Officials from the water projects, fish agencies, and the State Water Board review how they responded last year, and outline what they plan to do if conditions remain dry
Today, officials from state and federal water agencies and fish agencies held a media call to discuss the Drought Operations Plan, and how the agencies plan to address a possible fourth year of drought.
On the call today, Director of Water Resources Mark Cowin, Regional Director of Bureau of Reclamation David Murillo, Tom Howard with the State Water Resources Control Board, Director of the Department of Fish and Wildlife Chuck Bonham, and State Water Resources Control Board chair Felicia Marcus.
Here’s what they had to say:
Mark Cowin, Director of the Department of Water Resources
We’re here today to talk about the likelihood of the fourth consecutive dry year and what state and federal agencies are doing to balance competing needs for the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project, which together supply water for about two-thirds of California’s population and about 3 million acres of farmland.
I don’t think its news to anyone that last year was historically dry and in fact, 2014 was the driest year on record for many parts of the state. If you look at the three previous years from 2011 through 2014, they rank as the driest consecutive three-year period on record in California.
December’s storms gave us some hope that we’re breaking the dry cycle, and in fact, DWR briefly activated its flood operations center in a hopeful moment, but we haven’t seen significant precipitation since December 21st of last year. And now we’re halfway through January, typically our wettest month, and the snowpack that provides about one-third of the water for people in California is only at about one-third of its normal content of water for this time of the year, so while those December storms helped to raise some reservoir levels slightly above where they were at this time last year, the state’s two biggest reservoirs, Shasta and Oroville, are only at about 62% of what they historically hold at this time of year.
We need a lot more rain and a great deal more of Sierra snow in order to begin to pull out of this drought, and unfortunately, very little is on the horizon, at least for the next ten days or so. So we must prepare for the worst.
Californians should brace for a fourth year of drought and expect that mitigating the economic and ecological harm of drought could be even harder than it was last year, so therefore we must continue to ask every Californian to help by using water sparingly and carefully. Each individual act of conservation – letting your lawn go brown or replacing the washer in a leaky faucet – makes a difference over time. There’s never enough water to waste in California, and this year, clearly, will not be an exception.
On the positive side, the challenges of last year prompted an unprecedented level of coordination and cooperation among DWR and the five other state and federal agencies that are responsible for either managing or regulating California’s two biggest water projects. That has allowed us to adjust quickly to weather and environmental conditions so that we can capture water supplies while also taking action to protect water quality and wildlife. I give credit and my personal appreciation to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Marine Fisheries Service for working with us to maximize flexibilities provided under the state and federal endangered species acts.
One very interesting area that has played out this year is our evolving understanding of how the levels of turbidity and river flows after storm events affects migration of Delta smelt. In simple terms, turbidity is a measure of how cloudy water is, and we have learned that small fish like cloudy water because it’s harder for big fish to find them. So we’ve employed some new tools this year – more active turbidity monitoring and management and enhanced fish monitoring – that have helped us decide on a day to day basis when pumping at the two projects should be increased or decreased. And we’ve a lot more to learn but I think there’s broad agreement that we’ve learned quite a bit this year, and it should help us balance project operations with appropriate fish protections moving forward.
As we at DWR and the BOR continue to manage project operations, and react to evolving conditions, we will continue to consider a number of priorities, including first of all reserving enough water in the reservoirs to provide for basic health and safety needs, not only for this year but for 2016 as well. Keeping enough water stored in upstream reservoirs is also necessary so that we can make releases all year long to repel salt water in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and allow us to continue moving fresh water through our projects. Another priority is maintaining enough water in reservoirs upstream to keep Sacramento River temperatures cool enough for various runs of salmon, and then finally as we refine our operations, we want to take best advantage of any sporadic storms that we see late in the winter or early spring, again, to boost water supplies and provide appropriate protection for fish.
Due to our recent experience and the relationships that we’ve built among our interagency team, I think we’re well ahead of where we were at this time last year in preparing and responding to drought. Last month, our federal and state agencies prepared and posted an interagency drought strategy paper for 2015 that describes the potential ways that we’ll respond to continued drought and we posted that document so the public would have more opportunity to understand how the projects might be operated under different circumstances under drought conditions.
Today, my Department, which operates the State Water Project, and the Bureau of Reclamation which operates the Central Valley Project, submitted a separate document, a drought contingency plan, to the State Water Resources Control Board. That plan spells out the modifications to water quality rules and water rights permits that we project operators may need to request in coming months in different areas, depending upon the weather. Our primary reason for considering those changes is that those existing rules do not explicitly consider project operations under extremely dry conditions. The drought contingency plan is based on reservoir storage and snowpack conditions as of January 1st and will be updated as conditions change.
The goal of today’s submittal is to learn from last year’s operations, plan on an even longer horizon, and be as transparent as possible about how we are balancing multiple demands on the two projects. With the plan we submitted today, we did not ask the water board to change any rules. Rather it frames the types of changes that we may request to the water board, depending upon the weather. DWR and the Bureau of Reclamation will continue to monitor the situation and may make a separate specific request to the State Board in the coming weeks.
I want to note that the State Board will ultimately need to consider those requested changes through an appropriate proceeding with comment from affected stakeholders and consistent with the rules that govern those proceedings, State Water Board members have not been involved in the development of these plans that require Board approvals.
Finally I want to hit on SWP operations and our allocation to our 29 public water agencies, including Santa Clara Valley Water District, Kern County Water Agency, and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California that contract for water supplies from the State Water Project. Last year, the State Water Project delivered only 5% to the total amounts for which those 29 agencies contract and that was the most meager allocation ever made by the SWP in 47 years of deliveries.
Looking ahead to how much water we can deliver this year, we announced a month and a half ago an initial allocation for 2015 of 10% of contracted supplies. At that time, recent storms were raising the level of Lake Oroville, our keystone reservoir and the second largest in California, more substantial storms soaked Northern California in mid-December, raising reservoir levels even more, and in Lake Oroville now, we have about 100,000 acre feet in storage beyond what we had this time last year, although we’re still well below average for this date. And thanks to those December storms, the new management tools that are employed in close coordination with other state and federal agencies, the SWP has been able to move several 100,000 acre-feet of water from upstream tributaries through the Delta and into San Luis reservoir down near Los Banos.
As a result of those actions, today we are announcing a modest boost in the 2015 SWP allocation, up an additional 5% from that initial 10% to now 15%. This allocation is based on very conservative assumptions and we are confident we can deliver at least that much without any extraordinary adjustment in environmental or water quality protection rules. And or course we’ll continue to monitor basic human health safety needs throughout our system and make adjustments as necessary to make sure that we meet those needs as a first priority.
So, I’ll close by just noting that this promises to be another difficult year. But I believe we are better prepared and applying what we learned last year, we’ll continue to adapt and work to minimize both economic and environmental impacts under these very difficult circumstances.
So with that …
David Murillo, Regional Director of Bureau of Reclamation
Mark did a pretty good job of identifying the actions that we have taken and the action that we will take, so I’ll do my best not to repeat a lot of what he’s already said.
The drought situation is a high priority for me and for the administration and the Department leaders in Washington, DC. Thanks to tight coordination between state and federal agencies, a 2015 drought operations plan is being delivered that will give federal and state water managers a common operating framework which allows them to respond more quickly and to optimize water flows through the coming year.
Despite the dismal physical hydrologic conditions that continue to persist in California, federal and state agencies are ahead of preparation response compared to where things stood at this time last year. This is attributed to the lessons from last year’s drought, from front loaded planning, and from relationships built around the sustained coordination between federal and state partners for the past years.
It’s important to reinforce that through the delivery of the 2015 Drought Operations Plan to the State Water Resources Control Board on January 15th, that all citizens of California have a responsibility to reduce usage and address drought. While progress has been made, water conservation is a shared sacrifice and there’s more the public and the private sector can do to contribute to our water conservation goals.
The drought contingency plan finalized today gives us on overview of current conditions in our reservoirs and the Delta related salinity and fisheries. Together we have work to do, statutory and regulatory obligations so that we can quickly adjust to water operations as conditions change. Too often the issue of drought is presented as a choice between people and fish. That’s a simplified version of the world that does not fit the reality on the ground. With this 2015 drought plan, we will have a blueprint for operational flexibility that allows water managers to respond quickly to changing conditions on the ground and to improve water flows.
We will not be giving a water allocation today. We provide our water allocations in February for the Sac River Settlement Contractors and Exchange Contractors that allocations announced about February 15th, and then for the water service contractors, that’s announcement is made around February 20th.
Our current storage in our reservoirs, they range anywhere from 108% (Maven note: not sure I heard that right) for the 15 year average which is at Folsom Reservoir, down to about 38% at New Melones Reservoir. Currently right now, we’re about 70% of the 15 year average at Shasta, which is about (indistinguishable) million acre-feet.
With that being said …
Tom Howard, State Water Resources Control Board
My name is Tom Howard and I serve as the Executive Director of the State Water Resources Control Board. We appreciate that this plan is being put together early in light of all of our collective efforts last year. The plan is due to the board today and it was a requirement the Board established as part of last year’s strategy for responding to the drought.
Last year the agencies worked hard to make critical decisions as conditions changed. This year the projects and agencies are presenting a framework in advance for how they plan to address a variety of scenarios for the coming year, based upon the experience from last year.
Most immediately the water board will of course take receipt of the plan that the projects have prepared for us and review it closely over the coming weeks. The Board’s naturally very interested in hearing from interested parties and stakeholders and the projects themselves so at our January 20th board meeting, we will be hearing presentations on this item and taking public comment on people’s ideas regarding the Drought Operations Plan.
And as Mark pointed out, depending on the hydrology moving forward, we may have to process some Temporary Urgency Change Petitions from the projects based on some of the plans that are laid out in this document.
I’m going to in part provide just a little bit of background on what we did last year, and unfortunately, we can probably, if the drought conditions persist, we can expect to be doing something similar again in this year.
First, we processed temporary urgency change petitions that water right holders throughout the state send to us, most of the time due to the extraordinary conditions, they needed relief in their water right permit terms in order to balance the available supply that they had. The second is that we were curtailing certain classes of water rights throughout the state. We ultimately ended up curtailing about 10,000 water right permits and we’ll be sending out a letter in the next week or two to all of the water right holders in the state, telling them that in light of the existing conditions, they can probably expect to see curtailment notices being sent this year as well.
The third was acting along with the regional water boards, we accelerated the use of recycled water and made financing available for recycled water projects. And lastly, recognizing the severity of the drought, and it’s possible long duration, the board focused on water conservation, adopting emergency regulations that required action by almost all urban water agencies and individuals across the state in July of 2014, and the State Water Board chair, Felicia Marcus, will be discussing the conservation efforts in a little more detail in a moment.
That summarizes my comments …
Chuck Bonham, Director of the Department of Fish and Wildlife
If you’re going to ask me how our fish and wildlife are doing because of this drought, my answer is, not so well. Let me quickly look at last year to inform you about some of those things we may expect to be doing this year. So in last year with our federal counterparts, we moved about 30 million salmon smolts out of our combined hatchery system down into the Bay Area because river conditions were too bad and increased mortality risk was too high. We shut down some of our state hatcheries because Folsom Reservoir was so low, we couldn’t get cool enough water into our hatcheries. We moved about 150,000 state and federally protected coho salmon in the Scott and Shasta tributaries to the Klamath from dried areas of that watershed to wet areas. Our department did over 300 rescues of fish in 25 watersheds around the state.
Then you turn to those less mobile species on the landside, like Amarosa volt or western pond turtle or garter snake, and we had serious questions about extinction and how to bring species into captive breeding. We saw bears and mountain lions show up in places we’d never seen before at historic levels, for example wandering around downtown Bakersfield. We got an unprecedented amount of calls from the public about cultivation of marijuana in watersheds of Northern California where trucks were illegally drying up waters in one location to move water over to marijuana production in a different location.
So let me tell you a little bit about what’s going on right now in the Delta and elsewhere. So some of you may know that the Department just completed and published its Fall Midwater Trawl, I believe the Sacramento Bee wrote about this yesterday. We’ve been doing that drawl since 1967. It’s important to note that is not a population estimate. That is a trawl that’s done roughly in the same place at the same locations at the same time of year which creates a number that allows us to do a population abundance estimate or index. Notwithstanding this year, we had the lowest recorded number of Delta smelt in that trawl ever, since 1967, 9, and we had the second lowest ever longfin smelt recorded in this trawl at a number of 16.
As of right now, I would say about 90% of our different salmon runs are moving in and out of the Delta, and on the winter run salmon front, which is perhaps our most critically at-risk and highly protected on the state and federal front, things are dire for winter run as well. We won’t completely know the effect of this drought until probably about 2017-ish, because salmon have multiple years in their lifecycle, but I would say generally as to winter-run, what we’re seeing right now on the out migrating scale is slightly less than 400,000 young juvenile fish have passed our Red Bluff rotary screw trap; that’s about 4 times lower than our 2008-2013 average, and it’s about half of what we saw in 2011 alone, which was a particularly wet year.
Let me turn to birds. So January is our peak season when we see waterfowl in the Central Valley. Reasonable best professional guess would be we might see about 5 million birds this January in the Central Valley. The December rains that Director Cowin mentioned were very helpful. It allowed us in short order at rapid pace to get more acres wet in the Central Valley, which is habitat for birds, and in December, because of those rains, we were able to get much closer to our typical amount of wet acreages covered. That wetland has now begun to shrink rapidly because January has been extremely dry. We also know that food will be less available for these birds because during the water year of 2014, summer irrigation was so much lower.
This can provoke outbreaks of avian cholera, which always happens within bird populations. As to drought, what occurs is an amplification of those disease outbreaks. I will say those as of today, we have not collected longfin smelt or Delta smelt down at the two state and federal facilities since I think January 7th, which is very good news. We have not run across any collection triggers that would rstrict water operations, and given our management during December, and where currently smelts are distributed farther away from the pumps in different parts of the Delta, and this current low turbidity in the south Delta, we’re not expecting any time soon an uptick in that salvage on our current prediction estimates.
So what are we going to be doing? Well, we’re going to be doing a lot of specific things in the context of the drought contingency plan, and we’ll be doing stuff than just planning. I think it’s important to note that about a year ago, we came to you and told you about historic allocations to the SWP and it wasn’t until April of 2014 that we had a drought strategy and contingency plan. Compare April of 2014 to January of 2015, so we’re well ahead on the planning curve, but we’re also well ahead on actual actions. Our department has gone and done 46 contingency planning for our own properties, which cover 280,000 acres. That’s something we hadn’t done alst year. We actually went out and breached dykes and restored almost 250 acres in Lindsay Slough in Suisun Marsh as habitat restoration benefit for Delta smelt, going and working on habitat issues when flow was low makes good sense for the benefit of species.
I’d encourage you to go look at our website which is wildlife.ca.gov/Drought, and you’ll see a roster of all the activities we’ve done over the last year in many categories. I think we expect, because of the drought contingency plan to have a better dialog this year with all of the agencies on maintaining the minimum baseline of water for refuges in the coming year which I think is a great coordination improvement.
I will also tell you that on the salmon front, we’re looking at whole suite of things. We’ll have again increased capacity at the Livingstone National Fish Hatchery to deal with any winter run emergency contingency needs. We’ll be putting temperature and dissolved oxygen probes throughout the upper Sacramento system to help us monitor what are called the redds of fall run and winter run salmon, those beds where the baby eggs are laid, to monitor and allow for us to move water quality and quantity decisions on kind of a sliding scale all up and down the Upper Sacramento.
We’ll be doing additional trawls. All through the holidays, our respective staff were in the water every single day, running these improved trawls and monitoring early warning systems. We’ll keep that going. We’re going to do an enhanced particle tracking model this year to simulate fish migration behavior so we can make sure we’re using as accurate real time information as possible, and we’re going to do a feasibility study on passive integration, of actually putting transponders into these fish so we literally actually know where they are at any given moment to allow us to increase our flexibility in decision making, and I’ll end on an action note that is a real success story.
Director Cowin and Regional Director Murillo mentioned this. We managed turbidity collectively between our agencies in a way in December such that we avoided salvage triggers. We operated these projects to avoid a turbidity bridge and a fast track pushing smelt directly into those pumps, and as a result, we’ve avoided a worst restrictive operating regime, which would have come at the expense of hundreds of thousands of acre-feet, which is exactly what happened back in December of 2012. The ability to work together and learn from our lessons has put us in a much better spot.
I’ll end with a personal plea to all y’all, which is the plural of y’all, and say if you’re a fish and wildlife advocate in your own personal life, every drop of water we can save as Californians is a drop of water potentially usable for fish and wildlife in this state, so please help us save water.
Felicia Marcus, Chair of the State Water Resources Control Board
As has been said, we remain in an extremely serious situation. The drought is not over. The situation is still virtually as dire as it was a year ago, and more importantly, we absolutely can’t know when it will end. For all we know, we may just be in the beginning of a longer term drought, so we need to act as if it will continue.
Tom talked about the four major areas the water board has worked on and will continue to work on, two in water rights, changes to permit conditions and curtailments, and two in augmenting supply – recycling and urban conservation. I’ll speak to the latter two, but I really want to emphasize the importance of conservation and I thank my colleagues for doing that as well, because it is extremely important and it’s gotten an awful lot of attention in these last months, which is a good thing.
With respect to recycled water, last year we used our financial assistance program and permitting authority to provide incentives and guidance on the safe use of recycled water to supplement the state’s water supplies. We’re going to continue these efforts this year and bond funds from Proposition 1 will be a key part of our strategy along with our existing loan funds and regulatory work.
With respect to conservation, conservation continues to be the most efficient, and common sense way to extend our supplies, and we’re now looking at ways to improve upon our emergency water conservation regulations that went into effect last summer. Last summer we took action to move urban water agencies to do more to save water for a number of reasons, and I’ll just give you a few. First, as Californians, we really are all in this together. At a time when hundreds of thousands of acres of fields are lying fallow, thousands of people are out of work in agriculture, smaller communities are running out of water, and fish and wildlife and struggling, we should all step up. And with more urban water security, more flexibility can be found within our systems, which is what Chuck was talking about.
If you’ve got two years in storage, that’s great. But if the drought lasts four years, or eight years, or over a decade as it did in Australia, you’re going to want to conserve every drop now to make that water last. Third, by conserving, you forestall even more painful and dramatic cuts later, so whether its self interest or civic spirit, water conservation is just the right thing to do.
We frankly last summer were concerned that many communities were not taking action and just hoping for rain that might never come. And it didn’t. We set basic water waste rules for everyone, required urban water agencies to implement or enact mandatory limits of their choosing on outdoor irrigation in particular, and we required monthly reporting of progress which we made public. That conservation reporting by the state’s largest retail water suppliers began in July. It includes conservation rates for a given month in 2014 compared to 2013, as well as an estimate of the average residential gallons per capita use in each agency. This allows communities to compare themselves against each other and learn from those who are similar situated but doing much better.
Now some urban state residents did a great job conserving more water in the last six months of 2014 then they did in 2013. Others have done so for a long time. And yet others could do more. We plan to continue our work to improve conservation during 2015, especially if the drought continues, but not only if the drought continues. And we’re reviewing comments that we solicited actively from the public last month on what more we should be doing, so next month we will be actively considering whether the regulations need to be renewed or amended, as well as what other authorities we might employ to increase urban water conservation, so stay tuned, and be sure to go to SaveOurWater.com, which is the DWR/ACWA’s website, for really great tips on how to conserve.
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