The Current California Water Plan, and the Past

Alexis Madrigal puts together a great story looking at the $25 billion so-called Bay Delta Conservation Plan, and the long tangled history of the Sacramento-San Joachin River Delta, agricultural interests, Southern California cities and the massive State Water Project and Central Valley Project.  I highly recommend reading the whole thing.  Here is a pretty good description of the size and scale of those two massive engineering projects, and the agricultural beneficiaries of them:

If water is sitting in a reservoir or being bought or sold, then people talk about acre-feet of water. One acre-foot of water equals 43,560 cubic feet, or 325,851 gallons. An unofficial rule of California water politics holds that if you want to make an amount of water sound large, use gallons. If you'd like to make it sound small, set your units to acre-feet or even million acre-feet.Compare: 1) Los Angeles uses about 600,000 acre feet of water per year. 2) Los Angeles uses 195,510,600,000 gallons of water per year.

For the rest of this article, I'll go with acre-feet because it reflects the scale of these projects better. They are not working at your puny human level.

So, to set the scene: All of the golf courses, parks, and other “large landscapes” in the state use 700,000 acre-feet. That's a bit more than Los Angeles uses.

But then take a look at Kern County, at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. Last year, it consumed 2.7 million acre-feet of water. The vast majority of it went to agriculture. Kern County's water usage could support an urban population of 15.9 million people at LA's per capita consumption rate.

Not to let the thirsty southern Californian cities off the hook, but agriculture soaks up the vast majority of water in the state. Depending on the year, up to 80 percent of the water diverted by people goes to farms and ranches. If you include water used for environmental purposes, like having flowing streams and places for aquatic animals to live, then agriculture's share drops to 40 percent, with the environment getting roughly the same amount, and all urban uses gulping down the last 20 percent.
This water doesn't usually come from streams adjacent to family farms. Much of it is pumped from underground aquifers. And the rest is delivered by two vast interconnected hydraulic machines that push melted snow from dams in the Sierras, through the Delta, to massive pumps that fill the aqueducts traversing the state. One machine is called the Central Valley Project, and it's managed by the federal government under the Bureau of Reclamation, the same agency that built the Hoover Dam. Historically, it's sent 7 million acre feet of water south of the Delta.

The other machine is California's own concoction. That's the State Water Project, and it was cemented into place by Governor Pat Brown. It's never delivered less than 1.1 million acre feet of water to the south, and it's often delivered millions of acre feet.

The Central Valley Project sends about 70 percent of its water to farms and 30 percent to cities. The State Water Project’s proportions are inverted: it delivers water to the southern California cities and a few, large farming districts. The two projects work in concert and share some facilities, including the vast San Luis Reservoir in central California, not to mention the byways of the Delta. Both machines are controlled at a Joint Operations Center in Sacramento, where an interactive map on the wall shows the condition of the waterworks as best as it can be known.

Taken together, this is the infrastructure that does the dirty work of California's long-held water policy: Take water from the north and move it to the south.

The article contains a ton of other detail about the Central Valley, the water projects, the proposed "Conservation Plan", the massive risk of failure of flood-control levees in the delta, salt-water intrusion, and other issues encountered in the complex network of special interests and their water demands.

The other interesting thing about this story is that it makes the Chinese South-North Water Transfer Plan look less crazy, since it is so similar to what California already does.  Then again, doing something similar to what California does may just be the height of craziness.