News from Oroville

To be published February 15, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     Driving home Sunday night, I heard the voice of urgency through the radio, issuing an evacuation order for low-lying areas below Oroville Dam.  Earlier that day, I’d heard the opposite news:  that no danger was present despite spillway problems and full-to-overflowing levels of the reservoir.  The change in the news put me into emergency mode.

     In my early thirties, while at Berkeley, I’d studied dam failures and a phenomenon called “reservoir-induced seismicity” for a class on earthquakes I was taking as part of my preparation for environmental planning.  An earlier class, “Hydrology for Planners” taught by a nationally-famous hydraulic engineer, Luna Leopold (one of two sons of environmentalist Aldo Leopold who both taught on that campus,) had focused on floods and flooding, particularly with respect to urban areas.  Reservoirs, unfortunately, are where those two subjects sometimes converge.

     Eight years after Oroville Dam was completed, the city of Oroville (located just downstream from the dam) experienced a 5.7 magnitude earthquake embedded in a series of foreshocks and aftershocks that were caused by the reservoir itself – specifically, the rapid drawdown and refilling of the reservoir.  The damage from the earthquake, which involved no flooding because the new dam remained intact, was estimated at $3 million dollars.  Had the dam failed as a result of those earthquakes, the costs would have been astronomically higher.

     As I write this, the failures on both the main and emergency spillways, which prompted the evacuation of almost 190,000 people, are being managed.  Even if they succeed in lowering the reservoir in time for the next downpour, however, the costs of the evacuation to those shuttled away from homes, jobs, farm animals and implements could easily top the $3 million suffered in 1975, even when number is recalculated for inflation.  Add the costs to the state and multiple counties for providing emergency services, then the costs of repairing the dam’s spillways, and what we have is a portrait of one of the things that’s wrong with building large reservoirs:  the total costs of these projects are never computed in the cost-benefit studies.  They aren’t calculable.

     Oroville is an interesting town, especially considering that the majority of its vast water resources is shipped well beyond the lands surrounding it.  With a population of 16,000 it has much in common with the towns in our readership area.  The first olive processing plant was built there; the original “Mother Orange Tree” still resides there.  Located at the last spot on the Feather River where boats can go, it began as a service center for gold miners in the foothills when the state was still in diapers, then developed small-scale farms.  It has a small downtown with half-empty brick buildings like most of our towns have, and serious challenges for survival.

     Unlike Lindsay, however, it has many people working to preserve its historic quality and stimulate its economic development in sustainable ways.  My friend and attorney Richard Harriman has been following and assisting in these folks’ progress, and has brought me stories of hope even as we ponder how to help something similar come into being here.

     So I’m praying for the folks of Oroville right now, and the future of their downtown restoration.  The Feather River would like to go right through those streets and buildings right now and carry the fruit of many peoples’ efforts all the way to the Sutter By-Pass just south of Nicolaus.  Pray that the Department of Water Resources can stay on top of water under the tremendous force of gravity.  Pray that weighty water doesn’t trigger another earthquake.

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Trudy Wischemann is an environmental planner who writes.  You can send her your favorite flood stories c/o P.O. Box 1374 or leave a comment below.

Free Rein

Published in slightly edited form March 11, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


“We gallop everywhere we go
 I just loop the reins
And I never say Whoa
To my little red horse.”

     I’m borrowing these lines from a Juni Fisher song to show the roots of the common phrase “free rein.” For those who have never been on a horse’s back, it may not help much.  But being astride an animal ten or fifteen times heavier, stronger and faster than yourself, and letting him have his head, so to speak – can teach the meaning of another common phrase, “hang on.”  You’d better hope your hands can find the reins and “rein him in” (to use another common phrase) as you approach the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.

     Last week, when I wrote “Free Rain,” I was hearing this other “rein” in my head.  For almost 40 years I have been researching and writing about California’s water story.  No matter what the issue or urgency, the largest landowners in this valley always have had free rein over the water supply.  They have had free rein over the regulators of our water supply.  They most always have free rein even over the media reporting the news about our water supply.

     Last week I wrote about the letter the Lindsay-Strathmore Irrigation District (LSID) sent to its landowners about the availability of water to purchase at $1,300/acre-foot (af).  The seller listed was not a government agency but a contractor for State Water Project (SWP) water.  I called Scott Edwards, the manager of LSID, to find out who had water to sell and to learn more about the circumstances.

     “Tejon,” he said is the seller.  He thinks there are two other districts asking to buy the offered water and does not yet know how much LSID will receive of the 865 af requested.  I asked who within our district was able to buy this water, and he said “It’s all kinds of people, not just the big guys,” understanding the meaning of my question.

    

     Tejon is a familiar name to most of us, but rings a special bell in my mind.  Tejon Ranch was (and probably still is) the largest landowner in the Arvin-Edison Water Storage District, which surrounds the town of Arvin, one of the two towns I’ve studied since 1981.  Only part of its lands lie within the district boundaries, but even those acres were well in excess of the 160-acre limitation that was supposed to apply to Friant-Kern water when it was first received by that district.  The limitation was never enforced.    

    

     Tejon also receives SWP water through the Kern County Water Agency, which accounts for the availability of water to sell to the Tulare and Fresno County districts who don’t.  Paul Taylor, the Berkeley economist who was the champion of the acreage limitation provisions, understood the State Water Project as one of several means the large landowners created to circumvent the 160-acre law.

    
     Besides offering irrigation water for sale at usurious prices, the large landowners are using their free rein invisibly in other ways, particularly through groundwater pumping.  A friend who sits on the board of Tulare Irrigation District told me that he has become concerned about the water banking his district and the City of Tulare have done diligently for the past 10 years being tapped by Boswell’s “pump farm” to the west.  Thought to be 40 acres with 28 wells, the location is not known, much less how much water they are pumping, where it is being used, or how it is being transported.  No government agency is yet in charge of groundwater pumping.  We have no reins.

    

     The North Rim approaches.  What will we do?

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Trudy Wischemann is a voluntary water conserver who worries about agriculture and writes in town.  You can send her your water saving tips c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.