Northwest May Hold Secret to Water Woes
By Alex Breitler, The Record, Stockton, Calif.
Jun. 1–In a few days, most rivers and streams draining from the Sierra Nevada will have peaked for the season, channeling snowmelt from the granite-specked highlands to reservoirs, the ocean, your kitchen tap.
The melt came early this year. Just like last year.
Climate change threatens California’s longtime reliance on the spiny Sierra for most of its water, experts agree.
And that, one scientist says, is likely to increase interest in a more reliable source: the porous lava flows of the Cascade Range in Oregon and Washington, which hide away enough water to cover California in a pool 3 inches deep.
As water supplies tighten in coming decades, the Northwest’s groundwater surplus is likely to garner new attention from around the western United States, said Gordon Grant, a hydrologist for the U.S. Forest Service in Corvallis, Ore. Grant presented his research earlier this spring to fisheries experts gathered for a conference in Lodi.
"It is almost inevitable that the areas that store large quantities of groundwater will become increasingly looked at to provide water," Grant said.
As early as the mid-1960s there was talk in California of tapping the Pacific Northwest by diverting the Columbia River and pumping flows south through a massive system of canals, tunneling through mountain ranges on the way to Los Angeles.
The original proposal died in 1968, was resurrected in the early 1990s but ultimately was not politically viable. Even if it had been, officials at the time said, conserving water and allowing farmland to lie fallow would be far cheaper than building an extensive network of canals.
Today, California is occupied with figuring out how to convey water within its own boundaries, including whether to build a canal around the Delta to feed freshwater to other regions.
But climate change is looming.
The Cascades hold up to seven times more water underground than the range stores in its snowpack each year, Grant said. That’s enough groundwater to fill Utah’s Great Salt Lake.
Snowflakes melt and trickle into the ground, emerging perhaps several decades later in lush forested springs. For this reason, waterways there flow steadily even late into the summer.
On the other hand, snow drains off the rocky Sierra Nevada like water off a grocery store parking lot. Frank Gehrke, who coordinates measurements of California’s snowpack each winter for the state Department of Water Resources, said there is some groundwater storage in parts of the range, but not nearly enough to cancel out the loss of snowpack as temperatures warm.
As a result, rivers and streams begin to dry up earlier in the summer.
California does benefit from groundwater toward the southern end of the Cascades, including spring-fed rivers that drain into the Sacramento River.
"At a minimum, the value of those rivers will only increase," Grant said.
Water may eventually become the most valuable product harvested from national forest lands, he said. This could mean changes in demographics — where people live and work.
"If you project forward into a climate-warm world, the places where water is available, particularly in the late summer, those places are going to be disproportionately attractive to human beings," Grant said.
Exactly how that’s going to play out, he said, he doesn’t know.
Contact reporter Alex Breitler at (209) 546-8295 or abreitler@recordnet.com.
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