Keep Restore the Delta working for you in 2023!
This has been action packed year at Restore the Delta. In fact, we feel as if we have completed two years of work this year, and there is plenty more coming our way. Help us continue our fight with an end-of-year donation. You can donate here.
Delta residents gather to protest Delta tunnel proposal – ABC10 12/7/22
The new plan calls for a 40-foot wide concrete tunnel to draw water from the Hood and Courtland areas approximately 45 miles south to Bethany Reservoir. The current estimates are that it would cost $16 billion dollars and take 13 years to complete.
The tunnel would draw 3,000 cubic feet of water per second and would account for approximately 13% to 15% of the overall water supply.
However, not everyone believes the estimates proposed in the Environmental Impact Report.
“Why would you buy the equivalent of a Maserati and only drive it 10 miles per hour?” said Attorney Osha Meserve, when referencing the water supply numbers.
As state preps, residents make their case that the Delta Tunnel is an environmental crime story in full-view – Sacramento News & Review 12/9/22
During the meeting, some young adults from Stockton spoke about the toxic algal blooms that formed on McLeod Lake along their city’s downtown waterfront in the summer of 2020, which wafted unhealthy, potentially hazardous fumes into the air throughout the well-tread business district (the blooms have also been linked to the deaths of area sea otters). California environmental groups have cited research indicating that these toxic algal blooms are connected to lack of cool, fresh water flowing through the North Delta. That’s why conservationists – the ranks of which include groups like the Sierra Club and Restore the Delta – have argued that the Delta Tunnel will accelerate the region’s toxic algal bloom problem, with the worst impacts hitting marginalized communities in San Joaquin County that already have consistently poor air quality.
“The proposed tunnel will exasperate current and very real issues in the Delta and Delta communities,” said Stockton resident Cintia Cortez, “issues that are felt in the environmental justice community and in my community – in communities of minority and low-income families that are discouraged from drinking the water going into their homes and who cannot step outside of their homes to take a breath of fresh air.”
Greenhouse gaslighting and California’s water crisis – Jon Rosenfeld 12/6/22
The instinct to link natural disasters to climate change is understandable. Rising air temperature will increase water temperatures and dramatically alter global patterns of precipitation and evaporation. But political leaders, captains of industry, and regulatory agencies increasingly invoke climate change as a way of dodging responsibility for disasters that they could prevent. I call this “greenhouse gaslighting.”
Delta Flows HABs in Stockton: Perspective from a resident scientist – Spencer Fern 12/5/22
With blooms present at several testing sites, it was concerning to see people fishing, walking, having picnics, etc. Toxins from HABs not only affect humans but pets and wildlife as well. Fish in HABs-infested waters tend to have guts filled with toxins, which can be a method of exposure in subsistence fishers. Unsupervised pets and strays that ingest the water with toxins die from even licking the water off themselves. Communities living near Stockton’s waterways are also harmed when toxins from HABs attach to particulate matter in the air, compounding the air quality problem in Stockton.