California Farmers Concerned Over Water Shortage Issue

While issuing a final biological opinion relating to endangered species, the National Marine Fisheries Service called for action on the part of state and federal water regulators that would have a direct impact on water-pumping operations in California’s Central Valley, which of course will be felt by the state’s farmers, USAgNet reports.

Acting under authority granted by the Endangered Species Act, federal biologists and hydrologists concluded that current water pumping operations in the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project should be changed to ensure survival of winter and spring-run chinook salmon, Central Valley steelhead fish, the southern population of North American green sturgeon and Southern resident killer whales, which rely on chinook salmon runs for food.

To accomplish this goal, the opinion calls for several actions, such as increasing cold-water storage in Lake Shasta, regulating river flow rates to protect migrating fish and curtailing water-transferring pumps in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to a greater degree. The opinion covers the state and federal export facilities in the delta, the Nimbus hatchery on the American River and the operations of diversion structures, including the Red Bluff Diversion Dam and the Delta Cross Channel gates.

If the directives are put in place, they could reduce available water to cities and farms south of the delta by 300,000 to 500,000 acre-feet, a drop of 5% to 7% from water deliveries that are already drastically limited by drought and earlier court rulings related to protecting endangered species such as the delta smelt.