Farmers and cities on the east side of the Valley may get more water than they originally thought.
Friant Water Authority, which operates the Friant-Kern Canal, said in a recent memo on its website it is confident its contractors will not only get the 15% allocation of surface water deliveries announced in February but that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation will likely increase the amount to 20%, possibly as early as this week.
On a recent day in the San Joaquin Valley, the rain falling outside was cause for celebration for Aaron Fukuda.
“For us, water is a mood,” Fukuda, president of the Tulare Irrigation District, said over the phone.
As a third consecutive dry year sets in on California, drought has become a source of stress and anxiety for farmers and communities. But rain brings happiness. If only the rain came more often, Fukuda stated.
The school is disappearing.
Westside Elementary opened its doors nearly a century ago here in the San Joaquin Valley, among the most productive agricultural regions on earth. As recently as 1995, nearly 500 students filled its classrooms. Now 160 students attend and enrollment is falling fast.
This was where the children of farmworkers learned to read and write, often next to the children of the farm owners who employed their parents.
Free water deliveries have started for some San Joaquin Valley residents with nitrate contaminated wells.
But advocates worry that nine months into the state’s nitrate control program, outreach has been lacking and not enough wells have been tested.
The nitrate control program launched in May of 2021. It offers free water deliveries for residents whose wells test over the limit for nitrates. The program is mandated by the State Water Resources Control Board and funded by nitrate polluters throughout the valley.
Water made California.
The statement is often made about what is arguably the largest and most complex water transfer systems ever created by mankind — the California State Water Project — and its kissing cousin the federal Central Valley Project.
In the San Joaquin Valley, water is becoming a commodity equal to life and death.
California is a powerhouse of food production, growing some 40 percent of the country’s fruit, vegetables and nuts. However, the agriculture industry depends on a water supply that’s increasingly fragile and unreliable as the climate warms. As a means to increase access to livable drinking water, community and elected leaders alike are rallying behind “Building More Dams.” But this is simply not a viable solution.
Following a sizable atmospheric river dumping rain and snow in the San Joaquin Valley and central Sierra Nevada mountain range and another on the way for Christmas, it appears that Valley communities won’t be earning any immediate extra water supplies.
Earlier this month, California’s Department of Water Resources announced that, for the first time ever, it would start the 2022 water year with a zero water allocation for water users relying on the California aqueduct and other state canal systems.
State water officials have asked local groundwater agencies to better prevent land subsidence. Simultaneously, the state is also working to fix the damage caused by sinking land.
Subsidence is caused by the over-pumping of groundwater. It occurs in many parts of California but is especially pronounced in the San Joaquin Valley during drought years.
The Kern River cascades from the Sierra Nevada in a steep-sided canyon, coursing through granite boulders, and flows to the northeast side of Bakersfield. There, beside cottonwoods and willows, the last of the river collects in a pool where dragonflies hover and reeds sway in the breeze.
Then the river dies, disappearing into the sand.
Decades ago, the Kern flowed all the way through Bakersfield. But so much water has been appropriated and diverted in canals to farmland that the river has vanished in the city, leaving miles of dry riverbed.
Now, a group of residents is campaigning to bring back a flowing river in Bakersfield.
More than 140 water districts in the central San Joaquin Valley have yet to apply for state water debt relief, leaving thousands of customers susceptible to water shutoffs after the state’s moratorium expires on Dec. 31. The deadline to apply is Monday at 5 p.m. California residents who fell behind on paying their water bills during the pandemic are protected from having their water shut off through the end of the year.
