24 Mar COMMENTARY: Protecting California’s water – SB 872
By Michelle Paul, California Farm Water Coalition
From the moment California’s earliest residents called the vast, fertile soils of California’s Central Valley home, efforts began to solve one of the state’s oldest challenges: harnessing the water. With rainfall and snowpack varying dramatically year to year, and because most people and farms are in the state’s arid regions, water must be carefully managed and transported long distances to ensure all communities can thrive.
California’s water infrastructure has developed over more than 220 years, beginning with the construction of a stone dam on Mission Creek in 1807. Since then, countless projects have been added to meet the evolving needs of each region. Today, nearly every part of the state’s engineered water supply system is interconnected, either through hydrology or connections between physical infrastructure.
The most obvious examples of this are the federal Central Valley Project and the California State Water Project, mostly built between 1940 and 1979 to meet agricultural, urban, and now, environmental water supply needs. They both share the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, and both systems need upgrades and repairs after, in some cases, 80 years of water deliveries.