Cadillac Desert (90 page)

The Department of Water Resources later estimated that ten million acre-feet of runoff—enough for the city of San Francisco for forty years—had poured out the Golden Gate in two weeks. The crew of a freighter miles out to sea that was plowing through huge waves off the Gate said the wash coming across the bow tasted almost like Evian.

Californians didn’t know it yet, but they were riding a meteorological roller coaster, and the great ’86 storm was the crest before the giant drop. During all but one of the five subsequent water years, the
annual
runoff of all the rivers emptying into San Francisco Bay was less than the runoff measured from February 14 to February 28 in 1986. By 1992, nearly all of the state had suffered through six dry or critically dry years in a row—the fiercest drought since the Dust Bowl, when California had seven million people instead of the thirty-one million who officially live there today.

Unlike the drought of the mid-Seventies, which held the state in a vise grip for a couple of years and suddenly let go, this drought was like a lobster headed for the pot—it clamped down savagely, held on relentlessly, and then really began to squeeze. By 1990, one of Santa Barbara’s two water-supply reservoirs was a plain of sun-cracked mud. The other, bigger one was about a quarter full. A few years earlier, therapists in southern California reported that they were seeing lots of people showing clinical signs of depression because the sun had disappeared for weeks. Now some of the same people were spray-painting their lawns green and hiring Indian rain dancers to try to coax in a cloud. Santa Barbara, a pretty city situated on a sliver of plain between hulking mountains and the sea, used to cherish its geographic isolation and its minimal water supply because both helped to constrain growth, which most people there abhor; it is the one major city in southern California that decided not to hook into the State Water Project. By 1991, however, panicked Santa Barbarans had voted to build a spur to the California Aqueduct through ranges of mountains, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars,
and
to construct one of the world’s largest desalination plants, which will cost them many millions more.

Had it not been for a series of storms that came onshore in March, when the rainy season is usually about to end, the 1991 water year would have been the driest in California history. Until those storms arrived, precipitation in some parts of the state was less than 20 percent of normal, and measured runoff was as low as 5 percent of normal. Even when it did rain, hardly any runoff made it into the reservoirs—the famished landscape soaked it all up. Nineteen ninety-two—the year in which I am now writing—has been much the same. December and January, which are usually the wettest months, were numbingly dry, but toward the close of the rainy season, for two or three weeks, southern and central California were battered by storms. Not much of the runoff could be captured, because from Monterey south California has few reservoirs of real size—it doesn’t rain enough in the south to make building them worthwhile, and when it does rain it often rains violently, so the rivers carry great volumes of sediment and debris. (A small reservoir built on Malibu Creek in the 1920s had utterly silted up by the mid-1940s.) Meanwhile, northern California, where the real reservoirs are, was again bypassed by the biggest storms, and so, as I write this, the state is entering the dry season—and its sixth consecutive year of drought—with less than half its usual water supply on tap.

As it happened, the drought was just a backdrop against which a patently Californian
sturm und drang
was being acted out. In 1989, northern California was hit by an earthquake that, though not exactly colossal—it released about 3 percent as much energy as the San Francisco earthquake of 1906—killed dozens of people and caused seven billion dollars’ worth of damage to homes, buildings, and public infrastructure. Two years later, an enormous wildfire swept the Oakland Hills, destroying twenty-five hundred homes, taking more lives, and inflicting at least two billion dollars’ worth of damage. Only a few weeks afterward, on Interstate 5, the worst mass highway collision in U.S. history occurred, involving 151 cars. About a year later, a pair of walloping earthquakes jolted the Mojave Desert, which has become suburban Los Angeles. In the midst of this litany was a hard winter freeze that wiped out a $1.5 billion citrus crop and yet
another
earthquake, which reduced much of the lovely town of Ferndale, far up on the north coast, to rubble.

Joan Didion once described the state as an “amphitheater of natural disaster,” and all these events bore her out—life in California was imitating a heavy metal cartoon. Only none of these was a
natural
disaster in any true sense. Earthquakes are quite harmless until you decide to put millions of people and two trillion dollars in real estate atop scissile fault zones. California is not Brazil, and it is far north of Florida—orchard growers are always gambling with frost. The mass collision, a macabre excitement on the world’s most boring stretch of interstate, was caused by a huge cloud of dust blowing off a cotton field that had been plowed bare and then fallowed due to the drought. Everything about California that is contrived and man-made and therefore vulnerable came together for the Oakland Hills fire: It began with a match or a cigarette dropped in a field of Turkish grass gone to straw (the native bunchgrasses, which can tolerate drought, have been all but usurped by invasive varieties); the grass fire spread into a grove of Australian eucalyptus trees, which can stand a drought but not a hard freeze; the resin-rich eucalyptus, which burn fiercely when frost-killed, went off like Roman candles, showering embers from roof to wood-shingle roof.

The drought itself, which may end up a more costly disaster than all of these combined, qualifies best as punishment meted out to an impudent culture by an indignant God. But the worst damage—ecological and economic—could have been averted, even after six dry years, had it not been for acts of man precipitated by the usual combination of wilfulness and avarice. It wasn’t a man-made drought, but man made it very much worse.

Before the Gold Rush, the streams that drain into the Central Valley from the Sierra Nevada and the northern Coast Range represented so many miles of salmon-spawning habitat that you could have stitched it all together and run it across the continent and back again. By the 1960s, 97 percent of it was gone. Friant Dam single-handedly wiped out a spawning run of a hundred and fifty thousand fish by blocking and dewatering the entire San Joaquin River. Salmon could live with the small hydroelectric dams built high in the mountains decades ago; they cannot live with giant, impassable multipurpose dams built low in the foothills, whose main purpose is usually to capture as much water as possible that can then be taken out of the rivers.

Despite the worst disruption of salmon habitat that you can find anywhere on earth, the Sacramento River and a few tributaries, in the late 1960s, still supported a surprisingly robust salmon fishery—the most productive south of the Columbia. There were four distinct subspecies: a fall run, reared mainly in hatcheries, that was the bread and butter of the commercial salmon fleet; a distinct late-fall run; a large winter run; and a rapidly declining spring run, a superfish that goes over forty pounds and blasts through Class Five rapids on its way to spawning reaches nearly a mile above sea level in the Sierra Nevada. (The Sacramento River is unique in the world for its four runs of chinook salmon.) In good years, after the war, the Sacramento fishery could sustain a harvest of several hundred thousand fish, and in great years a million or more fish.

The tenacity of the Sacramento River salmon was remarkable because of the deadly obstacle course the fish, juveniles and adults, have to run from the beginning to the end of their lives. Shasta Dam blocked off enormously productive spawning beds in the watershed; other dams on important tributaries, especially the Yuba and the American, did the same. The Red Bluff diversion dam, at the gateway to the last mainstem spawning reach, frustrates many thousands of upriver-migrating adults despite a fish ladder that goes around it. The intake at the Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District, capable of diverting 3000 cubic feet per second, swallows millions of downriver-migrating juveniles each year. In drier years, when Shasta Lake swelters for months in hundred-degree heat, the warm water emanating into the lower river cooks vast numbers of eggs and juveniles, which usually cannot tolerate water warmer than 60°. An abandoned mint near Shasta leaches ghostly wastes when it rains, and agriculture adds pesticides and herbicides.

But the worst hazard to the fishery is the battery of pumps at the south end of the Delta, which feed the aqueducts that sustain southern California. When the State Water Project began operating in the late Sixties, joining the Central Valley Project, another couple of million acre-feet of water that used to pour out to sea was sucked across the Delta by the pumps, confusing the upriver-migrating adults and entraining tens of millions of hapless juveniles, which go wherever the river currents, natural or artificial, want them to go. In wet years, in the Sixties and Seventies, when the Delta pumps diverted only 20 percent of the Sacramento outflow, the escapement ratio was high and millions of young fish made it to sea, where they could fatten in ocean pastures and return in great numbers to spawn. But in drier years, when as much as 50 percent of the Sacramento River outflow was sucked toward southern California, escapement was low, salmon mortality was high, and the commercial fleet—still comprised of many hundreds of boats—braced itself for poor seasons in the years immediately to come.

As it happened the 1986 floods coincided perfectly with a heavy outmigration of young fish, so the escapement ratio was better than great. It was fabulous. The offshore catch in two or three years, when fish of the 1986 class returned to spawn, was going to be the best in decades.

I first encountered that prediction a few weeks after the floods in an obscure publication called Fridays, the biweekly house organ of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, which is put out by the PCFFA’s only paid staff member, a fish processor’s son with a law degree named Zeke Grader. He is one of a handful of people in the world who are paid to think exactly as a salmon would think, which means that his thinking tends to be the opposite of most everyone else’s.

In the dry months and years following the 1986 floods, Grader’s optimism about the 1986-class fish was counterweighted by a deepening pessimism over the fishery’s long-term prognosis. His reasoning was simple and not arguable: Salmon have to confront a drought right away. Everyone else, cushioned by years’ worth of reservoir storage, does not. It might not be obvious to people, but it was already obvious to the fish: California, in 1987, had entered a year of severe drought, and because droughts tend to come in cycles, there was apt to be another dry year—and then, conceivably, several more. No big floods (“surplus flows” in water-buffalo argot) were going to flush tens of millions of newly hatched salmon and steelhead past the insistent pull of 300,000 horsepower Delta pumps—not to mention the 160-odd diversion intakes, most lacking fish screens, between the Delta and Shasta Dam. In July of 1987, Grader observed in
Fridays
that 85 percent of the spring flow of the Sacramento River had been either diverted or held in storage that year, with unknown but potentially devastating consequences for the fishery. He quoted Dr. Michael Rozengurt, an expatriate Russian fisheries biologist, who compared California’s situation to what the Russians had done to the Sea of Azov, a spectacular fishery turned into a biological desert by Stalin’s directive to irrigate a limitless acreage of cotton.

During the next several years (I know this because I recently read five years of
Fridays
over a weekend), Zeke Grader sounded more and more like John the Baptist, although he must have felt more like Sisyphus.
Fridays
has only a few thousand readers, most of whom are West Coast fishermen or fisheries biologists—who needed no convincing that the drought could mean disaster for the salmon if extraordinary measures weren’t taken to protect them. That is the sometimes fatal weakness of anadromous fish: By insisting on spawning in rivers and estuaries, they are like an army trapped in a mountain cul-de-sac, easy pickings for forces, natural or unnatural (which is to say, human) that are far beyond their control. But after years of intense drought, as Grader noted again and again, the Bureau of Reclamation and Department of Water Resources—which essentially run the Sacramento River watershed—were still allocating water as if these were normal times. They had taken nearly all of the salmon habitat; now they were taking most of the water—and the fish with it.

The most significant statistics from the drought—which Zeke Grader, to my knowledge, was the first to elucidate—really had nothing to do with precipitation and everything to do with what happened to the precipitation after it fell.

In 1987, which was categorized as a “critically dry” year—the driest of five classifications—the Central Valley Project and State Water Project gave their agricultural customers (who consume 95 percent of the CVP supply and around 65 percent of the SWP’s average yield) every acre-foot of their water entitlements, based on the “carryover” they held in storage. The water managers could have argued, in 1987, that they were blindsided by the suddenness of the drought, but in 1988, another critically dry year, agriculture got full entitlements again. In 1989, a year classified as “dry,” nearly all CVP and SWP customers received full water deliveries
again.
It wasn’t until 1990, a desolately dry year despite some late rains in May, that the two huge water agencies began cutting back their agricultural customers. But even in that year a big block of users with water rights predating the Central Valley Project received normal-year water supplies.