For decades the San Joaquin River disappeared from maps between Friant Dam and the confluence with the Merced River, now thanks to a partnership between state water officials, farmers and environmental groups the river has returned and with it hopes for a long extinct salmon population to return.
It has been decades since the river flowed continuously from the dam to the ocean during spring, summer and fall without the help of an unusually wet year.
The connection with the ocean happened about two weeks ago, officials said.
“This is a big moment,” said Monty Schmidt, senior water resources scientist for the Natural Resource Defense Council, a national environmental watchdog with an office in San Francisco. “It’s a big step toward having a living river again.”
The San Joaquin had been mostly dry for about 60 miles over the last six decades after Friant was built to provide irrigation water for farmers and flood protection for surrounding residents.
The NRDC filed a lawsuit in the late 1980s to revive the river. Nearly two decades later, environmentalists, farmers and the federal government signed an agreement to restore the river.Now, in the first full year of the restoration, east San Joaquin Valley farmers will lose up to 230,000 acre-feet of water to keep the flow going. It amounts to 18% of the water they have been getting after an average season.
Farmers are hoping to get some of the restoration water back after it flows down the river.
Officials may be able to work out water trades with other districts that use the restoration flow this year, said Ron Jacobsma, general manager of the Friant Water Users Authority, representing 15,000 east-side growers.Jacobsma also said some restoration water may reach the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, where officials could attempt to pump it back to east-side farmers through canals. But that might prove difficult because federal officials have been forced to cut back pumping to protect threatened fish.
The water releases are considered experimental at this point in the restoration as government officials study such aspects as water temperature, which needs to be cool for salmon, and seepage, which could destroy crops on surrounding land.
The experimental flows will end Dec. 1 and pick up again in 2011, federal officials said, though an exact schedule has not been settled yet.
Salmon will be reintroduced by Dec. 31, 2012. The restoration cost over the next several years is estimated between $250 million and $800 million.
(via Fresno Bee)
One of the major problems facing the river is a massive concrete channel called the East Side Bypass about 99 miles downstream from the dam that was designed to carry floodwater (think L.A. River).
Where the bypass was built miles of native river channel have been closed off. In places farmers have planted crops are right up to the banks of the old river. Officials will need to pick to either let the water flow in it’s original water course or divert it to the bypass.
If the native channel is used, it would need to be widened and deepened. If the bypass channel is used, it would have to be redesigned with trees and shrubs along the banks to help keep the water cool for the fish (also like the L.A. river).
Plans to restock the salmon population in the San Jaoquin River to replace the extinct population could stimulate pacific run salmon populations to return to the Merced River also. Unfortunately a series of impassible dams stand between the salmon and Yosemite National Park.