Earth
One big criticism of the new water reform law is the "back-room process" to arrive at a compromise proposal that could be passed. The criticism is not without merit.
"Too few powerful interests had too much power to determine the content," wrote Peter Gleick, co-founder of the Pacific Institute, an Oakland-based think tank. Gleick, a water policy expert, has an interesting analysis.
The law, passed Wednesday by state legislators, sets up a council to watch over the troubled Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. It also starts the process to clean up the state's water quality and conserve water in cities, along with a mountain of other goals.
Voters will need to approve an $11 billion bond next year to make this happen.
So what happens when there are too few people in the negotiating room? Organizations not at the table tend to be pressured to fall in line with philosophies and past loyalties, instead of details.
Now there is a swarm of Northern California opponents, such as the Sierra Club and Friends of the River, who have to be brought along.
The leading edge of the San Joaquin River is 2.8 miles from the Chowchilla Bypass structure, federal officials reported this morning.
That's not far from Mendota, but it still has not reached the Mendota Pool. This is an initial, experimental flow of water that began Oct. 1 as the start of the river restoration.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation plans to slow down the release of water from Friant Dam on Wednesday morning.
Right now, it's going 700 cubic feet per second. It will slow to 350 cfs Wednesday through Nov. 20. Then the extra flow will be shut off until Feb. 1.
In the afterglow of a historic water reform law passing the Legislature this week, it's good to remember a few things:
1. Voters next year still need to approve the $11 billion in bonds. It is not a slam dunk.
2. There is an oversight council now to monitor every twitch of every species in the troubled Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. But there is no money yet to pay for it. Look for that in January.
3. The state is going to hire 25 new inspectors to catch folks who are illegally diverting water from streams. But right now, there's no real penalty, just a laborious process that could result years later in a fine. And the fine is just about what the thief would have paid for the water to begin with.
Will this new law make any more difference than the Calfed Bay-Delta Program, which flopped over the last dozen years or so?
 The first wood-burning ban of the fireplace season is today for Fresno, San Joaquin, Stanislaus and Kern counties.
You can't burn wood in fireplaces, wood stoves, fireplace inserts and pellet-burning devices until midnight today.
Kings County had the San Joaquin Valley's first wood-burning ban on Sunday.
The San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District makes the wood-burning forecasts on a county-by-county basis. You can call 1 (800) 766-4463 to find out if you're allowed to burn.
Wood burning pumps tiny specks, called particulate matter, into the air, and the pollution can cause a number of health problems.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation on Sunday will increase water releases in the San Joaquin River for two weeks as part of the the restoration program.
The flows are test releases to study how the dried part of the river will react. The river has not connected consistently with the Pacific Ocean since Friant Dam was completed in the late 1940s.
The flows began on Oct. 1 with releases of about 350 cubic feet per second at Friant Dam. On Sunday, the flow will be doubled to 700 cfs.
Movement of the flows can be tracked on the program's Web site at www.restoresjr.net/activities/if/index.html.
What will interstellar travelers find in the distant future when visiting this planet, presumably after humans have died off?
Geologist Jan Zalasiewicz tells the science of such a story in a book called "The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks?"
Here's part of what you'll learn:
New Orleans would become fossilized, but not San Francisco or Denver.
Your coffee mug could be a fossil, but not your Cadillac.
And, sadly, forget about the music of Mozart and Schubert and Duke Ellington, and the poetry of Shakespeare. Not much fossil material there.
There were no explanations in the advertising tease. But if you know anything about fossils, you can probably guess the reasons. The book will be available next month from Oxford University Press.
On the news blog, read reporter E.J. Schultz's diagnosis of the problems with getting votes for legislation to fix California's water problems. As he says, it's a little like herding cats.
Another development that he has mentioned is the split between environmentalists and Northern California water interests.
The Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council are onboard with a compromise that also has the support of San Joaquin Valley farmers and Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.
But fishing groups, delta farmers and other northern water interests aren't buying it.
A similar split in opinion happened in 1994, as I recall, when the stars seemed to align and the historic Bay-Delta Accord was signed. A lot of environmental groups signed on. But a lot of Northern California groups had big doubts.
The Bay-Delta Accord, like many noble efforts to settle California's water wars, has not fixed the problems. Will the latest effort succeed where others have failed? Stay tuned.
Earthjustice today filed another suit against the state to push for protection of the American pika, a small rabbit-like mountain creature that can only live at high elevation.
The pika is slowly being forced into alpine islands in the Sierra Nevada as the climate warms up. The California Fish and Game Commission denied a petition in June to protect the pika under the state Endangered Species Act.
Earthjustice filed the lawsuit today on behalf of the Center for Biological Diversity. It was the second lawsuit filed this year over the pika.
Environmentalists in May went to court and won a review of their first pika petition, which had been turned down last year. But the state again refused to list the animal for protection.
The Center for Biological Diversity maintains that the pika's habitat will completely disappear at the end of this century.
One look at the local air district monitor readings and you know the wind was blowing crazy on Tuesday.
In Corcoran, the PM-10 monitor -- which measures dust and other small particles -- showed eight times more stuff in the air than on Monday.
The federal standard for PM-10 is 150 micrograms per cubic meter of air. The Corcoran monitor measured 417 Tuesday.
There was no display for Fresno, so I don't know what the reading was here. But Bakersfield was 189.
The San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District has achieved the PM-10 standard. Could this exceedence knock the Valley out of attainment? Not likely. Usually, the high readings are waived if there is a big wind event, as there was Tuesday.
The Bee published stories on Monday about the decline in the mountain yellow-legged frog and efforts being made to save the amphibian, but we didn't talk about how tough these critters are throughout the world.
Amphibians have survived several mass extinctions in the distant past. Most recently, they lived through the extinction that wiped out dinosaurs about 65 million years ago.
So they've survived some of the worst hits for life on Earth, but perhaps 200 species already have been wiped out in this era.
Humans have destroyed the habitat of mountain yellow-legged frog in California, but there are bigger problems in the escalating loss of amphibians around the globe. Many of those problems are occurring here, too.
Ultraviolet radiation, climate change and pesticides are all on the list. But the most sinister, according to scientists, is the infectious disease, chytridiomycosis, also known as chytrid fungus.
Many experts think chytrid fungus is directly responsible for decimating more than 200 amphibian species. It is an aquatic fungus. And even more concerning, it is the first of its kind to focus only on amphibians.
As Sacramento bureaucrats, city folks, enviros and farm water officials continue talking about fixing the state's water system, it's a good time to look at the cost of a new dam on the San Joaquin River -- about $3 billion.
In June, the federal government released a report on the idea, which would create up to 1.26 million acre-feet of additional storage. That's double the size of Millerton Lake.
How will this price tag fit into the current compromise that is being fashioned in Sacramento? It's hard to know right now.
Officials are talking about a $9 billion bond, though there are few details about how it will
be divided among the many needs throughout California.
Keep your eye on the mad scramble for money and compromise right now in Sacramento. The Bee's Sacramento reporter E.J. Schultz has been writing almost daily about it, and his reports have been among the most informative.
The South Coast Air Basin had 14 more ozone violations than the San Joaquin Valley this year. Yet South Coast has a lot more pollution.
I looked at the numbers for the two gases that create ozone, and what a story they tell. South Coast puts out about a third more of one gas and nearly 50% more of the other.
The two pollutants are reactive organic gases (fumes from paints, gasoline and dairy waste) and oxides of nitrogen (gases from engine combustion).
Right about here, I usually say: South Coast has Pacific Ocean breezes to break up the ozone, and the Valley usually just cooks in the pollutants. Not a lot of breezes in this bowl.
What do you think? I'll just toss out another number to chew on. Population: Valley, nearly 4 million; South Coast, 16 million.
A reader called, requesting a story to explain that the huge water pumps in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta are indeed running.
It may sound like a strange request, considering the pumps have been operating since late June, but this can be a very confusing discussion.
For months, the public has been bombarded with a simple political war cry from farmers and city officials who have suffered water cutbacks: "Turn on the pumps."
As I said, the federal and state water pumps -- which provide water for more than 20 million Californians and several milion cropland acres -- are on. This political war cry is more about timing of the cutbacks, not the actual real-time pumping right now.
The delta is a sensitive ecosystem with dwindling fish species, a damaged food chain, many pollution problems and federal wildlife protection rules. Following those rules, the pumps were slowed or shut down earlier in the year to protect fish species from being wiped out.
Irrigators lost part of their water supply at a critical moment. So they are still crying, "Turn on the pumps," but they are referring to a different time of year. They're trying to head off another cutback next year.
And if the state has a fourth year of drought, the cry will get much louder.
Pssst. California might have a wet winter.
After three years of drought, that's good news. And it's not from the Farmers' Almanac. It's from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The bet is that El Nino is warming up the equatorial Pacific Ocean enough to divert the jet stream just a little south -- bringing storms more into California than the Pacific Northwest.
Of course, no one is guaranteeing anything. But it looks better this fall than it has in a few years.
We've had a couple of phone calls, a few e-mails and some comments on the blog item about restoring Hetch Hetchy, San Francisco's reservoir in Yosemite National Park.
Folks wanted to know how San Francisco could replace the water supply if the reservoir was emptied. And they wanted confirmation from another source that the Bay Area really was resisting any credible ideas.
I thought we should quote an editorial from our sister newspaper, The Sacramento Bee. Bee editorial writer Tom Philp, who has since left the newspaper, won a 2005 Pulitzer Prize for his series of editorials on restoring Hetch Hetchy.
He talks about an idea for replacing the city's water and addresses San Francisco's reluctance to explore the idea.
Here's an excerpt from a later editorial he wrote:
Continue reading "A word from a Pulitzer Prize winner on Hetch Hetchy" »
 A few days ago, reader Alan Kandel asked a question that many have posed to me over the years: "Will the Hetch Hetchy Valley ever be returned to its original pristine state?"
That's more than just a good question. For some people, it's a quest. For others, it's the trump card in an argument with Bay area environmentalists over the San Joaquin Valley's pollution problems.
Hetch Hetchy Valley, as you probably know, is a Yosemite National Park landmark submerged under water behind a dam that belongs to San Francisco. And San Francisco resists all efforts to change that.
In my experience, big cities, government agencies and industries have to be forced to make such landscape changes, usually by lawsuits.
Continue reading "That Hetch Hetchy question again" »
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Those who are closely following the San Joaquin River rebirth are saying the first release of water has moved past Gravelly Ford, which is 38 miles downstream of Friant Dam.
It will be another 24 miles to the Mendota Pool. Will the storm speed up this process? Federal and state officials haven't answered that question yet today.
The restoration flow began on Oct. 1. Revive the San Joaquin , a local advocacy group, has been posting photos and video of the restoration. The video above can be found on the organization's site.
The prediction of a gully-washing storm for Tuesday and Wednesday reminded of a killer blizzard in October five years ago. I hope mountain climbers, backpackers and other outdoor enthusiasts are aware of the forecast this week.
Here's the first paragraph to a story I wrote five years ago after tragedy struck:
"A powerful blizzard that has pounded the high Sierra with 3 feet of snow left two Japanese rock climbers dead in Yosemite National Park and hindered rescues of more than a dozen people in other areas."
It had been a fairly balmy October, as I recall -- a little like this October.
The storm predicted this week is supposed to be warm. But above 8,000 feet, it will be winter. The snow could be several feet deep. And the temperatures in the high Sierra will no doubt plummet.
Though there were two ozone violations in the last week, the San Joaquin Valley appears to have just completed its cleanest summer ever. But did it really seem like such a good season?
There have been 98 violations. The previous record was 102, and that was four years ago.
Here is one question to think about: Was the air better where you live?
Let's look at two monitors, the one at Fresno Skypark and the one in Clovis. There were 37 violations at Skypark and 48 in Clovis this year.
In 2008, Skypark had 39; Clovis 44. There were actually more violations this year in Clovis than the previous year. And Skypark went down by only two.
Of course, there are other ways of looking at this -- ozone concentration, for one. It was lower this year than the previous year. But compared to several previous years, the improvement is moderate at best.
Did the air seem better this year to you? Or was this just a summer of nice, breezy interludes between the usual ozone-laced hot spells.
 When Ken Burns' powerful documentary about national parks was airing last week, I was about a mile from the gate of a national park -- Acadia National Park in Maine.
I was traveling in New England, so I couldn't be in Yosemite or Sequoia-Kings Canyon. So it seemed appropriate to rent a house near the entrance to Maine's grand outdoor paradise.
Did anyone else catch the Burns documentary? What did you think?
The photo in this item is Duck Brook in Acadia. It was Oct.1, and the color was just coming into the maples there.
Downstream, the beaver dens were all over the place. Critters were no doubt getting ready for another harsh Maine winter.
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