike Villines and Fabian Nuñez about the upcoming Great Sushi Roll-off. Nuñez’s haiku?

Sushi challenge on
The public very happy
We aren’t naked chefs

Land-locked Clovis man
Makes worst Republican Rice
Since Condoleeza

Núñez sushi wins
Feral cats at Capitol
Reject Villines’ swill

Who knew Fabian was a poet?

In a response to my post about the DWR’s Hetch Hetchy  report, sasha from Left in S.F. challenged the power replacement aspects of the restoration.

That’s all true as far as it goes, but as I’ve written before, the price tag of restoring Hetch Hetchy is better calculated in new asthma and lung cancer cases. Hetch Hetchy provides something like 20% of San Francisco’s electricity. If the dam were torn down, that power capacity would have to be replaced.

That power will almost certainly end up being replaced by gas-fired power plants, and those plants will be located in poor communities of color, because that’s where they put power plants. As long as advocates ignore the direct effect of the Hetch hetchy teardown, which will be more children tied to their asthma inhaler, more seniors unable to breathe, and more people in neighborhood clinics with shortness of breath, they are only confirming the worst stereotypes of the environmental movement, where environmentalists care more about trees than about people. 

Yes, the power would need to be replaced, but we need more power generation regardless of whether HH is dammed up or not. 

The E.D. report, however, has provided an analysis of where our power comes from and how Hetch Hetchy affects our power generation.  To be precise, the HH system provides only “0.6 percent of California’s electricity supply and represented 5.5 percent of statewide hydropower production. Also, only the Moccasin and Kirkwood plants actually generate power using water stored behind O’Shaughnessy Dam.”

Follow me to the flip…

And we must consider also where the bulk of HH power really goes: into pumping water.  Pumping water is the state’s single largest use of power.  If the Turlock and Modesto Irrigation District’s begin to make more substantive efforts toward conservation, much of the power loss can be made up throug small holding dams to increase hydropower generation along the Tuolomne.

The E.D. report also suggests other conservation measures including dynamic pricing for large energy consumers (ie industrial users) and local micro-conservation efforts. 

But more directly to your charge that we will have to build more gas-fired plants, well, that’s not necessarily true.  First of all, there were some members of the Assembly (Tim Leslie, a right-winger Rep, amongst others) who suggested trading off new dams for the restoration of the HH Valley.  While I’m not convinced this is the greatest idea, it is a reasonable consideration.  If we so desired, there are places on the rivers from the Sierra that we could build new dams.  Of course, there is plenty of environmental damage from dams as well.  Fish are unable to spawn properly and we could end up severely damaging our salmon population.  I think we’ve seen how perilous the salmon situation is already with the tight restrictions this season, building more dams would only accentuate that.

But as I said a few days ago on Calitics when we set a record for power consumption (which has likely been broken or will be broken today), we need more power generation facilities, specifically more alternative power generation facilities, with or without Hetch Hetchy.  I suggested requiring solar panels on all new construction, but I don’t think that’s the only option.  California has at least two resources in abundance, wind and sun, both of which are largely untapped.  And news that Vermont is now looking to produce energy from methane from cow manure offers another promise of new energy sources.  And of course, we could consider nuclear power productionm but the question of where we dump our spent fuel might hold that one back a while.

So, I think the accusation of environmentalists caring more about trees than people rings pretty hollow.  It’s not environmentalists that are pushing gas-fired plants on the world.  Environmentalists are working to decrease emissions and decrease the effects of global warming.  Heck, E.D. has other campaigns, Fight Global Warming and Clean Air for Life, running concurrently with their Restore Hetch Hetchy campaign. I think pointing fingers at E.D. and its partners is the wrong place to start.  If LA can save Mono Lake, why is it now so absurd to start talking about restoring Hetch Hetchy.  Look, I agree with the fact that we need to ensure secure water and power replacements, but that is not sufficient to kill the debate.

E.D. is working harder than anybody out there to clean up the air.  It’s a little disconcerting to see people on the left attacking them when it’s inconvienent for us.  I love the fact that we have HH and its resources, but if LA can save Mono Lake, why can’t we work to restore the Hetch Hetchy Valley?

The Department of Water Resources revealed its report to a few selected officials and apparently the cost is pretty high.  I’ve done a fair amount of research on the issues surrounding the Hetch Hetchy Restoration, and this report only aggregates information from other sources.  From what I’ve seen cost estimates in the past have ranged from a low range of $1B to a high range of $10B.  The DWR’s report doesn’t give much more specificity than that apparently, pegging the estimates at between $3-$10B.  I suppose this is higher, but not really out of the realm of possibility.

It would cost anywhere from $3 billion to $10 billion to fulfill one of California environmentalists’ fondest dreams — draining Hetch Hetchy Reservoir and restoring a valley in Yosemite National Park that John Muir called “one of nature’s rarest and most precious mountain temples.”

That is the conclusion of a report worked up by the state Department of Water Resources, analyzing what it would take to bring back Hetch Hetchy Valley and find alternative sources of water and power for San Francisco, which operates the valley’s O’Shaughnessy Dam. The cost estimate is more in line with what critics of the idea expected, and as much as 10 times the figure floated by environmentalists.

“Clearly, it’s not cheap,” said Assemblyman Joe Canciamilla, D-Pittsburg, one of a handful of officials who have been briefed on the findings. The report has not been made public.

“But we knew it was going to be expensive, no matter what the option,” said Canciamilla, who is nevertheless still intrigued by the possibility of restoring Hetch Hetchy.

The idea was first raised back in the 1980s by then-Energy Secretary Donald Hodel, but it really gained traction two years ago when the nonprofit group Environmental Defense issued a report called “Paradise Regained.” It put the cost of draining Hetch Hetchy, coming up with other sources of water for 2.4 million Bay Area customers and replacing the electricity that Hetch Hetchy generates for San Francisco at anywhere from $500 million to $1.5 billion. (SF Chron 7/19/06)

But, I don’t think this report really kills the discussions of tearing down the damn as much as some officials (DiFi, Leno, the SFPUC in general) would like.  The Environmental Defense people have acknowledged that their predictions of costs were very rough and have made provisions for higher costs.  The thing is, nobody truly understands how beautiful this place is.  When I first came at the issue, I thought it was nuts to dear down O’Shaughnessy Dam, and I still think it’s a bit crazy to give up our secure water and power resources.  However, have you seen the pictures of that valley? If you click on the picture above, you’ll be taken to the Sierra Club’s HH photo gallery.  You won’t be disappointed.  It is simply beautiful.

So the question that is now posed to us is: How much would we pay for a valley that has beauty that is only rivaled by Yosemite? I don’t think even billions should be considered crazy.