San Joaquin Valley water managers were surprised and baffled by water releases initiated by executive order, and the president’s bizarre claims about them.
https://sjvwater.org/trumps-emergency-water-order-responsible-for-water-dump-from-tulare-county-lakes/
It was no game on Thursday when area water managers were given about an hour’s notice that the Army Corps planned to release water up to “channel capacity,” the top amount rivers can handle, immediately.
This policy is dumb in several ways, so it’s hard to know where to start, but I think two pictures tell a pretty good story.
The first key point is that the reservoirs involved are in a different watershed and almost 200 miles from LA, and therefore unlikely to contribute to LA’s water situation. The only connection between the two regions is a massive pumping station that’s expensive to run. Even if it had the capacity, you can’t simply take water from one basin to another, because every drop is spoken for. These water rights are private property, not a policy plaything.
Even if you could magically transport this water to LA, it wouldn’t prevent fires. That’s because fires occur due to fuel and weather conditions. There’s simply no way for imported water to run uphill into Pacific Palisades, moisten the soil, and humidify the air.
In short, no one with even the crudest understanding of SoCal water thinks this is a good idea.
“A decision to take summer water from local farmers and dump it out of these reservoirs shows a complete lack of understanding of how the system works and sets a very dangerous precedent,” said Dan Vink, a longtime Tulare County water manager and principal partner at Six-33 Solutions, a water and natural resource firm in Visalia.
“This decision was clearly made by someone with no understanding of the system or the impacts that come from knee-jerk political actions.”