California
California dam raise would take more Delta water. Why are environmentalists silent? | Opinion
Fresno drivers headed to the Bay Area via Pacheco Pass on Highway 152 can’t help but take note of a sprawling inland sea that seemingly appears out of nowhere among the yellowed, oak-dotted foothills.
This is San Luis Reservoir, essentially a 2 million acre-foot holding tank built to irrigate San Joaquin Valley farms and supply drinking water to Silicon Valley. Its construction was considered such a significant addition to California’s water supply that President John F. Kennedy turned out in 1962 to push the dynamite plunger.
“It is a pleasure for me to come out here and help blow up this Valley,” Kennedy quipped from a temporary grandstand erected atop a nearby hill.
Six decades later, the 3½-mile long earth dam that towers above 152 and impounds the federally owned, state operated reservoir is getting fortified. Construction crews are 2½ years into a $1.1 billion seismic upgrade of B.F. Sisk Dam that won’t be completed until 2031.
Opinion
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Funded mainly by the 1978 Safety of Dams Act, the project will raise the 382-foot-tall dam by 10 feet and add additional safety features designed to ease concerns of widespread flooding if slumping were to occur during a major earthquake. (San Luis Reservoir lies within two fault zones and is situated uphill from the nearby communities of Los Banos and Santa Nella.)
So far, the 120 to 150 workers have focused on reinforcing and raising three different stability berms along the dam’s midsection where seepage had been occurring. Most of the material required, millions of cubic yards worth of boulders, riprap and gravel, is excavated from an on-site quarry and transported to the dam via a steady procession of dump trucks operating 12 hours a day.
Just by itself, the Sisk Dam safety modification project does not increase the reservoir’s capacity. To accomplish that, the Bureau of Reclamation and San Luis & Delta-Mendota Water Authority are teaming on a second 10-foot dam raise that would create an additional 130,000 acre feet of storage.
Enlarging the reservoir is projected to cost an additional $1 billion. But because the 10-foot storage raise would take place concurrently with the 10-foot seismic raise, work that isn’t scheduled to begin until 2027, the partners have time to assemble a funding plan. The next public negotiations are Aug. 22-23 in Monterey.
“We want to maximize the effort and minimize the expense,” said Henry Garcia, the Bureau of Reclamation’s construction manager.
Little scrutiny, zero opposition
The expansion of San Luis Reservoir is a small part of a larger effort by the state and federal agencies to increase water storage. But unlike virtually every other dam project in California, this one was approved with little public scrutiny and zero opposition from environmentalists — even though the extra 130,000 acre feet of water would come out of the heavily scrutinized San Joaquin-Sacramento River Delta.
Why is that?
As with everything involving water and the environment in California, there are multiple factors at play.
The first of those is overload. Ron Stork, policy director at Friends of the River, rattled off more than a half-dozen dam projects his Sacramento-based environmental group and others are rallying against. They include: Sites Reservoir, a 1.5 million acre-foot offstream storage site planned in Colusa County; the proposed 25-fold expansion of Pacheco Reservoir, just over the hill from San Luis and connected to it via a tunnel that runs through Pacheco Pass; and most urgently of all, the Trump-administration plan to raise Shasta Dam, which would inundate protected salmon habitat on the McCloud River.
With all that going on — in addition to the ongoing battle against the Delta tunnel — environmentalists are compelled to prioritize their efforts. And San Luis, a vital cog in the state’s conveyance system already in operation, ranks at the bottom.
“Those other projects are taking out beautiful portions of God’s green earth where San Luis Reservoir would essentially extend the bathtub ring around an existing 2 million acre-foot reservoir,” Stork said.
“So, yeah, that’s not so good. But if you’re up to your neck in alligators, some alligators are more important than others.”
‘The least worst thing’
Osha Meserve, an environmental lawyer who is among the coalition opposed to the expansion of Pacheco Reservoir by the Santa Clara Valley Water District, which receives drinking water from San Luis Reservoir, called the San Luis dam raise “the least worst thing” among all the storage projects currently planned in California.
“There’s so many destructive water infrastructure projects being proposed right now that I think people are having to prioritize the ones that they believe are the most damaging to the environment and are the worst investments of public funds,” Meserve said.
San Luis Reservoir doesn’t rise to that level, Meserve added, because one can argue the worst environmental damage occurred during its original construction. Also, the federal government is largely footing the bill.
The fact that the 10-foot capacity raise and the 10-foot seismic raise were submitted as individual projects has also added to the general confusion. Despite that, mitigation measures included in the Sisk Dam Raise and Reservoir Expansion Project essentially mirror those submitted for the seismic work. On top of that, the public comment period occurred in August 2020 during the height of the pandemic.
Only four letters not written by government agencies or water districts are included in the final Environmental Impact Report. Three were submitted from local farmers in support of more storage.
“They did it in pieces so you can’t see the entire project, and they did that at a time when public input was spotty,” said Patricia Schifferle, director of the water consulting firm Pacific Advocates. “It was designed to make sure the public doesn’t comment. That was the intentional process.”
Construction on the earth dam that contains the largest offstream reservoir in the United States will continue another seven years, at least. After which it’ll be structurally safer and 6.5% larger.
Federal regulators say Apple violated hazardous waste laws at one of its Silicon Valley facilities, leading to a settlement after inspections revealed lapses in handling and storage practices.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday that the tech giant’s Santa Clara site failed to properly identify, store and label hazardous waste, among other violations of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.
Apple agreed to pay a $261,283 penalty and has since come into compliance, the EPA said.
Inspections were conducted in August 2023 and January 2024 after the agency received a tip from the public.
“Hazardous waste regulations serve as critical safeguards for facility workers, communities, and the environment,” Amy Miller, director of the EPA’s Pacific Southwest Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Division, said in a statement. “EPA’s actions will protect human health and the environment in the community of Santa Clara from the risk of hazardous waste.”
According to the EPA, Apple’s violations included failing to maintain a permit to store hazardous waste for more than 90 days, to control air emissions from a solvent waste tank and to perform daily inspections of waste containers.
The EPA said its inspections were prompted by a “tip and complaint from the public.”
The inspections followed a June 2023 complaint from former Apple employee Ashley Gjøvik, who said she alerted regulators after observing chemical emissions venting into the air from an Apple facility near her Santa Clara home, where she said she had become sick from the fumes.
The case adds to Apple’s history of environmental enforcement in California.
In 2016, the company agreed to pay penalties and increase inspections after state regulators found hazardous waste violations at facilities in Sunnyvale and Cupertino.
Showers could linger in Los Angeles on Tuesday following four straight days of rain — and even more rain is likely on Thursday and Friday.
There’s a 20% to 30% of showers and thunderstorms Tuesday across much of Los Angeles County, the National Weather Service said, although it’s expected to be mostly sunny. The thunderstorms will remain a slight risk because of a cold front that ushered in unstable air Monday.
By Tuesday, the cold front will have moved away from L.A., but the cold core of the low-pressure system will still be around. “This will bring enough instability to the area for a slight chance of thunderstorm development,” the weather service in Oxnard said.
Temperatures have chilled with the latest storm. While the L.A. coast and San Gabriel Valley on Monday reached the mid-60s, due to late arriving rain, most of L.A. County’s coastal areas and valleys “struggled to get out of the 50s,” the weather service said.
Wednesday will bring a reprieve with sunny skies, but another storm is expected to enter Southern California on Thursday and continue through Friday.
Thursday’s storm is expected to drop from 0.25 to 0.75 inches of precipitation. That’s on top of the 0.74 inches of rain that fell on downtown L.A. in the 24-hour period that ended at 9 p.m. Monday. Before that, the weekend storm that began Friday brought 2.68 inches of rain to downtown.
For the 24-hour period ending 9 p.m. Monday, Porter Ranch received 1.61 inches; La Cañada Flintridge, 1.5; Northridge, 1.43; Bel-Air, 1.21; Castaic, 1.15; Van Nuys, 1.12; and Beverly Hills, 1.11.
Warm Springs Camp, in the mountains overlooking the Santa Clarita Valley, recorded an 18-hour rainfall total of 2.5 inches by Monday evening.
The storms, thus far, have caused some mayhem but no severe or life-threatening damage in recently burned areas.
By late Monday night, landslides and flooding were reported on a number of roads. The 5 Freeway near Highway 14, between Sylmar and Santa Clarita, suffered flooding Monday afternoon, as did an offramp on the 91 Freeway at Carmenita Road. The California Highway Patrol said there was flooding at onramps to the 10 Freeway in El Monte and the 605 Freeway on the southern border of Baldwin Park.
Mountain roads were hard hit. One motorist on Angeles Crest Highway, a road that winds through the San Gabriel Mountains, became “stuck in mud, dirt and rock” in a northbound lane, while the southbound lane was completely blocked with multiple landslides, according to reports filed to the National Weather Service. Snowplows couldn’t haul away the debris because it was too heavy.
Near the 101 Freeway in Hidden Hills, a number of vehicles hydroplaned as Round Meadow Road flooded near Mureau Road.
Monday afternoon and evening also brought rockslides or mudsldies to San Francisquito Canyon Road, the mountainous route that connects Santa Clarita to the Antelope Valley; a section of Kanan Dume Road, which leads into the Santa Monica Mountains from Malibu; and on Mulholland Highway south of Calabasas.
Snow levels were at around 7,000 feet on Monday but were expected to drop to 5,000 feet by Tuesday. Officials issued a winter weather advisory for the eastern San Gabriel Mountains and the northern Ventura County mountains that is set to last through Tuesday night. About 2 to 5 inches of snow could fall in the mountains.
“As for the Grapevine area, there is a chance of a dusting of snow Tuesday morning as the snow levels lower,” the weather service said. The Grapevine is a key travel corridor on the 5 Freeway that connects L.A. and Santa Clarita with the Central Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area.
The highest point of the Grapevine section is the Tejon Pass, which peaks in elevation at 4,144 feet above sea level. At that location, “some non-accumulating snow is possible,” the weather service said.
Legoland doesn’t have the same mindshare as a Disney or Universal resort, but Merlin Entertainments, the owner of those theme parks, is hoping to get onto the radar of more theme park enthusiasts with an upcoming $90 million expansion.
The Galacticoaster, scheduled to open in 2026 at both the Legoland Florida and Legoland California resorts, will be an indoor family coaster that’s themed to one of the first Lego space sets from the 1970s, when a 100-piece set was considered expansive.
This will be the first new roller coaster at Carlsbad’s Legoland California in nearly 20 years. In Winter Haven, Fla., it will be Legoland Florida’s first new coaster in 15 years.
Legoland hasn’t offered a lot of details about the coaster just yet. The building that will house it, however, will have the same footprint as 10 basketball courts. The track will be more than 1,500 feet long.
California’s Lego Galaxy expansion will also feature two additional themed rides, food and gift shop offerings, and a “Junior Astronaut Training Zone” for toddlers.
Legoland’s expansion comes as Disney is in the midst of a $60 billion capital investment between now and 2033, which includes a variety of planned updates and changes at its park, updating legacy attractions and unveiling what it called “the largest ever” expansion plans for the Magic Kingdom. The company is also adding seven ships to its cruise line fleet, including the Destiny, which will begin sailing on Nov. 20.
Universal, meanwhile, recently launched Epic Universe, a $6 billion new theme park that spans 110 acres, with hundreds more for expansion. Universal, in August, said revenue at its parks was up 19% thanks to Epic Universe.
A $90 million expansion doesn’t come close to matching those numbers, but Legoland doesn’t have to fight at the same level as those companies. Merlin Entertainment, earlier this year, said annual sales hit a record high last year, with revenues jumping 8% to £2.1 billion (about $2.8 billion) in 2024.
Beyond Legoland, Merlin owns the Madame Tussauds museums and the Orlando Wheel at Icon Park, Central Florida’s tallest ferris wheel.
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