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June 24th, 2009
More H20 on tap for Novato
Bigger pipeline proposed, but the trick is filling it
By Tim Omarzu
Managing Editor
Wednesday, November 21, 2007 1:58 PM PST
Plans are afoot to increase the size of Novato’s lifeline: the pipeline that’s right alongside Highway 101 and delivers 80 percent of Novato’s water from the Russian and Eel rivers.
This underground aqueduct would have to be dug up and moved, anyway, if Caltrans, the state highway agency, proceeds with its plans to widen and add car pool lanes by 2014 to the “Novato Narrows” section of Highway 101 between Novato and Petaluma.
For maintenance purposes, the pipeline and other utilities would have to scooted out from underneath the wider highway.
If the pipeline is excavated at Caltrans’ expense, that could be an ideal time to enlarge its capacity, said officials from Marin County’s two largest water districts, which serve a combined 250,000 people.
“This might be an opportunity to build (a new pipeline) … cost effectively,” said Chris DeGabriele, general manager of the North Marin Water District, which has some 60,000 Novato-area customers.
DeGabriele suggests boosting the capacity of the pipeline, which the district owns, from its current daily maximum of 19 million gallons to almost 33 million gallons — a 74 percent increase.
The Marin Municipal Water District pays to share space in the pipeline. It serves 190,000 customers in southern Marin, including the city of San Rafael, and is considering spending $115 million to build a desalination plant on the bay that could provide 5,000 acre-feet of water, annually. (An acre-foot, a commonly used water volume measurement, is enough water to cover an acre with water one foot deep.)
The expanded pipeline could provide more water—7,000 to 8,000 acre feet, annually — than the desalination plant at a fraction of the cost, said Paul Helliker, Marin Municipal’s general manager.
“It’s definitely one of the options that we’re analyzing,” Helliker said of the larger pipeline.
However, building a bigger pipeline isn’t enough, in itself, to make precious additional water appear in Marin.
The Sonoma County Water Agency wholesales the Russian and Eel River water to the Marin water agencies, as well as to the water agencies serving Santa Rosa, Cotati, Rohnert Park, Windsor, Petaluma, and the Sonoma Valley.
Yet the Sonoma County Water Agency is struggling to deliver water from its two main reservoirs: Lake Mendocino and Lake Sonoma.
This summer it required mandatory water conservation measures to cut consumption by 15 percent due to shortages from the reservoirs.
Historical diversion
A look back about 100 years helps explain how the Sonoma County Water Agency got into its current situation.
Though it’s not common knowledge, Marin and Sonoma counties are like Los Angeles when it comes to water.
Just as L.A. blossomed by tapping the far-off Owens River, Marin and Sonoma counties rely on water from the Eel River, California’s third largest river, which starts in the mountains of Mendocino County and empties into the Pacific just south of Eureka.
The Eel and Russian rivers entered into a man-made marriage about 100 years ago, when a 1.5-mile-long tunnel was drilled into Snow Mountain near Ukiah. The tunnel diverted part of the Eel River’s flow through hydroelectric generators and into the Russian River watershed.
That diversion tunnel was enlarged in the 1950s. And a reservoir, Lake Mendocino, was built in the 1950s on the east fork of the Russian River to hold Eel River water.
On average, 180,000 acre-feet of the Eel is diverted annually — as much as 95 percent of the Eel’s summer flow, said David Keller, Bay Area Director of Friends of the Eel River.
The result?
For one thing, people now swim and canoe in the Russian River during the summer when, historically, the river dried up. Releases from Lake Mendocino keep it full.
“The (summertime) flow in the Russian River is very artificial. It’s not a natural situation,” said Pam Jeane, deputy chief engineer for the Sonoma County Water Agency.
Swimmers and canoeists aren’t the only ones to take advantage of the Russian River’s summertime flows. Wineries and ranchers in Sonoma and Mendocino counties pump water out of the Russian River — in some cases without a permit. Illegal pot-growing operations also tap the river.
And cities along the Russian River, such as Ukiah, Hopland, Cloverdale and Healdsburg, rely on municipal wells that are likely are fed by in-stream flows.
This blend of Russian and Eel river water makes its way to Novato and Marin via the North Marin Water District’s pipeline.
But while Eel River water has been a boon for Sonoma and Marin counties, the diversion — and other manmade impacts, such as sediment from logging — have wreaked havoc on the Eel’s salmon and steelhead trout populations.
The fish numbered more than 1 million in the early 1900s. But in 1988, only 31,000 Chinook and coho salmon and steelhead trout returned to the Eel River basin, according to “The Grim Fish Facts,” an article written by The Friends of the Eel River.
And a mere 700 salmon and steelhead were counted in 2003 at a fish ladder on the Eel at the diversion tunnel, the article reported.
“Both steelhead and … salmon are nearly extirpated in the upper main Eel River,” the article said.
The article went on to cite a 1998 U.S Fish and Wildlife Service letter that indicates the best thing for the fish would be to end the diversion.
That helps explain why federal regulators this year cut the diversion of Eel River water by 33 percent.
Which was one reason that Lake Mendocino was low. Which, in turn, helped prompt this summer’s 15 percent mandatory water conservation measures throughout the North Bay, including in Novato.
Lake Sonoma: hard to tap
The Sonoma County Water Agency had plenty of water in Lake Sonoma that it could have released this summer, but endangered fish got in the way.
The reservoir was built in 1983 on Dry Creek, a tributary that feeds into the Russian River at Healdsburg.
With a water supply pool of 212,000 acre-feet, Lake Sonoma is three times the size of Lake Mendocino.
But the Sonoma County Water Agency only released a limited amount of water down Dry Creek because if the flows are too strong, the water can blast away immature salmon and steelhead that spend the summer in the creek.
“It washes them right out,” Jeane said, “We blast them right out of there if we release too much water.”
The water agency didn’t consider how releasing water might impact fish when it built the reservoir, she said. Now, it’s exploring options that would allow it to release more water from Lake Sonoma, such as reconfiguring the creek or installing what Jeane said would a “very expensive” pipeline to carry water so that it doesn’t have to flow down the creek.
The North Marin Water District is entitled to 14,100 acre-feet, annually, from the Sonoma County Water Agency.
It wants its pipeline near Highway 101 expanded to carry that amount of water.
But until the Dry Creek problem is solved, the Sonoma County Water Agency won’t be able to deliver the Novato agency’s full allotment of water.
“The water’s there; we don’t have the legal access to it. We have the right to store it; we don’t have the right to (release) it,” Jeane said. “Somehow, we’ve got to figure out how to deal with the fish and, at the same time, provide water to the people.”
Officials from the North Marin Water District planned to meet today with Caltrans to discuss options for relocating the pipeline alongside Highway 101.
DeGabriele believes there is enough supply for his agency to get its full allotment. He said the Sonoma County Water Agency has 367,500 acre-feet of storage between Lake Mendocino and Lake Sonoma and only sells about 60,000 to 65,000 acre-feet to North Bay communities.
“There’s ample supply available for the region’s needs now and into the future,” DeGabriele said.
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Capdiamont wrote on Nov 21, 2007 9:37 PM: