The district is working to expand its supply from other sources, but the tunnel project is critical to provide flexibility and ensure the state is capturing all of the water that it can, said Adel Hagekhalil, the district’s general manager. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is the state’s largest water contractor, using water from the Delta to supply 19 million people, including the city of Los Angeles. The proposed tunnel project would take the water from the Sacramento River before it reaches the Delta. Two in three Californians, or about 27 million people, rely on water that comes from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, a vital estuary where the two rivers mingle with tidal flows from the Pacific Ocean before it is conveyed south through the State Water Project.Īt the southern end of the Delta, state and federally run pumping plants suck up the water and send it south. The preferred route would build two stations to pull water from the Sacramento River just south of the capital city, then carry that water south alongside Interstate 5 before breaking off toward Bethany Reservoir at the top of the California Aqueduct, the state's main channel for moving water south, built in the 1960s. Still, even if the political support to build it is there, construction likely wouldn’t break ground until at least 2028 and would take more than a decade, said Carrie Buckman, environmental program manager for the project. It would be paid for by water agencies that contract with the state to use it. A prior estimate for a different single-tunnel route put it at about $16 billion. Critics say it will harm communities in the fragile Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, which rely on water that could instead be diverted to the tunnel. The Department of Water Resources plan analyzes the effects of the project on the environment, residents, fish and farmland. “Our water infrastructure was not built for that,' said Wade Crowfoot, secretary of California's Natural Resources Agency. Though California is in the third year of a punishing drought, it saw record rainfall last October and another major dump of rain and snow in December, some of which the state was unable to capture. It would also better shield the state's water supply from the risk of an earthquake that could cause levees to crumble and ocean salt water to flood into the system. State water officials say a tunnel is badly needed to modernize the state's water infrastructure in the face of climate change, which scientists say is likely to cause both prolonged droughts and major deluges of rain and snow. “This project is unlikely to be decided on its technical merits,' he said. The two sides have become so entrenched that the project's fate will ultimately depend on whether Newsom or a future governor can muster the political will to push it through, said Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow with the Water Policy Center at the Public Policy Institute of California. Jerry Brown and the latest iteration of a project that has been talked about and planned in some form, but never constructed, for about half a century. It's scaled back from the two-tunnel plan championed by former Gov. The proposal released Wednesday would build one tunnel to take water from the Sacramento River, the state's largest, to the California Aqueduct for delivery further south. (AP) - A new plan to reroute how water moves from wetter Northern California to drier Southern California would ferry some of it through a single, 45-mile (72-kilometer) underground tunnel, wrapping around the state’s existing water delivery system and dumping it into the main aqueduct that flows south to vast swaths of farmland and millions of people. The state Department of Water Resources released a report on July 27, 2022, outlining their preferred route for the giant water system, which will reroute water from the north to the south. Gain Newsom's administration has scaled the project back to a single tunnel, but the project still has many critics.

Jerry Brown to build a giant twin tunnel system to move water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to Southern California, Wednesday July 25, 2012. Facebook Twitter Email FILE - Demonstrators rallied at the Capitol to protest a plan announced by Gov.

Water wetter