Opinion: State Auditor needs to investigate water agency over inaccurate data
We need to talk about what happened to all the water that was lost.We know what happened in cities up and down the state: They went dry.In the 2021 water year, California water officials disastrously miscalculated the moisture content of the Sierra Nevada snowpack. Because the Department of Water Resources didn’t know how much water was in the snow, or how much would be absorbed by the parched ground beneath, the department grossly overestimated how much would flow into reservoirs.
Even as dozens of climate scientists predicted drought, California wasted enough water to provide for at least 1.4 million households for a year. That’s enough for everyone living in San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento, Stockton, Fresno and Modesto combined. Those wasted flows did nothing to help salmon or to keep salt out of the Delta.
That wasted water had value beyond what we could have done with it – grown crops, fortified reservoirs, saved a few thousand salmon. On emerging water “exchanges,” where investors bet on commodity price fluctuations, California water was selling for $792.56 an acre foot in early March. That means the state flushed away some $550 million. That’s malfeasance.Question No.
No. 2: No water agency other than the Department of Water Resources made such a colossal mistake in predicting runoff. Turlock Irrigation District was extremely close in its estimates on the Tuolumne River basin. The NOAA’s California Nevada River Forecast Center – whose data many water districts incorporate into their calculations – was also extraordinarily close.
No. 3: When will the state start to live up to its obligations? Contractually, California has agreed to do two important things: keep saltwater from rushing into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta from the San Francisco Bay and protect native fish species. Because the state has failed to create enough water storage, it routinely has too little water for either task.
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