Nathan Halverson, a reporter with Reveal News from the Center for Investigative Reporting, writes that scientists last summer “recorded the worst sinking in at least 50 years”:

“But the extent of the problem and how much it will cost taxpayers to fix are part of the mystery of the state’s unfolding drought. No agency is tracking the sinking statewide, little public money has been put toward studying it and California allows agriculture businesses to keep crucial parts of their operations secret.

 

“The cause is known: People are pulling unsustainable amounts of water out of underground aquifers, primarily for food production. With the water sucked out to irrigate crops, a practice that has accelerated during the drought, tens of thousands of square miles are deflating like a leaky air mattress, inch by inch.”

California sources nearly 60 percent of its water supply from groundwater, which is causing this sinking or “subsidence” – the formal term describing the sinking of land resulting from groundwater extraction. The U.S. Geological Survey says the sinking is starting to affect much of the state’s infrastructure, including bridges, canals and highways.

In 2013, USGS published a study on subsidence in the Delta, which is one of the main sources of fresh water in California. The report says the Delta is “the heart of a massive north-to-south water delivery system,” where much of the water “is pumped southward for use in the San Joaquin Valley and elsewhere in central and southern California”:

“The leveed tracts and islands help to protect water-export facilities in the southern Delta from saltwater intrusion by displacing water and maintaining favorable freshwater gradients. However, ongoing subsidence behind the levees reduces levee stability and, thus, threatens to degrade water quality in the massive north-to-south water-transfer system.”

Halverson reports the sinking in some parts of California had ballooned to a “rate of about 1 foot per year in 2012.” And even if we stop pumping groundwater immediately, geological survey scientist Devin Galloway tells CIR, “the damage already done to aquifers now drained to record-low levels will trigger sinking that will last for years, even decades.”

But a California-based journalist who specializes in science reporting based on hard evidence — Hank Campbell, author of “Science Left Behind” and founder of the popular Science 2.0 website — takes a broader view based on the last 50 years of state governance.

In an essay titled “California Government Is The Big Water Management Problem,” featured on the Real Clear Science site, Campbell notes that ….

… much of the fresh water that California has runs into the Pacific Ocean. You might wonder why the Pacific Ocean needs so much, since 96 percent of Earth’s water is already in oceans, but the oceans are not asking for it. Instead, it is due to anti-science policies lobbied for by well-heeled California environmentalists.

Environmental regulations mandate that water that would sustain 4.4 million families gets flushed this way, regardless of drought conditions (however, farmers do get penalized during a drought, the environment must come before food). Meanwhile, Governor Jerry Brown just now got around to mandating water conservation among his wealthiest and most loyal voters. It had to be mandated because the wealthy are not conserving anything the way the more agricultural sections of California have been doing for two years. …

[If] we cared about the actual problem — having enough water in good times and bad — the situation would be easy to resolve. For example, enough water to sustain 2.6 million California families was dumped into the ocean because there isn’t enough storage capacity in the north of the state and environmental rules limit the amount of water that can be pumped to reservoirs in the south.

An intentional effort to not prepare for drought

Campbell notes that this isn’t just a failure of government foresight. He says this inaction was the goal of powerful interests.

Why not allow more water to be stored in the south or build more reservoirs in the north instead of dumping fresh water into the ocean? Californians know water is important, we have agreed to water bonds totaling $22 billion in recent years, but the money has ended up going to environmental projects rather than things that help the people paying interest on those bonds.

Most of California is actually desert, the green parts are all watered to be that way, and we know droughts will happen — this is the fourth one in 50 years — so it would make sense to store more water, a literal anti-rainy day plan. But environmentalists block all efforts to create more reservoirs even though we know this sort of thing has always happened and will continue to happen. ….

Because of environmental impact lawsuits and lobbying by environmental groups, there hasn’t been a real investment in water infrastructure since the 1960s, when there were only 16 million people in California. Now there are 40 million people all using the same major infrastructure. …

The common denominators in our water problem are a lack of snow and lawsuit-driven, rather than science-driven, environmentalism. We can only fix one of those.

Greens bitterly fight desalination plants

California environmentalists have also been the biggest opponents of a soon-to-open desalination plant in Carlsbad and one proposed for Huntington Beach. They say it is because of legitimate concerns about effects on fish, ocean water quality and the coastline.

Defenders of desalination efforts, such as former state Sen. Mark Wyland, R-Carlsbad, say that many greens’ real long-term goal is blocking growth or making it more difficult. Constricting water supplies could be seen as a tactic toward that end.