on the cover / By Heidi Walters

Cup Runneth Over

Humboldt County’s unique problem: way more water than we know what to do with

(Oct. 22, 2009)  The blue heron, legs spraddled for balance, tipped its long body forward into a horizontal crouch and stretched its neck and head out. Statue-still as the Mad River twirled past. The water moved gently, at autumn speed, and pooled in an eddied quiet around the twig-addled nub of rock where the heron waited. The pool erupted in tiny fountains, plip plip plip plip plip; the fish jumped all about, but the heron didn’t twitch.

“The ultimate fisherman,” said Barry Van Sickle, superintendent of the Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District, watching the heron from the deck of the district’s industrial water diversion works on the opposite bank. He waited, expecting the heron to suddenly strike, swift and efficient. But it didn’t. “Although, he’s studying it pretty hard,” Van Sickle finally said. “He’s not doing much today.”

Barry Van Sickle, superintendent of the Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District, and his crew in May turned off pumps, at Pumping Station No. 6, at Essex that had drawn water from the Mad River to deliver to the pulp mill. Photo by Heidi Walters

GALLERY >

Studying and studying. Watching and waiting. And the heron’s not the only one pondering the waters of the Mad, and the opportunities and challenges within, so intently these days.

A couple of weeks ago, Carol Rische, general manager of the Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District, got a call from Terry Spragg. He was wondering, said Rische in a recent interview, whether the district would be interested in letting him do a waterbag demonstration. He’d fill up his innovative Spragg Bags with Mad River water and float them in the ocean to San Francisco. And if it impressed the district and some other municipality — say, Marin County, or Monterey — maybe the municipalities would enter into a water transfer agreement with each other, and he, Spragg, could be the transporter. He’d already contacted Marin and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, and even had a chat with some local folks about using their dock on the Samoa Peninsula.

The time was ripe: California’s water crisis was deepening. Coastal towns were talking about building expensive desalination plants, and one was already in the works in San Diego County. The state, meanwhile, needed to shore up or rejigger the 50-year-old water works that delivers the majority of the state’s precipitation, in the north, from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta at San Francisco Bay to Central Valley farmers and 22 million customers farther south. And the Bay-Delta ecosystem was collapsing, hurting protected fish like the Delta smelt and salmon; the Sacramento’s salmon fishery, for that matter, was kaput. A third year of drought plus environmental concerns had led to water curtailments to farmers and declarations of drought emergencies in 50 of the state’s 58 counties — including Humboldt, whose town of Redway relies on the shrinking South Fork Eel River.

Meanwhile, other major water supplies — from the Colorado River, from the Owens Valley — had diminished, the state’s population continued to grow, global warming promised more drought and floods, and a levee-busting earthquake could happen at any moment.

Legislative leaders and Governor Schwarzenegger bickered behind closed doors over everything from stiffer water conservation rules, to building two new dams and a peripheral canal to carry more water around the Delta, to seeking over $9 billion in bonds for the fixes — something the state treasurer warned might not fly with debt-shy voters. At one point, two weeks ago, the Governor even held hostage the 704 other bills that the Legislature had labored over, saying he’d veto them all if they couldn’t agree, pronto, on a water plan.

Spragg, however, had read a newspaper account of HBMWD’s latest troubles of quite the opposite nature. Its last industrial customer, the pulp mill, had closed and the pumps that had diverted Mad River water to the mill were now completely turned off. That left the district with millions of gallons of unused water capacity. Also, the mill had paid 45 percent of the district’s costs; now the district’s seven municipalities — serving 80,000 customers — had to shoulder the burden. And their costs had already tripled since 1999, after another mill shut down and the remaining mill reduced its water usage.

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