[env-trinity] Trinity's Water in Westlands

[Byron Leydecker]

Time Seeping Out For Drainage Debacle? State Regulators Give 90 Days to Act
on Half-Century Old Environmental Problem

California Progress Report - 11/10/08

By Traci Sheehan
Executive Director
Planning and Conservation League


Fifty years after the Westlands Water District began irrigating
drainage-impaired lands in the San Joaquin Valley, causing massive
accumulation of toxic selenium and other salts in the soils and drainage
water, the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board (Board) has
taken action to address the ongoing pollution problem. In a letter last
week, the Board gave the water district 90 days to file for a waste
discharge permit and present a plan for cleaning up the soils that have been
building up salts and toxins for decades. 

While federal officials knew that providing water to Westlands from the
Delta and Northern California would aggravate the naturally occurring
salt-loading problems on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley, the
Federal Bureau of Reclamation pushed forward with the irrigation project. As
a result, the Westlands area is one of the largest, most heavily subsidized,
and profitable agribusiness regions in the world as well as one of
California's worst environmental legacies. 

The hard clay soils on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley are naturally
impermeable, preventing water and salts from seeping into the earth. In many
places in the area, the water table is no more than five feet from the
surface of the ground. Toxics and salts from the imported irrigation water
mix with the groundwater, compromising crop root systems - a problem people
in the business refer to as "drainage impairment." 

The Board's letter reminds Westlands that discharging toxic laden water is a
violation of laws protecting the state's surface and groundwater. We're
pleased to see the Board treating the drainage situation as a serious
problem and hope their actions mark a turning point in efforts to clean up
the area.

Traci Sheehan is the Executive Director of the  <http://www.pcl.org/>
Planning and Conservation League, a statewide, nonprofit lobbying
organization. For more than thirty years, PCL has fought to develop a body
of environmental laws in California that is the best in the United States.
PCL staff review virtually every environmental bill that comes before the
California Legislature each year. It has testified in support or opposition
of thousands of bills to strengthen California's environmental laws and
fight off rollbacks of environmental protections.

 

 

Byron Leydecker, JCT

Chair, Friends of Trinity River

PO Box 2327

Mill Valley, CA 94942-2327

415 383 4810

415 519 4810 cell

bwl3 at comcast.net

bleydecker at stanfordalumni.org (secondary)

http://fotr.org 

 <mailto:bwl3 at comcast.net>  

 

 

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