Posted on 11/27/2016 10:12:36 AM PST by Mariner
LOS BANOS - The helicopter landed in the western hills above the San Joaquin Valley and out of the dust walked President John F. Kennedy.
It was Aug. 18, 1962, and the sun would not let go. In the hollow of the mountain, where California was about to build its newest reservoir, the air felt like a blast furnace. Summer had baked the earth to a tan and shrunken form. The hills turned to hide. Though not a drop of rain had fallen from the sky since spring, no one in the assembled crowd, certainly not the cotton kings, thought of this as drought.
Going dry for eight months was California’s condition. And here was the president coming west to deliver California’s fix. A son of Massachusetts, he knew this was a place where “things do not happen but are made to happen.” Looking down on the Valley, he could see nature’s aridity and man’s answer side by side. Desert and farm, salt and fruit. The difference was the reach of an irrigation canal.
Two Irish American politicians at the peak of their power, JFK and Gov. Pat Brown, came together that day outside Los Banos, “the baths,” to build the nation’s largest off-stream earthen reservoir. No partnership between Washington, D.C., and Sacramento had ever tackled a project of such monument. By dint of the new reservoir and an aqueduct that sent water from one end of California to the other, the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project forever joined hands.
But the building of the San Luis Reservoir and canal stands out in the annals of western reclamation for a more inglorious reason. The Westlands Water District, 600,000 acres of irrigated agriculture, controlled nearly all the federal water that moved through the new plumbing.
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
It has to do with private investment, private improvements to the land, private wealth creation. IOW, pre-big-government history.
Henry Miller (an assumed name), a German immigrant, went west during the gold rush with only a few dollars in his pocket. He worked first as a butcher in San Francisco, then invested his earnings in land and began raising cattle. His ranching and meat-packing business thrived as California's population grew. Eventually, he and a partner owned more farmland in the West than any other individual or corporation. He was the first to run an integrated cattle ranching, irrigation and meatpacking enterprise. He built canals and reservoirs without government help--and before there was such a thing as a bulldozer--to water his herds of cattle in the dry areas of the San Joaquin Valley, Oregon and Nevada.
And the whole operation was headquartered at Los Banos, of all places.
Thanks for this history lesson. California has had a colorful history, a great history. Water rights for the Central and Southern part of the state continue to be part of this history. Frankly, as the Democrats continue their destruction of capitalism in the state, water may be the least of its problems.
I’ve been there. Don’t they have a lot of cattle pens?
I will never support any efforts to depopulate any state. I can make jokes and poke fun, but the reality is California cannot sustain itself without desalination efforts. Drop the choo choo and build more desalination plants because your neighboring states don’t have that option available to them.
You might have some “fun” with this State graphic:
http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphsMain.action
And you can have more “fun” by clicking on the reservoir’s name which brings up a bunch of current and past data on that particular storage faclility. And again you still need to understand that agribusiness is the biggest problem we have. California feeds the entire country, but we do it by watering a desert. We need to stop growing water-intensive crops like rice. When we went to Vegas last year to attend my wife’s Las Vegas High Reunion, we had to take a detour off of I-5 and it took us through groves of fruit and nut trees, all of which had been converted to drip irrigation. So the farmers are finally getting the message that they have to conserve or go out of business.
Speaking as the one-time manager of a pecan orchard in Alabama -- where we planted 29,002 trees and laid 183 miles of plumbing -- drip irrigation works just fine.
It reduces water usage by around 75%, eliminates drainage problems, and affords a very cost-effective way to apply pesticides and fertilizer.
“How can California rob Colorado of its water?”
Politics. LA votes to take water by force of government. Legal theft covers much of what government does...
Our discussion was about water. You’re frustrated that you can’t win there, so you’re branching out. Don’t blame you.
I covered the pension when I said that two sides agreeing on terms left us little room to change things. We have a Democrat controlled government. I don’t agree with how things are.
Please provide any information you like referencing water desalination.
As for California taking too much Colorado river water, California has 65% of the populace living in the states that are affected by the Colorado Water Agreement. It takes 29% of the water by agreement.
Your state has 4.76% of the population in the states in the water pact, and gets 4% of the water.
California is the largest agricultural producing state. In 2009 it had a $34.8 billion dollar agricultural industry. The following four states were Iowa at 21, Texas at 16.6, Nebraska at 15.3, and Illinois at 14.5 billion. It accomplishes that with water from the Colorado river.
California had 15 years beginning in 2001 to enact Colorado River conservation efforts to decrease dependency on the inland water source. What has California done to comply?
The majority of California’s population lives on the coast, so if you’re going to use residential water usage as the core of your argument, it makes more sense to desalinate and provide the majority of its population with water reclaimed from the Pacific.
Doubtful the upper river states are going to blow the dams and flood their residents, so California should determine if they’re willing to trade all the “shared” lakes for the Colorado.
Right, you don’t need a lot of the intrastate water sources in the northern part of the state.
We get a lot water from the Northern part of the state.
The Colorado isn’t in the northern part of the state.
We’re doing a lot here in Nevada to get water from other sources alternative to the Colorado. I don’t understand why California is so NIMBY about doing the same, but that’ll probably come out during negotiations.
Northern California is affected by the water the southern part of the state gets from the Colorado river. There is less need for water from northern California.
As for what occurs during negotiations, I expect each state to plead their case as they should.
As for the NIMBY comment, I think it’s simply more stupidity from our misguided Leftist idiot state leadership.
Californians aren’t evil because they lay claim to Colorado river water. It’s on our border and we have as much right to it as anyone else it flows by.
I have advocated for southern California to build nuclear powered desalinization plants here on the forum. I did it because it was my intent to reduce the pressure on northern California’s water resources.
The Colorado river is a southern California resource.
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