http://www.californiadroughtupdate.org/California-Water-and-Infrastructure-Report-January-11-2024.pdf
(With expanded coverage of all the Western States)
by Patrick Ruckert
Published weekly since July, 2014
An archive of all these weekly reports can be found at both links below:
http://www.californiadroughtupdate.org
https://www.facebook.com/CaliforniaDroughtUpdate
For a free subscription to the weekly report: Send me an email– patruckert@gmail.com
A Note to Readers
As the winter days follow each other one by one all of the water mangers, and others, wonder if the
present snow-drought will throw the state back into another years long drought. Though there remains
almost three more months of the “wet period” for most of the state, no one is counting on mother nature
to come to the rescue. The water managers have already announced that the allocation of water to water
districts, cities and agriculture will be only 20% of what they have requested. And only if the three
months ahead are very different than what we have seen in November and December in terms of the
rain and snowfall.
While the state’s reservoirs are well above the average level for this time of the year, things are very
different on the Colorado River, where the two largest reservoirs in the nation are barely at 35% full.
Fear of dramatic action to reduce what is taken from the river, meanwhile, has created a new situation
in the negotiations on what must be done. The three lower basin states are stepping forward with a new
plan to ensure that what is withdrawn from the river will not exceed new water coming into it.
I again include some excerpts from a new article by Edward Ring, whose polemic, as usual, is that
attempting to solve the water crisis in the state by conservation is a sure path to disaster, and the $7
billion, or $8 billion the state wishes to spend on an impossible program would better be spent on
infrastructure that would save much more water than the impossibility policy that will only save
400,000 acre feet a year.
This week’s Feature presents some of the material I have published here previously, but I thought it
was very appropriate to highlight it once again during this election year.
The material is on the role of President John Kennedy, who in 1962 and 1963, not only was driving the
Apollo Project to put a man on the Moon “in this decade,” but initiated and dedicated many important
water projects in the western states, while backing the North American Water and Power project to
create a continental water management system. In addition, he initiated from the White House a policy
to begin building large nuclear-powered desalination plants, with the first to be built at Huntington
Beach, CA.
