I just sent an email to my U.S. Representative urging them to
make global warming a priority in 2008, and I hope you'll join
me.
Why? Well, when it comes to global warming, the U.S. House is
WAY behind. And if our Representatives don't catch up right now,
it will simply be too late.
As the climate change crisis continues to worsen, we cannot sit
back and wait for our leaders to take aggressive action. You can
make a difference today. Take action by clicking below:
http://action.lcv.org/campaign/warmingcrisis_ean_alt?rk=udMwgNKqN4dAW
7 comments:
Although I've written my representatives before about this subject, I went ahead and did it again just now using this format and modified the letter to include the fact that our class is studying the effects of global warming. Every little bit helps, right?
Here are my two articles I found. The first is from the Fort Bragg Advocate News it is about the controversy of wave energy on the Mendocino Coast. The second article is from the Anderson valley newspaper it is on the water crisis of the Russian River.
Wave energy blogger plans local march
By FRANK HARTZELL Of the Fort Bragg Advocate-News -
Article Last Updated: 03/27/2008 07:47:45 AM PDT
Laurel Krause, who has been blogging about wave energy for more than a year from her Fort Bragg home, is getting out from behind the computer screen to try to make a splash on the streets this Saturday.
Krause, 53, wants locals to support a moratorium on wave energy permits until a process for local input can be devised.
She has plastered announcements on local telephone poles and listserves up and down the coast for the Mendocino Wave Energy Moratorium March & Meeting at Fort Bragg Town Hall starting at 11 a.m.
Krause has documented the progress of the wave energy issue on her blog/Website and has been surprised to learn how local waters can be controlled from Washington, D.C.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, recently denied tardy efforts by the City of Fort Bragg and County of Mendocino to have a direct role in Pacific Gas & Electric's three-year exclusive study off Fort Bragg, telling the agencies to wait three years until a license is issued. Licenses last for up to 50 years.
City Council action Monday
At Monday's Fort Bragg City Council meeting, the council directed staff to prepare an appeal of FERC's denial of intervenor status for the city and an appeal of the issuance of the
preliminary permit.
Fourth District Supervisor Kendall Smith, who has led efforts at the county level, made a presentation to the council Monday night about local and state agencies being excluded by FERC.
The council also directed contact with U.S. Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein and the state attorney general's office, in an effort to broaden the public process into wave energy permitting, said City Manager Linda Ruffing.
The city will also contact the California Coastal Commission, State Lands Commission and the Department of Fish & Game, requesting that they not grant any permits to FERC unless the Fort Bragg and other local stakeholders such as the county and FISH, a local fishermen's group, are granted intervenor status in a timely manner, Ruffing said.
The council also encouraged PG&E to present their draft 45-day work plan to the council and community prior to the April 30 deadline for submittal to FERC.
Citizen Krause
"The wheels of wave energy development on our coast continue to turn without any local resident input," Krause said. "If we don't start doing something now, one day soon we could turn around and see wave farms off our coast. Local residents want to participate in this process as it's our coast ... but there's no way for us to voice our concerns."
Krause came to the area after she visited Fort Bragg for the Whale Festival in 2004 and "fell in love with the town." She says before that she lived in the Bay Area for over 30 years mostly working in and around Silicon Valley at high-tech start-up companies in sales and marketing.
"I remember a friend mentioning that the mill had recently closed, and I thought it would be awesome to see this town reborn into a thriving, healthy, prosperous small California coastal town. Later that year I moved up here and have been living just north of Fort Bragg since October 2004," she said.
In September she started the blog/Website at www.mendocinocoastcurrent.wordpress.com.
"The idea was to create an Internet space where Mendocino Coast residents could read about local news and technology information as it relates to wave energy development on our coast. Since then, PG&E, GreenWave, FERC, the City of Fort Bragg and Mendocino County have provided phenomenal fodder on this very important topic," she said.
In February her Website first informed fishermen in the San Luis Obispo area that GreenWave had filed for permits off both Mendocino and San Luis Obispo. That story had been broken earlier by The Mendocino Beacon.
"Seems GreenWave applied for a FERC permit off their coast, and fishermen in SLO were starting to get nervous about the future of their coastline," she said.
Like many locals, Krause has a dream for the old Georgia Pacific oceanfront mill site.
"I realized that a portion of the mill site could become a great place for a cleantech' think tank, a research and development center for clean technology development," she said. "It occurred to me that we could transform the mill site into generating electricity for our community Š and also a new industry to employ people here."
"It could bring new industry and employment to Fort Bragg — testing and developing clean technologies like solar, wind, biomass, desalination Š even wave energy," she said.
Krause is looking for volunteers to act as march monitors. She can be reached at 357-2855.
Anderson Valley Advertiser October 3, 2007
Water Woesby Bruce Anderson"No river should reach the ocean." —StalinNot so long ago there was so much water in the summer time Russian River you could water ski at Healdsburg. Where did all the water go? Why has inland Mendocino County gone from abundance to red flag scarcity? People, lots more of them, lots more demand on the Russian River's finite flows, lots more interests claiming the water, lots more complicating bureaucracy. All this and 1905, which is when a large portion of one watershed's largest river was put into the watershed next door, when the Eel was umbilically attached to the Russian by a mile-and-a-half cord. In 1905, a largely Chinese labor force hand dug a tunnel 5,826 feet through Snow Mountain at Potter Valley through which rushed a year-round portion of the South Fork of the Eel River. The diverted water powered a huge pair of turbines on the Potter Valley end of the tunnel, and the electricity thus generated illuminated Ukiah, adding significantly to the wealth of a San Francisco entrepreneur named Van Arsdale. Once the water had turned the lights on in Ukiah it flowed into the upper Russian River as surplus water, water without value, water unclaimed except by the farmers and ranchers of Potter Valley who quickly moved to ensure that they would get it for nothing forever. It isn't forever yet but the Potter Valley boys are into their fourth generation with all the water they can use and then some. Farmers and wine grape growers from Ukiah to Jenner are similarly blessed.The Russian River all the way to Healdsburg, prior to the Eel flowing through the Chinese tunnel at Potter Valley in 1905, went dry in the summer time. Suddenly, in the year before the big earthquake, there was such an abundance of summer time water in the Russian River that resorts and high dives appeared on its banks from Ukiah to Guerneville.A hundred years later the high dives are gone because there are so many people taking water out of the unmonitored, un-gaged river, if it weren't for the diversion of the Eel River at Potter Valley the Russian River would again dry up in the summer months.The first dam on the Eel is named after the enterprising Van Arsdale. It created Lake Pillsbury to ensure that there would be enough summer flow in the Eel to divert at Potter Valley for Ukiah's electricity. When Van Arsdale silted up, as dams inevitably do, Scott dam was built on the Eel to take over Van Arsdale's water reserve electrification function. It has since silted up too, as has Lake Mendocino, the first dam on the Russian River built in the middle 1950s to catch much of the water flowing through the Potter Valley Diversion. The Mendocino County supervisors, the late Joe Scaramella dissenting, voted 4-1 not to participate in the building of Coyote Dam behind which would rest, everyone assumed, the infinitely ample waters of Lake Mendocino. In the dry year of 2007, Lake Mendocino is so low it looks like a big mud puddle, and its downstream dependents in places like burgeoning Santa Rosa have been forced to enact serious water conservation measures.The old water deals don't look too good today, although it's hard to blame pre-industrial Ukiah for wanting clean power or Van Arsdale for bringing it to them. It's less forgivable of Mendocino County supervisors, circa 1955, to have given away both Mendocino County's and Humboldt County's water. Mendocino County supervisors thought Coyote Dam cost too much, and few people, except for Sonoma County's farsighted water bureaucrats, thought the water streaming year-round through the mile-and-a-half tunnel at Potter Valley and down into the Russian River's parched summer beds, had any value at all. Humboldt County signed off on the 1905 diversion and hasn't been consulted since although its mighty Eel is nearly as battered and as overdrawn as the Russian River, to which the Eel still gives warm weather life. Sonoma County has always gotten Potter Valley diversion water for nothing. Sonoma County sells it to Marin County, particularly the dry towns of Northern Marin, for pure gain, the sales product costing nothing more but the pipes and valves to get it down the Russian River. The Sonoma County water business, overseen by Sonoma County supervisors, is that rare public bureaucracy that turns hefty annual profits.As wells go dry all over Mendocino County this year because last year's spring rains were insufficient to replenish the ground water they depend on, and the Russian River is tapped out, Mendocino County's idea man — some say wrong idea man — supervisor John Pinches of the north county, says he thinks he's got the answer to the inland county's water shortages. Pinches wants to siphon off two percent of the mainstem Eel River's winter flow at Dos Rios. "All that water winds up in the ocean anyway," the supervisor observes in an irrefutable statement of the obvious. "Why not take a little bit of it for the people of Mendocino County who need it? We're always talking about low cost housing in Mendocino County but there isn't fifty acres anywhere with the water to build it." The Pinches Plan, in total, would amount to an annual diversion of about half of Lake Mendocino's capacity and cost a quarter of a billion dollars to purify and pump to holding tanks in Redwood Valley from where it would be made available to communities straddling the Russian River as far south as Hopland.One of the many ironies involved in Pinches' plan is there's already considerable water processing machinery 35 miles away in Willits. Willits' treated sewage water is emptied into Outlet Creek, which flows northeast and on into the Eel. Presumably, if Pinches' plan were to become reality, and even if it were funded and became reality, that reality is at least a decade away, Willits would be drinking water it had already once bled of impurities before Willits sent it into Outlet Creek and on into the Eel near Dos Rios. Pinches' many critics say his plan would not only violate the Eel River's protected federal status as "wild and scenic" if embraced it would encourage downstream development. Pinches counters by pointing out that Humboldt County towns continue to be copiously watered by the Eel because Humboldt County municipalities were grandfathered in when the Eel was declared "wild and scenic." Pinches also maintains that he simply wants to "get Mendocino County in line" for water money if the Governor's nine billion dollar water bond measure is passed in November. The Governor's plan is basically an updated Peripheral Canal scheme that would ship water to the desert megalopolis of Los Angeles from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta where the two mighty rivers meet to feed San Francisco Bay. The Governor has wrapped his scheme in a few green-ish conservation proposals. But even if Mendocino County gets in line for three-quarters of a billion Pinches' proposal is vaguely estimated to cost, Mendocino County has always been a low-priority for projects that require large sums of state tax money. The irrepressible Pinches, however, points to funding for the Willits By-Pass. "We got that funding because we had a place in line for transportation money," he says. "We should do the same for water money."The supervisor's water plan is the only plan out there. And Mendocino County, especially inland Mendocino County, is drying up because the water that might ordinarily be available to it belongs to Sonoma County. Pinches' plan has the advantage of being the only plan to specifically address Mendocino County's water shortages, which have now become chronic and border on critical. Pinches' plan also has the disadvantage of being promoted by a man perceived as conservative, Mendocino County being hopelessly divided along the liberal-conservative fault line it's impossible to discuss the water issue, and most issues, without an automatic taking of sides by persons at each end of the great divide. Many people oppose the Pinches Plan simply because Pinches suggested it. And many people support it simply because Pinches thinks it's doable and because the persuasive supervisor has easily beat back the plan's detractors because he's a superior propagandist. And Pinches' two percent of the Eel plan is the only plan, so far, and is unlikely, given the size of the supervisor's megaphone, to be shelved in favor of much less costly but far more innovative conservation and catchment ideas suggested by local water researchers like Rachel Olivieri, a Willits mail carrier who probably knows more about North County water than anybody in that population.Ms. Olivieri begins with the specific suggestion that Lake Mendocino's 69,000 acre feet of stored water, almost all of it the property of Sonoma County because Sonoma County largely funded the construction of Coyote Dam, has a 122,000 acre foot capacity, the difference being allotted for flood control space. Why not use that capacity for Mendocino County rather than go to Pinches' new and expensive plan? "In an average year Mendocino County gets 19 million acre feet of water in rainfall," Olivieri says. "If there were a five foot ring around the county the county would fill up to that depth every winter. We have 2% of the state's land mass, but we get 15% of state's rainfall. Five acre feet falls, on average, on one acre of Mendocino County ground. An acre foot can easily supply two families for a year, which is the amount of rain that falls on them. If we captured water right where it falls, and used it at least twice, 'stacking the functions,' as they say, there would be plenty of water everywhere in Mendocino County. Why not capture water where it falls and store it there?" The Mendocino County Sheriff's Department isn't known to be on the cutting edge of ecological technology but, As Olivieri noted recently when she walked past it, "The sub-station at Covelo is designed to capture rainfall, re-directing the water to a pond and windmill, thus creating a kind of natural water and energy loop, and that project isn't quite finished. So there are people in local government not only thinking about how to conserve water they're doing it."Rachel Olivieri's ideas, long-term, are sound. They naturally appeal to many county residents, many of whom, especially people living in the county's vast outback, already trap and save water through ingenious systems of their own devising. But water shortages are much more acute, or soon will be much more acute, in Mendocino County's more densely populated areas, especially the 101 corridor. Fort Bragg has reached the limits of its growth without new sources of water and has enacted a series of conservation measures which enables the city to successfully provide its citizens with water during the dry months. Willits and Ukiah are talking about drilling into what is assumed to be their lush aquifers although neither the quantity nor the quality of the water trapped beneath their valley floors is known. But from Redwood Valley south through Ukiah and on down to Hopland, most of the length of Mendocino County's stretch of the Russian River, the river has no more water to give. Neither does the summer time Eel upon which the summer time Russian depends. The well-documented exhaustion of the summer Eel hasn't prevented Sonoma County supervisor Mike Reilly from calling the water crisis a "regulatory drought." Reilly wants more water diverted from the summer Eel to make up historically profligate Sonoma County's shortfalls.Mendocino County's supervisors make water policy but have no authority to enact it. There are half a dozen little water districts, each independent of the others, in the Ukiah Valley alone. They make water policy in isolation. And Sonoma County, despite having a water reserve twice the size of Lake Mendocino piled up behind the Warm Springs Dam, can send only a few drops of that water to downstream consumers for fear that it will drown fish in the 14 miles of Dry Creek used to transport Warm Springs water. Well, not drown the Dry Creek fish, more like blast fingerlings out of the summer stream bed if flows from Warm Springs aren't kept to a relative trickle. Dry Creek is home to coho salmon, an endangered species. If more dry months' water were released into Dry Creek, the feds say, the salmon would be one step closer to extinction because the baby coho would be destroyed by higher flows.With all this water piled up behind the Warm Springs dam since 1983 when Lake Sonoma appeared behind it, the great irony is that all that water represents a hazard to baby fish. Sonoma County is talking about a 14 mile pipeline from Warm Springs to Sonoma County's collection point in the Russian River near Forestville at Wohler Bridge, but the pipeline is millions of dollars and many years away. For now, the pipeline is that 14 miles of Dry Creek ambling out of the hills northwest of Healdsburg and on down west of the Russian River where it waters some thirty wineries and finally into the Russian River at Forestville.Because water shortages are becoming acute in the Russian River corridor, Sonoma and Mendocino County authorities are urging voluntary conservation measures which may or may not be working.The whole downstream summer show is dependent on the Eel diversion, and the miraculousness of it all becomes clear when one becomes aware that it's all run out of an office on Santa Rosa Avenue, downtown Santa Rosa whose remote water technician can turn the water on or turn the water off for more than a million people from Ukiah to Santa Rosa. The water genie, though, performs his allocations according to a strict set of sales agreements determining who gets how much, when, old contracts to which Mendocino County is not a party.Draws on all Mendocino County's water sources, even with building moratoriums in effect from Brooktrails to Hopland, continue to suck up both the summer Eel and the summer Russian River. River front property owners aren't required to gage how much water they take, and water district information from those many little fiefdoms is either non-existent or anecdotal. Supervisor Pinches will probably get a place in the state line for water money, but that line is sure to be a long one, and Mendocino County, historically considered, is usually last in line.
Water Woesby Bruce Anderson"No river should reach the ocean." —StalinNot so long ago there was so much water in the summer time Russian River you could water ski at Healdsburg. Where did all the water go? Why has inland Mendocino County gone from abundance to red flag scarcity? People, lots more of them, lots more demand on the Russian River's finite flows, lots more interests claiming the water, lots more complicating bureaucracy. All this and 1905, which is when a large portion of one watershed's largest river was put into the watershed next door, when the Eel was umbilically attached to the Russian by a mile-and-a-half cord. In 1905, a largely Chinese labor force hand dug a tunnel 5,826 feet through Snow Mountain at Potter Valley through which rushed a year-round portion of the South Fork of the Eel River. The diverted water powered a huge pair of turbines on the Potter Valley end of the tunnel, and the electricity thus generated illuminated Ukiah, adding significantly to the wealth of a San Francisco entrepreneur named Van Arsdale. Once the water had turned the lights on in Ukiah it flowed into the upper Russian River as surplus water, water without value, water unclaimed except by the farmers and ranchers of Potter Valley who quickly moved to ensure that they would get it for nothing forever. It isn't forever yet but the Potter Valley boys are into their fourth generation with all the water they can use and then some. Farmers and wine grape growers from Ukiah to Jenner are similarly blessed.The Russian River all the way to Healdsburg, prior to the Eel flowing through the Chinese tunnel at Potter Valley in 1905, went dry in the summer time. Suddenly, in the year before the big earthquake, there was such an abundance of summer time water in the Russian River that resorts and high dives appeared on its banks from Ukiah to Guerneville.A hundred years later the high dives are gone because there are so many people taking water out of the unmonitored, un-gaged river, if it weren't for the diversion of the Eel River at Potter Valley the Russian River would again dry up in the summer months.The first dam on the Eel is named after the enterprising Van Arsdale. It created Lake Pillsbury to ensure that there would be enough summer flow in the Eel to divert at Potter Valley for Ukiah's electricity. When Van Arsdale silted up, as dams inevitably do, Scott dam was built on the Eel to take over Van Arsdale's water reserve electrification function. It has since silted up too, as has Lake Mendocino, the first dam on the Russian River built in the middle 1950s to catch much of the water flowing through the Potter Valley Diversion. The Mendocino County supervisors, the late Joe Scaramella dissenting, voted 4-1 not to participate in the building of Coyote Dam behind which would rest, everyone assumed, the infinitely ample waters of Lake Mendocino. In the dry year of 2007, Lake Mendocino is so low it looks like a big mud puddle, and its downstream dependents in places like burgeoning Santa Rosa have been forced to enact serious water conservation measures.The old water deals don't look too good today, although it's hard to blame pre-industrial Ukiah for wanting clean power or Van Arsdale for bringing it to them. It's less forgivable of Mendocino County supervisors, circa 1955, to have given away both Mendocino County's and Humboldt County's water. Mendocino County supervisors thought Coyote Dam cost too much, and few people, except for Sonoma County's farsighted water bureaucrats, thought the water streaming year-round through the mile-and-a-half tunnel at Potter Valley and down into the Russian River's parched summer beds, had any value at all. Humboldt County signed off on the 1905 diversion and hasn't been consulted since although its mighty Eel is nearly as battered and as overdrawn as the Russian River, to which the Eel still gives warm weather life. Sonoma County has always gotten Potter Valley diversion water for nothing. Sonoma County sells it to Marin County, particularly the dry towns of Northern Marin, for pure gain, the sales product costing nothing more but the pipes and valves to get it down the Russian River. The Sonoma County water business, overseen by Sonoma County supervisors, is that rare public bureaucracy that turns hefty annual profits.As wells go dry all over Mendocino County this year because last year's spring rains were insufficient to replenish the ground water they depend on, and the Russian River is tapped out, Mendocino County's idea man — some say wrong idea man — supervisor John Pinches of the north county, says he thinks he's got the answer to the inland county's water shortages. Pinches wants to siphon off two percent of the mainstem Eel River's winter flow at Dos Rios. "All that water winds up in the ocean anyway," the supervisor observes in an irrefutable statement of the obvious. "Why not take a little bit of it for the people of Mendocino County who need it? We're always talking about low cost housing in Mendocino County but there isn't fifty acres anywhere with the water to build it." The Pinches Plan, in total, would amount to an annual diversion of about half of Lake Mendocino's capacity and cost a quarter of a billion dollars to purify and pump to holding tanks in Redwood Valley from where it would be made available to communities straddling the Russian River as far south as Hopland.One of the many ironies involved in Pinches' plan is there's already considerable water processing machinery 35 miles away in Willits. Willits' treated sewage water is emptied into Outlet Creek, which flows northeast and on into the Eel. Presumably, if Pinches' plan were to become reality, and even if it were funded and became reality, that reality is at least a decade away, Willits would be drinking water it had already once bled of impurities before Willits sent it into Outlet Creek and on into the Eel near Dos Rios. Pinches' many critics say his plan would not only violate the Eel River's protected federal status as "wild and scenic" if embraced it would encourage downstream development. Pinches counters by pointing out that Humboldt County towns continue to be copiously watered by the Eel because Humboldt County municipalities were grandfathered in when the Eel was declared "wild and scenic." Pinches also maintains that he simply wants to "get Mendocino County in line" for water money if the Governor's nine billion dollar water bond measure is passed in November. The Governor's plan is basically an updated Peripheral Canal scheme that would ship water to the desert megalopolis of Los Angeles from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta where the two mighty rivers meet to feed San Francisco Bay. The Governor has wrapped his scheme in a few green-ish conservation proposals. But even if Mendocino County gets in line for three-quarters of a billion Pinches' proposal is vaguely estimated to cost, Mendocino County has always been a low-priority for projects that require large sums of state tax money. The irrepressible Pinches, however, points to funding for the Willits By-Pass. "We got that funding because we had a place in line for transportation money," he says. "We should do the same for water money."The supervisor's water plan is the only plan out there. And Mendocino County, especially inland Mendocino County, is drying up because the water that might ordinarily be available to it belongs to Sonoma County. Pinches' plan has the advantage of being the only plan to specifically address Mendocino County's water shortages, which have now become chronic and border on critical. Pinches' plan also has the disadvantage of being promoted by a man perceived as conservative, Mendocino County being hopelessly divided along the liberal-conservative fault line it's impossible to discuss the water issue, and most issues, without an automatic taking of sides by persons at each end of the great divide. Many people oppose the Pinches Plan simply because Pinches suggested it. And many people support it simply because Pinches thinks it's doable and because the persuasive supervisor has easily beat back the plan's detractors because he's a superior propagandist. And Pinches' two percent of the Eel plan is the only plan, so far, and is unlikely, given the size of the supervisor's megaphone, to be shelved in favor of much less costly but far more innovative conservation and catchment ideas suggested by local water researchers like Rachel Olivieri, a Willits mail carrier who probably knows more about North County water than anybody in that population.Ms. Olivieri begins with the specific suggestion that Lake Mendocino's 69,000 acre feet of stored water, almost all of it the property of Sonoma County because Sonoma County largely funded the construction of Coyote Dam, has a 122,000 acre foot capacity, the difference being allotted for flood control space. Why not use that capacity for Mendocino County rather than go to Pinches' new and expensive plan? "In an average year Mendocino County gets 19 million acre feet of water in rainfall," Olivieri says. "If there were a five foot ring around the county the county would fill up to that depth every winter. We have 2% of the state's land mass, but we get 15% of state's rainfall. Five acre feet falls, on average, on one acre of Mendocino County ground. An acre foot can easily supply two families for a year, which is the amount of rain that falls on them. If we captured water right where it falls, and used it at least twice, 'stacking the functions,' as they say, there would be plenty of water everywhere in Mendocino County. Why not capture water where it falls and store it there?" The Mendocino County Sheriff's Department isn't known to be on the cutting edge of ecological technology but, As Olivieri noted recently when she walked past it, "The sub-station at Covelo is designed to capture rainfall, re-directing the water to a pond and windmill, thus creating a kind of natural water and energy loop, and that project isn't quite finished. So there are people in local government not only thinking about how to conserve water they're doing it."Rachel Olivieri's ideas, long-term, are sound. They naturally appeal to many county residents, many of whom, especially people living in the county's vast outback, already trap and save water through ingenious systems of their own devising. But water shortages are much more acute, or soon will be much more acute, in Mendocino County's more densely populated areas, especially the 101 corridor. Fort Bragg has reached the limits of its growth without new sources of water and has enacted a series of conservation measures which enables the city to successfully provide its citizens with water during the dry months. Willits and Ukiah are talking about drilling into what is assumed to be their lush aquifers although neither the quantity nor the quality of the water trapped beneath their valley floors is known. But from Redwood Valley south through Ukiah and on down to Hopland, most of the length of Mendocino County's stretch of the Russian River, the river has no more water to give. Neither does the summer time Eel upon which the summer time Russian depends. The well-documented exhaustion of the summer Eel hasn't prevented Sonoma County supervisor Mike Reilly from calling the water crisis a "regulatory drought." Reilly wants more water diverted from the summer Eel to make up historically profligate Sonoma County's shortfalls.Mendocino County's supervisors make water policy but have no authority to enact it. There are half a dozen little water districts, each independent of the others, in the Ukiah Valley alone. They make water policy in isolation. And Sonoma County, despite having a water reserve twice the size of Lake Mendocino piled up behind the Warm Springs Dam, can send only a few drops of that water to downstream consumers for fear that it will drown fish in the 14 miles of Dry Creek used to transport Warm Springs water. Well, not drown the Dry Creek fish, more like blast fingerlings out of the summer stream bed if flows from Warm Springs aren't kept to a relative trickle. Dry Creek is home to coho salmon, an endangered species. If more dry months' water were released into Dry Creek, the feds say, the salmon would be one step closer to extinction because the baby coho would be destroyed by higher flows.With all this water piled up behind the Warm Springs dam since 1983 when Lake Sonoma appeared behind it, the great irony is that all that water represents a hazard to baby fish. Sonoma County is talking about a 14 mile pipeline from Warm Springs to Sonoma County's collection point in the Russian River near Forestville at Wohler Bridge, but the pipeline is millions of dollars and many years away. For now, the pipeline is that 14 miles of Dry Creek ambling out of the hills northwest of Healdsburg and on down west of the Russian River where it waters some thirty wineries and finally into the Russian River at Forestville.Because water shortages are becoming acute in the Russian River corridor, Sonoma and Mendocino County authorities are urging voluntary conservation measures which may or may not be working.The whole downstream summer show is dependent on the Eel diversion, and the miraculousness of it all becomes clear when one becomes aware that it's all run out of an office on Santa Rosa Avenue, downtown Santa Rosa whose remote water technician can turn the water on or turn the water off for more than a million people from Ukiah to Santa Rosa. The water genie, though, performs his allocations according to a strict set of sales agreements determining who gets how much, when, old contracts to which Mendocino County is not a party.Draws on all Mendocino County's water sources, even with building moratoriums in effect from Brooktrails to Hopland, continue to suck up both the summer Eel and the summer Russian River. River front property owners aren't required to gage how much water they take, and water district information from those many little fiefdoms is either non-existent or anecdotal. Supervisor Pinches will probably get a place in the state line for water money, but that line is sure to be a long one, and Mendocino County, historically considered, is usually last in line.
P.S. I did not notice my Anderson Valley article was dated back to October 3, 2007. I tried to erase it but it will not let me. I suppose it is still current even though it is six months old the problem is not solved yet.
Here are two recent articles I found online.
(1) Specially-designed Soils Could Help Combat Climate Change
This article by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council is from the April 2, 2008 issue of Science Daily. It talks about using special soils as a carbon sink to help fight global warming.
The article can be accessed here:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080331110057.htm
(Sorry you have to cut and paste. I haven't figured out the HTML tags to allow hyperlinks in this forum yet.)
(2) Mycroremedia What?
This is a piece by Alastair Bland dated January 9, 2008 from bohemian.com (a Sonoma/Marin/Napa website) that talks about the usefulness of mushrooms in sopping up oil spills. It reminds me of the article by Paul Stamets we received at the last class. Talk about magic mushrooms!
It can be found here: http://www.bohemian.com/bohemian/01.09.08/cover-0802.html
Oh! Another place you can go to sign up to help, watch videos, and learn more about global warming is:
http://www.wecansolveit.org/
It is a nonprofit campaign founded by Al Gore and the Alliance for Climate Protection.
Crystal and June,
What were your opinions on the articles you posted?
Freeda Alida
Yes, the gas prices have gone sky high, but drilling off of Sonoma County coast. No way. The House of Representatives approved a plan to permanently ban oil drilling off the Sonoma coast. Even if a North Coast oil lease plan were approved today it would be 15 to 20 years before any oil reached California refineries. Why do they continue to seek oil in our ocean floors? This does nothing but destroy wildlife. They need to be looking into alternative methods.
Experts: North Coast oil wouldn't ease gas prices
By GUY KOVNER
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
http://www1.pressdemocrat.com/article/20080402/NEWS/804020350
Drilling for oil off the Sonoma County coast would not ease the pain at the pump, experts said, as gasoline prices set new records on Tuesday in Santa Rosa and California, both over $3.60 for a gallon of regular unleaded gas.
There is oil beneath the ocean floor off Bodega Bay, and the battle over tapping it has raged for more than 20 years. But economists, environmentalists and analysts said it would not take the edge off prices expected to hit the $4 a gallon mark by Memorial Day.
"I don't see that as a solution," said Suzanne Garfield of the California Energy Commission. Crude oil is a global commodity "produced and sold at what the market will bear," she said.
"It does not matter where crude oil enters the stream," said Richard Charter of Bodega Bay, a veteran of North Coast oil drilling wars and government relations program manager for Defenders of Wildlife.
On Monday, the House of Representatives approved a plan to permanently ban oil drilling off the Sonoma coast, the farthest such a measure has ever advanced in Congress.
Crude oil prices, which topped $100 a barrel in January, are widely regarded as driving the gasoline prices up 44 cents in the past year in Santa Rosa, crimping family and business budgets.
Oil from North Coast offshore wells would be cheaper than oil from the Middle East and South America, but it would make no impact on global prices because it would come far too little and too late, experts said.
"Not even a drop in the bucket," said Christopher Knittel, a UC Davis economist, estimating the potential North Coast oil yield at "1 percent of the world's oil supply, if that."
If the environmental and political objections to North Coast oil extraction could be overcome, only the oil companies would benefit, Knittel said, by obtaining oil below the market rate.
"You can lobby your congressman (for local oil drilling) if you want to raise oil company profits," he said.
And even if a North Coast oil lease plan were approved today, Charter said, it would be 15 to 20 years before any oil reached California refineries.
"These things do not turn on like a spigot," he said.
If proximity to offshore oil wells paid off at the pump, then Santa Barbara County should be a motorist's haven, Charter said. But it isn't, with a gallon of regular gas at $3.75 on Tuesday, a dime higher than Santa Rosa's record price, according to the AAA Daily Fuel Gauge Report.
California's average price, $3.64 per gallon of regular unleaded fuel, was also a new record.
"You can't drill your way out of the current situation," Charter said.
The United States produces more than 5 million barrels of oil a day, which accounts for about 6 percent of the world's 80 million barrel a day consumption, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Oil reserves on the North Coast, including Sonoma, Mendocino and Humboldt counties, were estimated in the 1980s at up to 760 million barrels, a little over a month of U.S. consumption.
At that level, Charter and Knittel said, it's far too little to make an impact on oil prices.
Overall, the nation has a 112 billion barrels of oil on federal lands that have been declared off limits, including the North Coast, said Joe Sparano, president of the Western States Petroleum Association in Sacramento, an oil industry trade group.
That's almost four times the nation's existing crude oil reserves of 29 billion barrels.
His group is neutral on the question of expanded offshore oil drilling, but Sparano suggested it could ease the price crunch. "If you increase supply you usually have a beneficial impact on costs," he said.
Congress is not about to authorize any drilling in areas currently protected, Charter said. "It's political suicide," he said.
California's best antidote to high gasoline prices is conservation, Charter and Garfield said. More fuel-efficient vehicles and wider use of alternative fuels could make a difference, they said.
You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com.
This article caught my eye when I saw Eel River on it. I cannot believe that the Mendocino County Board of supervisor would spend $50,000 to divert water. What is this going to do for our wildlife? I don't know if anybody has ever been to Covelo to see these two Rivers (Blackutte and Eel) come together, it is breathtaking. The diversion plan has met with resistance and legal threats since its initial unveiling. How can anybody have water rights? Water is natural; it’s free who owns it? How did Sonoma County, which controls the water supplies in Lake Mendocino, get the right to take it?
Advice puts Eel River diversion plan on shelf
http://www1.pressdemocrat.com
By GLENDA ANDERSON
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
UKIAH -- A recently revived proposal to divert water from a protected portion of the Eel River near Dos Rios has been quietly shelved following a negative legal opinion.
"For now, we've put the whole Dos Rios thing on hold," Mendocino County Water Agency chief Roland Sanford said.
Mendocino County supervisors had resuscitated the decade-old proposal aimed at increasing the county's water supply, agreeing in September to spend up to $50,000 for a study and legal opinion.
The board was scheduled to discuss the plan and legal opinion last month, but Sanford said that has been delayed indefinitely.
"We're very pleased," said David Drell of the Willits Environmental Center, which has been at the forefront of opposition to the proposal.
The legal opinion listed expensive obstacles to taking water from a section of the Eel River that has state and federal designations as wild and scenic.
At the least, the project would require an environmental impact report, and it undoubtedly would face legal challenges from environmental groups, according to the opinion by Rossmann and Moore, a San Francisco firm specializing in water and land use.
The opinion echoed issues raised by environmentalists and other critics since the proposal was first raised by Mendocino County Supervisor John Pinches in the 1990s.
"This outside legal opinion agreed with us almost completely," Drell said.
At issue was a plan to take water during spring high-flow runs from the main stem of the Eel River near the Covelo exit on Highway 101 in northern Mendocino County.
In the most recent incarnation, the water was to be piped about 45 miles along the railroad right-of-way to Lake Mendocino at an estimated cost of more than $200 million.
The legal opinion notes that the county would need to keep track of the water to ensure that it was needed, was used within the county and was not used for purposes, including agriculture, that are prohibited under wild and scenic regulations.
An early incarnation of the plan called for a new reservoir to store the water.
The diversion plan has met with resistance and legal threats since its initial unveiling. Critics said it would be too expensive, face too many legal hurdles and wasn't needed.
The county has plenty of water in the winter, they said. What it needs is more places to store that water.
Most county agencies initially ignored Pinches' proposal.
Only the Redwood Valley County Water District pursued the plan, seeking rights to the water in 1997.
Redwood Valley has been under a moratorium on new water hookups for almost 20 years because it has only a limited, winter water right. It buys the bulk of its water from Sonoma County, which controls supplies in Lake Mendocino.
The water agency spent almost $90,000 applying for water rights and initial engineering studies for the Dos Rios project. But the project was too big and expensive for Redwood Valley alone, which was unable to persuade other county agencies to join its efforts.
Redwood Valley eventually abandoned the effort in favor of other projects, and the state dropped its water right application.
When Pinches returned to the Board of Supervisors last year, he renewed his push for the project. At the very least, he said, the county should apply for a water right to keep someone else from making a claim.
Pinches said this week that the project is too costly for the county to pursue alone. Instead, it will focus on other water projects, some of which have yet to be revealed.
"We've got a smaller project on the horizon," Pinches said.
You can reach Staff Writer Glenda Anderson at 462-6473 or glenda.anderson@press
democrat.com.
I have just read an article about dioxin leakage on the Fort Bragg mill property. There are two routes the town of Fort Bragg wants to take to get ride of the dioxins. First berry the toxin on the mill property in a large sealed container, and the other is to ship it out of the town and have it berried some where else. To ship the dioxins out of town is the most expensive method it will cost 400,000 dollars. I personally want to see the dioxins berried locally other than just shipped to a different community. Currently there is a lot of controversy on this topic and many people want to see the dioxins trucked out of the area. I personally say we made the problem here let's fix it here.
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