The Delta Smelt: Let's Have a Debate

Delta smelt (Mercury News photo)

Environmental regulations that protect endangered species, specifically the delta smelt, have drastically reduced the amount of storm water that can be pumped to reservoirs:

But 94% of the water that has flowed since New Year’s Eve through the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, a linchpin of California’s water system, has continued straight to the Pacific Ocean instead of being captured and stored in the state’s reservoirs.

Environmental regulations aimed at protecting a two-inch-long fish, the endangered Delta smelt, have required the massive state and federal pumps near Tracy to reduce pumping rates by nearly half of their full limit, sharply curbing the amount of water that can be saved for farms and cities to the south...

In the 1950s, the federal government built huge pumps near Tracy to send water south to farmers and cities through the Central Valley Project. In the 1960s, former California Gov. Pat Brown built even bigger pumps two miles west, near Byron, that pumps Delta water into the State Water Project, which serves 27 million people.

The pumps are enormous and over time have disrupted fish and wildlife in the Delta, including smelt and salmon, sometimes grinding them up, sometimes making sloughs run backward, and other times removing up to half the Delta’s fresh water. Once plentiful, smelt and salmon numbers crashed. This winter, only five smelt have been found in the Delta by scientists.

A small fraction of the Delta storm water can be diverted by the pumps to storage, and smelt restrictions reduce even that amount by 40%:

When the state and federal pumps are fully running, they can move roughly 10,800 cubic feet per second. That means they are unable to catch most of the current deluge even if maxed out. But since Jan. 1, they have averaged just 6,415 cfs per day — far less than their capacity.

The water districts say that they "do not have much flexibility under the law." The law is a creation of men and can be undone by men. It's time to have a full-throated debate over why preventing the extinction of a small fish is more important than the lives and livelihood of millions of Californians.