The California drought

California Farmers Are Watering Their Crops With Oil Wastewater, And No One Knows What’s In It

BY NATASHA GEILING

Chevron’s Kern River oil field in California’s Central Valley.

Think Progress,

5 May, 2015

As California farmers face a fourth year of the state’s historic drought, they’re finding water in unexpected places — like Chevron’s Kern River oil field, which has been selling recycled wastewater from oil production to farmers in California’s Kern County. Each day, Chevron recycles and sells 21 million gallons of wastewater to farmers, which is then applied on about 10 percent of Kern County’s farmland. And while some praise the program as a model for dealing with water shortages, environmental groups are raising concerns about the water’s safety, according to a recent story in the Los Angeles Times.

Tests conducted by Water Defense, an environmental group founded by actor Mark Ruffalo in 2010, have found high levels of acetone and methylene chloride— compounds that can be toxic to humans — in wastewater from Chevron used for irrigation purposes. The tests also found the presence of oil, which is supposed to be removed from the wastewater during recycling.

“All these chemicals of concern are flowing in the irrigation canal,” Scott Smith, chief scientist for Water Defense, told ThinkProgress. “If you were a gas station and were spilling these kinds of chemicals into the water, you would be shut down and fined.”

Chevron, which produces around 70,000 barrels of oil and 760,000 barrels of water each day at the Kern River oil field, has been selling water to farmers in the surrounding area for two decades. But government authorities have never required that water to be tested for chemicals used in oil production — only naturally occurring toxins like salts and arsenic. And even those standards are“decades-old,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

Before getting to the Central Valley fields, wastewater from the Kern River oil field is mixed with walnut shells, which helps remove residual oil. The water then passes through a series of treatment ponds before flowing down an eight-mile canal to the Cawelo Water District. While in the canal, the wastewater is sometimes diluted with freshwater — and sometimes not. The water from the Kern River oil field is applied to some 45,000 acres of crops, irrigating everything from nut trees to citrus fruits.

Last year, the California state legislature passed a law requiring oil companies to disclose the chemicals that they use in oil extraction, and in April, California water authorities declared that oil companies would need to start checking to make sure that those same chemicals aren’t making it into recycled water bound for agricultural use. Oil companies have until June 15 to disclose the results of these new tests.

“We need to make sure we fully understand what goes into the wastewater,” Clay Rodgers, assistant executive officer of the Central Valley Water Quality Control Board, told the Los Angeles Times.

To test the recycled wastewater for contaminants, Water Defense’s Smith — who has consulted with the EPA and other government offices on more than 50 oil spills — took samples from 10 different points of varying depth along the Cawelo canal’s eight-mile stretch. Smith compares his testing method to a video, and says the state’s method is more like an instant picture — it looks at the wastewater for a split second, and can miss contaminants. His method, he contends, gives a better holistic picture of the water’s composition. One sample Smith took had levels of methylene chloride — an industrial solvent used to soften crude oil — as high as 56 parts per billion, four times the amount of methylene chloride Smith found in 2013 when he tested parts of an Arkansas river fouled by the 2013 ExxonMobil tar sands pipeline spill.

Chevron is pushing back against claims that the wastewater contains dangerous chemicals, saying in a statement emailed to the Los Angeles Times 

that“protection of people and the environment is a core value for Chevron, and we take all necessary steps to ensure the protection of our water resources.” Out of an “abundance of caution,” however, both Chevron and the Cawelo Water District will contract with an outside group to test the wastewater. Still, Chevron would not disclose publicly the fluids it uses for drilling or well maintenance.

Blake Sanden, an agriculture extension agent and irrigation water expert with UC Davis, told the Los Angeles Times that farmers can smell the petrochemicals in the water, but most assume that the soil is filtering out any harmful toxins before they can be absorbed by the crops. While soil does filter out some impurities, Sanden says it’s impossible to know for sure whether waste from oil production is making its way from irrigation water into the roots and leaves of crops.

To Smith, that’s just another missing piece of information that needs to be understood before wastewater from oil production is deemed safe for agriculture.

“The state appears to not even be testing for oil in the water,” Smith said. “You’re not going to find chemicals of concern if you don’t look for them.”

According to the Los Angeles Times, monitoring the oil fields has been a “low priority” for California’s Water State Resources Control Board, the state body that regulates wastewater. The burden for testing wastewater falls largely on the oil companies, which in the past have sought to reduce testing and disclosure requirements due to concerns over time and expense.

With the drought placing more attention on water resources, Smith says that it’s important for testing of wastewater to continue.

“We want to work with Chevron, we want to work with the regulators. We want to use multiple methods of testing,” he said. “That’s the best way to figure out what’s in that water and what can be done to solve it.”

Millions of trees die in California drought, adding to fire danger

Reuters,
5 May, 2015

California's drought led to the deaths of 12.5 million trees in the state's forests last year, leaving behind huge amounts of dry fuel that could burn easily as the summer wildfire season begins, the U.S. Forest Service said Monday.

The dead trees, visible from the air as red patches in the forest, were weakened by drought and in many cases then killed by bark beetles, which have infested the state's forests and thrive in the warm, dry conditions.

"In some places, we had 100 percent mortality," said Jeffrey Moore, a biological scientist with the Forest Service whose team mapped the dead trees by airplane last month.

The Forest Service report, which was released on Monday, included aerial surveys of about 8.3 million acres throughout the state.

The Forest Service has been closely tracking tree deaths since the start of the drought, now in its fourth year.

The dry weather has made conifers in the state's wooded area particularly vulnerable to beetles, which attack when the trees are weak, eventually killing them.

Stanton Floria, a spokesman for the Forest Service, said the drought was a major factor driving forest fires last year, and dry weather and dead trees and brush will exacerbate blazes again this summer.

The End of California?

NY Times,

1 May, 2015

ANGELS CAMP, Calif. — IN a normal year, no one in California looks twice at a neighbor’s lawn, that mane of bluegrass thriving in a sun-blasted desert. Or casts a scornful gaze at a fresh-planted almond grove, saplings that now stand accused of future water crimes. Or wonders why your car is conspicuously clean, or whether a fish deserves to live when a cherry tree will die.

Of course, there is nothing normal about the fourth year of the great drought: According to climate scientists, it may be the worst arid spell in 1,200 years. For all the fields that will go fallow, all the forests that will catch fire, all the wells that will come up dry, the lasting impact of this drought for the ages will be remembered, in the most exported term of California start-ups, as a disrupter.

“We are embarked upon an experiment that no one has ever tried,” said Gov. Jerry Brown in early April, in ordering the first mandatory statewide water rationing for cities.

Surprising, perhaps even disappointing to those with schadenfreude for the nearly 39 million people living in year-round sunshine, California will survive. It’s not going to blow away. The economy, now on a robust rebound, is not going to collapse. There won’t be a Tom Joad load of S.U.V.s headed north. Rains, and snow to the high Sierra, will eventually return.

But California, from this drought onward, will be a state transformed. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s was human-caused, after the grasslands of the Great Plains were ripped up, and the land thrown to the wind. It never fully recovered. The California drought of today is mostly nature’s hand, diminishing an Eden created by man. The Golden State may recover, but it won’t be the same place.

Looking to the future, there is also the grim prospect that this dry spell is only the start of a “megadrought,” made worse by climate change. California has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs. What if the endless days without rain become endless years?

In the cities of a changed California, brown is the new green. A residential lawn anywhere south of, say, Sacramento, is already considered an indulgence. “If the only person walking on your lawn is the person mowing it,” said Felicia Marcus, chairwoman of the State Water Resources Control Board, then maybe it should be taken out. The state wants people to convert lawns to drought-tolerant landscaping, or fake grass.

Artificial lakes filled with Sierra snowmelt will become baked-mud valleys, surrounded by ugly bathtub rings. Some rivers will dry completely — at least until a normal rain year. A few days ago, there was a bare trickle from the Napa, near the town of St. Helena, flowing through some of the most valuable vineyards on the planet. The state’s massive plumbing system, one of the biggest in the world, needs adequate snow in order to serve farmers in the Central Valley and techies in Silicon Valley. This year, California set a record low Sierra snowpack in April — 5 percent of normal — following the driest winter since records have been kept.

To Californians stunned by their bare mountains, there was no more absurd moment in public life recently than when James Inhofe, the Republican senator from Oklahoma who is chairman of the environment and public works committee, held up a snowball in February as evidence of America’s hydraulic bounty in the age of climate change.

You can see the result of endless weeks of cloudless skies in New Melones Lake, here in Calaveras County in the foothills east of the Central Valley, where Mark Twain made a legend of a jumping frog. The state’s fourth largest reservoir, holding water for farmers, and for fish downstream, is barely 20 percent full. It could be completely drained by summer’s end.

It’s a sad sight — a warming puddle, where the Stanislaus River once ran through it. At full capacity, with normal rainfall, New Melones should have enough water for nearly two million households for a year.

Even worse is the Lake McClure reservoir, impounding the spectral remains of the Merced River as it flows out of Yosemite National Park. It’s at 10 percent of capacity. In a normal spring, the reservoir holds more than 600,000 acre-feet of water. As April came to a close, it was at 104,000 acre-feet — with almost no snowmelt on the way. (The measurement is one acre filled to a depth of a foot, or 325,851 gallons.) That’s the surface disruption in a state that may soon be unrecognizable in places.

The morality tale behind California’s verdant prosperity will most certainly change. In the old narrative, the evil city took water from powerless farmers. Swimming pools in greater Los Angeles were filled with liquid that could have kept orchards alive in the Owens Valley, to the north.

It was hubris, born in the words of the city’s chief water engineer, William Mulholland, when he opened the gates of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913 with an immortal proclamation: “There it is. Take it.”

But now, just about everyone in California knows that it requires a gallon of water to grow a single almond, or that agriculture accounts for 80 percent of the water used by humans here. Meanwhile, the cities have become leaders in conservation. It takes 106 gallons of water to produce an ounce of beef — which is more than the average San Francisco Bay Area resident uses in a day. Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles wants to reduce the amount of water the city purchases by 50 percent in the next decade, cutting back through aggressive use of wastewater and conservation.

It’s outlandish, urban critics note, for big farm units to be growing alfalfa — which consumes about 20 percent of the state’s irrigation water — or raising cattle, in a place with a third of the rainfall of other states. And by exporting that alfalfa and other thirsty crops overseas, the state is essentially shipping its precious water to China.

Still, casting California farmers — who produce about half of the nation’s fruits, nuts and vegetables — as crony capitalist water gluttons may not be entirely fair. Yes, the water is subsidized, through taxpayer-funded dams, canals and pumping systems. But that water, in some cases, ends up as habitat for birds and wildlife. As it drains away, it can recharge badly depleted underground aquifers. Farmers have already let more than 400,000 acres go fallow and took a $2 billion hit last year. They may add 600,000 acres to that total this year. Almonds, after all, are a healthy food source.

The new morality tale becomes further muddled when you consider that San Francisco, praised for its penurious water ways, gets its life-supporting liquid from the Hetch Hetchy dam, in Yosemite. Many people, dating from the sainted John Muir, believe that flooding that mountain valley was one of the bigger crimes against nature in California history.

And not every city is Spartan with its water. On any given day you can find, as I did in a new housing development in the foothills east of Sacramento, water running down the street — at a flow rate that looked bigger than that coming from the anemic Merced River. It was pouring onto a grass median strip, and then spilling over, in a development called the Estates at Blackstone.

Or consider that wealthy communities — say, Portola Valley, woodsy home to many an environmentally conscious tech multimillionaire — use far more water per capita than do the poor of Compton, in the Los Angeles area. When cost is no object, there is very little incentive to cut back.

But there is no getting around the fact that agriculture, for all its water needs, still produces barely 2 percent of the state’s gross product, and employs only about 3 percent of its workers.

Fair or not, it seems incongruous that farmers in the San Joaquin Valley are still planting new almond trees — they’ve nearly doubled the crop since 2005 — while people in the cities kill their lawns and dash in and out of low-flow showers.

The idea that California could have it all — a pool in every suburban backyard, new crops in a drought, wild salmon in rivers now starved of oxygen — is fading fast. There is only so much more “pop per drop,” as Ms. Marcus, the State Water Resources Control Board chairwoman, said, or neighbor snitching on neighbor, until the urban majority resists and demands a change in allocation.

Nice article but completely missing two of the biggest problems our state has.Number one is the approx 5-10 Million Illegals that have...

What will come, then, from this disrupting drought is likely to be a shift of power. The urban “almond shaming” chorus is quick to note that the crop uses enough water to support 75 percent of the state’s population. In other words, there would be no water shortage in San Diego or Los Angeles if nut growers shut off the pumps.

“Imagine if somebody ever said, ‘Let’s have a vote on how to use California’s water,’ ” said Daniel Beard, a former Bureau of Recreation commissioner and a critic of federal dam building. “That’s the last thing big agricultural interests would want.”

The food industry is ripe for disruption. The land that has been left fallow now in the Central Valley is still less than 5 percent of all the irrigation acreage in California. Another 5 percent would leave most of the industry standing, and leaner. Low-value, high-water crops would disappear, as is already happening.

Absent a vote of the people, the free market could end up as the decider. The big city water districts have more than enough money to buy farm water in a freewheeling exchange. Indeed, they’ve been making numerous purchases for years — though limited by complex water contracts and infrastructure that makes it difficult to pipe large amounts from one place to the other.

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In addition, one fear of making water an open-market commodity is that rich and politically powerful communities would get all the clean water they needed, while poor public districts would be left out. A class system around breathable air has already developed in China. Is abundant water the next must-have possession of the 1 percent?

Agriculture will not give up its perch atop the power pyramid without a fight. Water that goes from the mountains to the sea is a waste, farmers say. The drought is “a man-made” disaster, as Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard executive who will likely run for the Republican presidential nomination, claims. She blames environmentalists for blocking major dam projects.

“California is a classic case of liberals being willing to sacrifice other people’s lives and livelihoods at the altar of their ideology,” she said on Glenn Beck’s radio program a few weeks ago. Of course, one of those elites was Ronald Reagan, who as governor signed legislation in 1973 that protected the Eel River in Northern California from dam builders.

“The environment is already taking a big hit in this drought,” said Ellen Hanak, director of the Water Policy Center at the nonprofit Public Policy Institute of California. “My sense is that Californians are pretty supportive of both a strong agricultural economy and a healthy environment.”

Big new reservoir projects — a return of the concrete empire — are doubtful. Without a government subsidy, cost is the biggest obstacle. Farmers certainly aren’t going to pay the billions now footed by federal taxpayers. And then: Where is the “new” water going to come from? Underground, wells are probing ever deeper, sucking aquifers dry, the land sinking at a dramatic rate. Overhead, the sky is unreliable.

Desalination, making seawater potable, is another option, which Carlsbad, north of San Diego, is now pursuing with a huge plant under construction. Australia went down this road during its epic drought in the 2000s. But the plants proved to be so prohibitively expensive to run that four of them were mothballed. Billions were spent without producing a drop of clean water.

What California still has, in great supply, is ingenuity. Three years ago, Mitt Romney compared the state to bankrupt Greece. It was laughed at and written off by conservative pundits. California now has a budget surplus and led the nation in job growth last year — far outpacing Texas.

The drought may indeed be a long overdue bill for creating an oasis civilization. But therein lies a solution. The Golden State is an invention, with lives to match. If the drought continues, California will be forced to rely even more on what has long sustained it — imagination. Not a bad thing to have too much of.