![]() I’m as guilty of this modern river blindness as anyone.īut I wanted to change. But we don’t spend time with them - don’t know where they start or where they go. We see them when we zip by on highways, maybe. I think this notion of being disconnected from the natural world is especially pronounced when it comes to rivers. “Most people are on the world, not in it,” wrote John Muir, the famous naturalist who traveled the Central Valley and the Sierra Nevada and whose journals I would carry with me down the San Joaquin. I had a personal reason for wanting to kayak the river, too. Depending on what happens soon, it could become a river reborn, or a drainage ditch. The advocacy group American Rivers, however, chose the San Joaquin as the “most endangered” river in 2014 because it’s at a turning point. And the Mighty Mississippi is so polluted by farms that it feeds a Connecticut-sized “dead zone” in the Gulf. The Rio Grande, which forms the U.S.-Mexico border, often doesn’t make it to the ocean, either. Earlier this year, the Colorado River flowed to the sea for the first time in decades - and that took an international agreement. Last year, CNN readers voted for me to do a story on the “most endangered” river in the country as part of my Change the List project. Now we’re in the era of dead rivers - a time when they’ve been so dammed, diverted and overused that many of them simply cease to flow. The San Joaquin is a river that would flip my boat, steal my camera, throw me into trees, take my food, tweak my muscles, acquaint me with heat exhaustion, scare the s- out of me, trap me in the mud and leave me hiking for three days across a desert. The quicksand was just one of several semi-apocalyptic challenges I’d face on my trip down the San Joaquin, from its headwaters in the Sierras, near Yosemite, to my hoped-for destination, beneath the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. That’s why I’d started walking in the first place, dragging my boat by a rope. So no one needs to worry about me getting swept away by current today. Now there’s not enough water for a kayak and me. This is what the San Joaquin USED to look like. The San Joaquin, the second-longest river in California, used to support ferry traffic. I looked to the left to see this Frankenriver flowing backward - toward the Sierra Nevada, where I’d started this “Mad Max” journey 12 days before. I was alone on the San Joaquin River in California’s remote Central Valley - the forgotten part of the Golden State, where no one thinks of taking a vacation. “That is the future.As anyone who’s seen “Indiana Jones” or “Princess Bride” can attest, you need a sidekick to get unstuck from quicksand. “When we look to the future, we want to be using the intertie less and less frequently, so that local communities and the groundwater sustainability agencies can capture those flood flows and recharge their groundwater basins,” Nemeth said. Local agencies need to get infrastructure in place that enables them to preserve more of the bounty the next time California gets a wet year, she said. With more water flowing in the Kern River than the area can handle, the situation underscores the region’s unrealized potential for aquifer recharge, Nemeth said. State regulators have declared local groundwater management plans inadequate in six areas of the San Joaquin Valley, including the Kern and Tulare Lake subbasins. In addition to dealing with the snowpack, local water officials have been struggling to develop plans for combating chronic overpumping of groundwater in the San Joaquin Valley, which has left some residents with dry wells and caused the land to sink several feet in portions of the Tulare Lake Basin. But Nemeth said the peak snowmelt for the Kern watershed will play out “within the next week or two.” Snowpack in the southern Sierra stands at more than 400% of average for this time of year, meaning unusually high runoffs could continue for months. The only place left to send the water safely is via the aqueduct to the cities of Southern California, where the Metropolitan Water District will mix it with flows from Northern California, treat it and send it to taps. So this is, in fact, water over and above what can be managed here in Kern County without causing flood damages.” “We’ve offered water to everybody, and we think we’ve done a pretty good job of making sure that all of the recharge ponds are full. All of our irrigation demands are being met,” Mulkay said. Local irrigation districts are already diverting as much water as they can handle to supply crops and fill groundwater recharge facilities. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order this week facilitating the water diversions as part of emergency flood response efforts. The only thing preventing floodwaters from inundating the city of Corcoran is an aging, 14-mile-long wall of dirt. California Fears grow as floodwaters threaten to drown this California city and prison complex ![]()
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