The Biggest Potential Water Disaster in the United States | The New Yorker

Source: The Biggest Potential Water Disaster in the United States | The New Yorker

Illustration by Alëna Skarina

The Sacramento is California’s largest river. It arises near the lower slopes of Mt. Shasta, in the northernmost part of the state, and runs some four hundred miles south, draining the upper corridor of the Central Valley, bending through downtown Sacramento, and, eventually, reaching the Pacific Ocean, by way of the San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. Erik Vink, the executive director of the Delta Protection Commission, a state conservation agency, described the Sacramento to me as “California’s first superhighway.” By the eighteen-fifties, daily steamboats ferried passengers between San Francisco and Sacramento in as little as six hours. Travellers now mostly use I-80 to cover the same ninety miles, and oceangoing ships bound for the Port of West Sacramento finish their trip in a deepwater canal built sixty years ago by the Army Corps of Engineers. But the Sacramento is still important: it and its tributaries make up the state’s single largest source of fresh surface water. Most precipitation in California falls in the north, while the biggest users, including all the major metropolitan areas and the immense farms of the San Joaquin Valley, are farther south. Devising ways to move water from wet places to dry places has been the labor of generations. During the past century and a half, miners, farmers, politicians, engineers, conservationists, and schemers of all kinds have worked—together and against one another—to create one of the most complex water-shifting systems in the world.