There would be regular detours along River Road, a main thoroughfare. Huge construction vehicles would patrol the roads for a decade. Everywhere you look in this part of the state, you see signs that read, “Stop the Tunnels! Save the Delta!” The tunnels would take at least 10 years to build, and the $15 billion price tag, which doesn’t include $10 billion for habitat restoration, could go up, based on the experience of other underground projects like Boston's Big Dig. Political, citizen, activist, whatever, it goes with the territory.” Yes, there is going to be some opposition. “California has prospered because we've taken risks, we've pioneered, and we've been able to collaborate. Taking this history, I can say that the proposal that we're unveiling today is a big idea for a big state for an ambitious people that since the Gold Rush has been setting the trends and tone for the entire United States,” Brown said. Brown explicitly invoked this grand spirit in unveiling an early version of the plan in mid 2012. It is an audacious plan, one that seems to come from another era, where governments were more ambitious in their transformation of the natural world. Locals fear that the Delta could end up wiped out like Owens Valley, which Los Angeles drained like a cold beer on a hot day. State officials hope that means federal environmental agencies will stop interfering in their water delivery operations. If the water goes underground at Hood, passing through new, high-tech fish screens, it will pick up fewer endangered creatures on the way to the south Delta pumps. Water that would have flowed down through the Delta, then sent south, will be diverted here instead. The water intakes for the tunnels would flank Hood: two to the north, one to the south. His proposal, the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, would bore two tunnels longer than the English-French Chunnel underneath the Delta, while simultaneously restoring thousands of acres of wetland. A statewide vote thwarted him then, but he's ready to try again. The Delta smelt population, for instance, has gone from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands in the last few decades.īrown's father, Pat, oversaw the completion of this productive, destructive system, and Jerry Brown himself tried to fix it during his first round as governor 30 years ago. The unnatural flows disrupt their natural habitat, and when they reach the pumps-which they often do, despite the state's efforts-they die. Native fish species are on the brink of extinction in part because of this massive water-transfer apparatus. More immediately, the Delta ecosystem is collapsing. The levees that define the region's water channels are aging, and geologists and climate scientists worry that earthquakes or rising sea levels could rupture them. Without this crucial nexus point, the current level of agricultural production in the southern San Joaquin Valley could not be sustained, and many cities, including the three largest on the West Coast-Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Jose-would have to come up with radical new water-supply solutions. The Delta, then, is not only a 700,000-acre place where people live and work, but some of the most important plumbing in the world. From there, the water travels through aqueducts to the great farms of the San Joaquin Valley and to the massive coastal cities. Since the 1950s, the Delta has served as the great hydraulic tie between northern and southern California: a network of rivers, tributaries, and canals deliver runoff from the Sierra Mountain Range's snowpack to massive pumps at the southern end of the Delta. Hood sits at the northern tip of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a network of manmade islands and channels constructed on the ruins of the largest estuary from Patagonia to Alaska. I've come here because this little patch of land is the key location in Governor Jerry Brown's proposed $25 billion plan to fix California's troubled water transport system.
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