by Patrick Ruckert
www.californiadroughtupdate.org/20220728-California-Water-and-Infrastructure-Report.pdf
A Note to Readers
This report begins with a video produced in 2014 by LaRouche PAC.
With the major impediment to implementing the kind and scale of projects required to address the water crisis now affecting most of the land area of North America, being the lack of leadership with the vision and determination to think big, in addition to the insane Federal Reserve speculative financial system that virtually prohibits such projects, we begin this week’s report with six speeches by President John Kennedy in 1962-63. These are the President inaugurating water projects in the western half of the nation. The content of these speeches demonstrates the kind of leadership we must recreate today.
I include this week three maps from the U.S. Drought Monitor. I usually do not include the map of the lower continental U.S., but as the drought continues to spread and intensify eastward, and this report includes a couple of reports this week from Texas, it was time to do so. The maps are here smaller than usual, but you can click on them and expand them if you wish.
Widely reported in recent weeks is the protest by farmers in the Netherlands aimed at the European Union and the Dutch government, who ordered farmers that they must almost completely stop using fertilizers. Canada has now joined the insanity, with the Canadian government ordering a 30% reduction of fertilizer use by the farmers in the mid-west Prairie provinces. The protest there has just begun. We have an article on the protests from the governments of Saskatchewan and Alberta.
In the U.S., damage from the heat wave and drought are forcing cattle ranchers to sell off their herds. We reported the death of 2,000 cattle in Kansas a couple of weeks ago.
In California, as groundwater levels fall, both farming areas and small towns are seeing their wells go dry. More than 4,500 homes wells have reported dry since 20015. There are been 699 go dry so far this year.
In addition, “…600 square miles of farmland is left fallow this year on the west-side of the Sacramento Valley, which is more than 370,000 acres of farmland, nearly 80% of the total farmland in this service area. There is virtually no rice planted on the west-side of the Valley. Other crops, including tomatoes, seed crops and almonds have also been affected.”
The State Water Resource Board, in an unprecedented act ordered family farmers and ranchers in Scott Valley, in far-northern California, to turn off their irrigation pumps on July 14.
The State Water Board has been busy this past week. It also “readopted measures for the Delta to protect drinking water supplies, prevent salinity intrusion and minimize impacts to fish and the environment.” This allows the staff of the water board to enact curtailments of water use by even those users with water rights going back to the 1800s. “So far this summer, about 4,300 rights holders and nearly 10,000 of 16,700 water rights in the Delta have been curtailed.”
Our first reporting this year on wildfires includes this article: “Until the Oak Fire, California’s fire season had been off to a great start.” Until now “just 33,592 acres burned statewide from January 1 to July 19 on federal, state and privately owned lands. That’s the lowest total over that time since 2009, and the third-lowest in the past 20 years.”
NASA Earth, provides the first article in this week’s coverage of the Colorado River. NASA provides a series of photos showing the dramatic decline of the water level of Lake Mead.
That article is followed by a series of articles on the looming deadline set by the Bureau of Reclamation that the seven states that take water from the river must submit a plan by August 15 on cutting between two and four million acre feet from their allocations beginning in 2023. Those articles cover the plans, or non-plans, of several of the states.
