Hacker News Reader

Comment by givemeethekeys | Hacker News Reader

So much rain flowed straight into the sea that I will have no sympathy for anyone who complains about the drought when the next one hits. California should have built more reservoirs to accommodate for longer droughts if 4-6 year is the new normal.

View on HN

What seems like missed opportunity is mainly just south central valley agricultural propaganda. Apologies if I unload too much information here.

"Additional surface water storage, while having some economic benefit, is not as valuable as expanding key conveyance and recharge facilities. Aqueducts, canals, and interties that allow users to buy and sell water, especially between the agricultural and urban sectors, are the most valuable. " [1]

and

"As Delta exports are restricted, scarcity increases for agricultural users south of the Delta. Some of these costs would be offset by revenues from sales of water by senior water-rights holders to urban areas and higher-valued agriculture." [1]

ie: Water limitations at the delta effect how many almonds or pistachios we can produce and sell (or rather, the agricultural monopolies).

As I've highlighted in another comment, locations for another surface-level reservoir are scarce, and offer diminishing returns at best. "No reservoir can reliably deliver more than the reservoir’s average annual inflow (minus evaporation)[...]" Most easy, cheap, and effective reservoir locations in California already have reservoirs." [2]

Our best tools are to: conserve water, protect our ground water aquifers (that actually make up the majority of our water supply), and hope we can hold/reverse climate change enough to keep temperatures low enough to generate snow pack every year in the mountains.

[1] https://doi.org/10.15447/sfews.2014v9iss2art4 [2]https://californiawaterblog.com/2011/09/13/water-storage-in-...

Aren't the issues of monopoly and water usage separate? More water would equal more economic activity which is good. But all the profits would accrue to one place because there's a monopoly, which is bad.

It seems like California is mismanaging on two fronts, one it should build more water storage to stimulate more economic growth, two it should break its monopolies so the benefits of that growth are more widely spread.

Should have built them when? In the last few years?

Why wouldn't you have sympathy for those affected by the drought who have no say in the building of reservoirs? Seems excessively harsh.

The (perhaps overly kind) reading is that OP thinks they should complain about California politicians who refuse to build more water infrastructure instead of complaining about drought.

This comment is textbook presentism.

4-6 years became "the new normal" 4-6 years ago.

With 30+ years of climate scientists warning about it.

Inflation became a three year calculation.

This is a Fox News talking point.

The real problem agriculture has in California is that we have moved from heavy labor crops to things like Almonds that are heavily automated. Sadly, Almonds take a ton of water, so really the answer is to grow less Almonds.

But they don't want to hear that. They are also against funding these insanely expensive reservoirs of course too.

This is yet more bullshit California politics, part of why I left. It’s the same thing as Californians eternally blaming the long-dead Ronald Reagan for the problem of visible homelessness in their state.

Bring up that CA finally has plenty of water this year and they bitch about how actually it’s “too much” after a decade of bitching about “not enough.” It’s like they never heard the Goldilocks fairy tale or simply cannot relate what comes out of their mouth to the most basic critical thinking. Really, it’s not enough of an unpredictable and uncontrollable weather pattern for ten years and when that finally lets up it’s TOO MUCH. And it’s the farmers’ (they vote R) fault too!!1 Okay, California.

There's nothing wrong with growing almonds! Almond are valuable. It's alfalfa that's the problem. You can't grow almonds in the Midwest, but alfalfa grows fine. Just stopping alfalfa buys at least fifty years of predicted snow and rainfall reduction, for a crop that's just shipping to Saudi Arabia.

Yet another reason why we should've collect rain water better. Almonds are delicious and make farmers good money, and the production can be automated.

They have been actively working to mitigate just that for the last few decades at least. It is challenging and expensive work despite how easy it is to ask why we don't just collect all the rain that hits the land. Last year with the historic rainfall, LA county captured enough rain to meet the drinking water needs of 5 million people.

I'm not sure that the existing reservoirs are being managed optimally. As I recall, perhaps incorrectly, there are mandatory outflows for maintaining endangered smelt populations.

Managing the Sacramento river delta is tough. It will become too salty and ruin agricultural land if too little fresh water is let through.[1]

[1] https://www.watereducation.org/aquapedia/sacramento-san-joaq...

Not just ag land, but the California Water Project and Aqueduct, which feeds both Los Angeles and SoCal agriculture.

One of the major themes of Mark Reisner's book A Dangerous Place, which explores the scenario of a major Hayward Fault earthquake (that's the fault running along the San Francisco Bay's eastern shoreline) would be massive levee failures in the California Delta, and the knock-on consequences of massive salt-water intrusion on not only the Delta but farming and southern California as well.

<https://archive.org/details/dangerousplaceca00reis/page/176/...>

Reply on news.ycombinator.com