In the event of a major levee failure in the Bay-Delta, fresh water in the Sacramento River would turn to sea water—and, at that moment, a resource that millions of Californians depend on would be unusable.
about the Colorado River, I interviewed Pat Mulroy, who had recently retired as the general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority and had just become a fellow at the University of Nevada’s law school.
All of that began to change in 1848, when a carpenter who was helping to build a sawmill for a Swiss immigrant named John Sutter noticed something glittering in the mill’s tailrace: the beginning of the California gold rush. An emergent mining technique involved shovelling gravel and dirt into an open-ended trough, called a sluice box, then running water over it. Gold is so dense that it settles into riffles in the bottoms of the sluice boxes as the lighter material is washed away.
The wind blew hard during our boat ride, as it often does in the Delta—one of California’s largest assemblages of wind turbines was just to our west, in the Montezuma Hills—so we spent most of the trip inside the boat’s enclosed bridge, snacking on grapes that Lund had brought and on chocolate cookies that Fleenor’s wife had made.
A different levee failure on Jones Tract drenched the entire island in 2004. Dealing with that break was complicated by the kinds of conflicts that, for decades, have derailed efforts to address climate change and other environmental threats. Because the Jones Tract levee was “non-project”—meaning that it wasn’t part of a federal flood-control program and hadn’t been built under federal supervision—the Army Corps of Engineers could not help until they had received a formal request.
Many other defenses have been tried or proposed. In 1929, John Reber, an actor, screenwriter, and theatre producer, suggested building two immense dams across San Francisco Bay, roughly where the Bay Bridge and the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge are today, to disconnect the Sacramento almost entirely from the Pacific Ocean. Reber wasn’t an engineer; in fact, he hadn’t gone to college. But he was an avid amateur hydrologist and an effective promoter.
People who don’t know much about water tend to suggest the same handful of remedies for California’s difficulties. One is to build a big pipeline from Oregon or Washington. Another is desalination. Another is to prevent the Sacramento and other rivers from reaching the ocean. Another is to build new reservoirs or enlarge existing ones.
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