Water gait

By Bill Kisliuk

The hound and I walked up the center of Redwood Creek recently, without getting a paw or a shoelace wet.

The creek has been bone-dry for months for where it passes near Alston Park, one indicator of the extremely dry season we’ve had this year — last week’s drizzle aside.

It hasn’t been a dry period for water-related news stories, though, as St. Helena is scaling back water usage, other cities around the North Bay are doing the same, and Napa’s supply of State Water Project flows likely will be limited because pumps in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta are endangering the Delta smelt.

Water news in California is nothing new, but it feels as though the scarcity is finally beginning to capture the imagination of the public and public servants.

One of the first long news articles I wrote, and therefore one of the first long news articles my editors just about completely rewrote, was about water, specifically the increased intrusion of salt water in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. With fresh water diverted to Central Valley farms and Southern California cities, salt water has made it further and further up the delta and altered the ecosystem there.

The granddaddy of all California water stories — captured among other places in the, ahem, watershed piece of non-fiction “Cadillac Desert” — was the tale of how William Mulholland engineered the delivery (did someone say theft?) of water from the Owens River in the Eastern Sierra to Los Angeles. “Cadillac Desert,” by Marc Reisner, also details the marvel of how engineers made water run uphill to top the pass into the Los Angeles basin.

I think of this every time my wife, her hound and I leave Los Angeles on Highway 5, where at the northern edge of the San Fernando Valley a giant man-made waterfall spills thousands of gallons a second into the thirsty city.

I’m a Southern California native, and I think it is fair to say that there is almost zero public perception there that California is perennially on the edge of a water crisis —ironic because that city relies entirely on imported water and the mighty-sounding Los Angeles River is just a sad, dry little desert wash encased in concrete.

But water awareness is growing. Local officials have talked for years about getting recycled water to Coombsville and Carneros, for example, which will ease the burden on falling water tables in those areas. As Kevin Courtney reported earlier this month, Coombsville property owners might be voting on an assessment to pay for a reclaimed water pipeline in 2009.

A reclaimed water pipeline to Carneros is more problematic for several reasons, ranging from the secrecy private property owners like to maintain about the strength of their wells to the obstacles of getting recycled water from treatment plants on the east side of the Napa River to Carneros properties on the west side.

Meanwhile, a dog can walk a long way on the rocky floor of Redwood Creek these days without finding anything to slurp.

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