San Diego water deal upheld, Salton Sea fight continues

A state appeals court Wednesday upheld the landmark water transfer between the Imperial Valley and San Diego County but left room for more legal wrangling regarding the Salton Sea.

A three-judge panel of the 3rd District Court of Appeal overturned a 2010 ruling by a Sacramento Superior Court judge that the water sale was improper because the Legislature had essentially signed a blank check to repair damage done to the Salton Sea.

So, the deal itself is now salvaged. But the same panel refused to decide the arguments that redirecting irrigation water to slake the thirst of San Diego decreases the amount of runoff into the sea, causing it to shrink. That, in turn, is imperiling birds and fish and creating toxic dust storms as ground laden with agricultural pesticides is suddenly exposed to the air.

Those arguments, the panel said, should go back to the Sacramento Superior Court, thus preserving the chances that opponents will be able to scuttle the deal between water-rich but cash-poor Imperial Irrigation District and the cash-rich but water-poor San Diego County Water Authority.

“This is obviously good news, and it’s been a long time coming,” said Kevin Kelley, general manager of the Imperial Irrigation District, “but there’s still considerable work to do in turning this agreement into one that is environmentally sustainable for the Salton Sea and economically viable for Imperial Valley agriculture.”

Maureen Stapleton, general manager of the San Diego County Water Authority, noted that in water issues, perseverance is key. “We were confident we would persevere and prevail,” she said.

The deal, the largest transfer of water from farms to cities in the nation, was signed in 2003, after years of pressure on the Imperial Irrigation District by the federal government. The water sales have continued despite the Superior Court ruling that the Legislature lacked authority to make an open-ended agreement to save the sea.

Straddling Imperial and Riverside counties, the Salton Sea is dependent on agricultural runoff for replenishment. As more water is sold to San Diego rather than used to irrigate farms, runoff has decreased and the sea has shrunk.

The appeal court’s 156-page opinion could serve as a treatise on the complexities and feuding that are part of California’s use of the Colorado River. Its opening sentence tells the tale: “For the better part of 100 years, citizens of the American Southwest have been fighting over the right to water from the Colorado River.”

Imperial County enjoys the largest allocation of any agency in the seven states that depend on the Colorado River. Farmers were braving the valley’s boiling summer temperatures a century ago to pull water from the river, long before California coastal cities saw the river as a source of water.

San Diego County, blessed by nature with mild weather and a gorgeous landscape, is virtually devoid of groundwater. For nearly half a century San Diego officials have hunted for a way to get an “independent” supply of water and decrease the county’s dependence on the Los Angeles-based Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

Although the Legislature agreed in 2003 to help the Salton Sea, the state’s financial woes, and a lack of a political constituency for the sea in the power corridors of Sacramento, have largely kept the state from following through on its promise, a point that environmental lawyers are sure to make when the issue returns to the Superior Court.

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-- Tony Perry in San Diego

Photo: A tributary of the New River flows into the Salton Sea. Credit: Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times

Retired federal judge withdraws from Westlands Water District case

Oliver Wanger won't be representing the  Westlands Water District after all, at least not this time.

The recently retired U.S. District Court judge caught a lot of flak last week when word got out that he would defend the powerful irrigation district in a state Superior Court lawsuit filed by environmental groups.

Newspaper editorials and bloggers criticized the move, saying Wanger had tarnished his judicial legacy by agreeing to represent Westlands, a party to numerous big water cases that he had decided in federal court.

In a statement released Tuesday, Wanger's Fresno law firm said the "recent media comment has raised confusion about the cases" he can take on as a private attorney. "The rules do not prevent him from taking cases involving parties who previously appeared before him. No conflict or violation of any rule has occurred."

But to avoid "misperception and diversion of attention from the merits of the case," Wanger and the law firm "have substituted out of the pending state appellate case involving the Westlands Water District. Neither he nor the law firm has provided any legal service whatsoever to the Westlands Water District in the state appellate case or in any other matter, nor is Westlands a client of Mr. Wanger or the firm."

Westlands, which has a tradition of hiring former federal water officials, apparently hasn't crossed Wanger off its list. "His decision not to proceed with this matter is entirely consistent with the meticulous attention he applied to all aspects of the law during his long career in the federal judiciary," Thomas Birmingham, the district's general manager, said in a statement. "We hope to work with him on other issues in the future."

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 --Bettina Boxall

Photo: Oliver W. Wanger. Credit: Gosia Wozniacka / Associated Press

Retired federal judge to represent Westlands Water District

Two months after he retired from the federal bench to return to private practice, Oliver Wanger has agreed to represent an influential irrigation district that frequented his courtroom.

As a U.S. District Court judge in Fresno, Wanger decided most of the last decade's major water cases in California. Many involved Westlands Water District as either a plaintiff or a defendant.

Now Wanger is going to defend Westlands in a recently filed Superior Court lawsuit brought by several environmental groups and a Native American tribe.

“It’s one case only in the state court. It involves matters of law and fact that I, of course, had nothing to do with and no association with” as a federal judge, Wanger said.

The suit contends that under California law, Westlands should have undertaken a state environmental review of its proposed federal water contracts.

Known for its combativeness, the district has over the years hired a number of former U.S. Interior Department officials.

Wanger said Westlands contacted his Fresno law practice about the suit. "The representations that we've been given … are that this case had nothing to do with anything that I worked on.”

“I obviously am bound by the canons of ethics and judicial conduct and will observe those scrupulously,”  added Wanger, who has been a featured speaker at several meetings of water contractors since he left the bench Sept. 30.

Stephan Volker, attorney for the plaintiffs, said his clients “are flattered that Westlands felt it needed to hire a former federal judge to defend against our case. But its strategy will not defeat our lawsuit.”

Generally considered even-handed in his rulings, Wanger caused a stir during his final weeks as a judge  when he attacked the credibility of two federal biologists who had testified before him in a case involving environmental curbs on water deliveries to Westlands and Southern California.

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--Bettina Boxall

Photo: Oliver W. Wanger. Credit: Gosia Wozniacka / Associated Press

Tree rings document ancient Western megadrought

Researchers say they have found new evidence of prolonged drought in parts of the West, suggesting megadroughts are not the rarity Westerners would like them to be.

Analyzing corings taken from ancient living and dead bristlecone pines in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, University of Arizona scientists found signs of extreme drought in the 2nd century that matches or exceeds the better-known droughts of the medieval period.

The composite tree-ring chronology, extending from 268 BC to AD 2009, shows that the longest dry periods in the entire record occurred during the first four centuries AD. The most pronounced drought lasted for about five decades in the second century.

Comparing their findings with two other tree-ring studies, the researchers concluded that the 2nd century drought was regional, extending from southern New Mexico north and west into Idaho.

Paleoclimatologist Connie Woodhouse, a co-author of the study that will be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, said scientists have wondered if the severe Western droughts that occurred between 900 and 1400 were unique.

The new tree ring record indicates they weren't -- and could occur again. “There is no good reason that we shouldn’t expect to have those,” Woodhouse said.

She added that researchers are not sure of the causes of the megadroughts but speculate that above-average temperatures and persistent La Nina ocean conditions may have contributed to them.

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Photo: University of Arizona geoscientist Cody Routson takes a tree ring sample from a bristlecone pine. Credit: Mark Losleben / University of Arizona Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research

Tapping into natural water sources

La Canada-Flintridge is once again is tapping into its natural water resources, thanks to a NASA-funded treatment plant that is cleaning the toxic residue left over from Jet Propulsion Laboratory rocket-building activities in the 1940s and '50s.

Officials from NASA, Pasadena and the Environmental Protection Agency celebrated the opening of the Monk Hill water treatment facility Thursday by toasting each other with local water purified by the new $8.5 million plant.

“It’s important for the local wells, the local aquifer, to be clean and usable,” Assemblyman Anthony Portantino (D-La Canada Flintridge) told the Valley Sun. “It was unfortunate that these wells got contaminated in the first place, but it’s a terrific accomplishment to see a clean-up effort go online.”

NASA agreed to pay for the main treatment plant after studies determined that perchlorates from rocket fuels and volatile organic compounds from industrial solvents, which had been dumped in seepage pits, drains and ditches near the JPL campus, had compromised local groundwater.

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Fracking used more diesel fuel than estimated, lawmakers say

Three U.S. House members investigating the use of toxic substances in the fluids injected into natural gas wells have revised their estimate of the amount of diesel fuel used in the practice, known as hydraulic fracturing or "fracking."

Rep. Henry Waxman of Los Angeles, the ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, joined Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) in sending a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency. The letter said two companies had erroneously reported usage of diesel fuel in fracking fluids, which are injected at high pressure into rock formations — usually shale — to create fissures that allow natural gas to be extracted. 

More than 32 million gallons of diesel were used from 2005 to 2009 by 12 companies employing fracking in states including Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Colorado, Wyoming, North Dakota, West Virginia and Pennsylvania, among others.

Oil service companies such as Halliburton have maintained that fracking does not affect drinking water, despite anecdotal evidence in places such as Wyoming that show methane and other chemicals in residential wells near fracking activities.

The amount of diesel under-reported was about 500,000 gallons, the lawmakers said in their letter to the EPA, which pressed the agency for better oversight and more uniform reporting requirements. 

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Photo: A natural gas well pad near Rifle, Colo., in the Rocky Mountains. Credit: David Zalubowski / Associated Press 

Burning oil from BP spill produced carbon plumes

Chalk up another environmental impact from last summer's Deepwater Horizon oil spill: Nine weeks of burning off oil slicks from the surface of the Gulf of Mexico following the BP spill released an estimated 1 million pounds of soot into the atmosphere, according to a study released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The burns were conducted to reduce the size of the slicks and to minimize the amount of oil reaching the gulf’s coast and wetlands systems. But the study, which was co-written by researchers at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences in Boulder, Colo., found the plumes of smoke from the burns produced an amount of carbon equal to the total black carbon emissions normally released by all ships that travel the Gulf of Mexico during a nine-week period.

Black carbon, whose primary component is often called soot, is among the most light-absorbing particles in the atmosphere. The new study, published online in Geophysical Research Letters, provides some of the most detailed observations made of black carbon sent airborne by burning surface oil.

The study found that the soot plumes reached much higher into the atmosphere than ship emissions normally rise, and that the average size of the soot particles was larger than normally emitted from other sources in the gulf region. Researchers also found that the soot particles were almost all black carbon, unlike forest fires, for example, which produce other particles along with black carbon.

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Photo: A controlled burn on June 19, 2010, attempting to remove oil floating near the leaking BP well in the Gulf of Mexico. Credit: Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times

Interior Department reviewing allegations in delta smelt case

An Interior Department official said Thursday the agency will ask independent experts to review allegations by a federal judge that the testimony of two department scientists was so inconsistent and contradictory it amounted to deliberate deception. 

U.S. District Court Judge Oliver Wanger attacked the credibility of the biologists last month shortly before retiring from the bench. At a hearing on a motion in a court case involving delta smelt protections, Wanger called one of the scientists a "zealot" and accused the agency of engaging in "bad faith."

A transcript of his remarks was widely circulated, providing ammunition for critics of endangered species protections that have cut water exports from the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta. Wanger later said his statements dealt with a limited issue and had been blown out of proportion.

Testifying before a House subcommittee on the Endangered Species Act, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Assistant Director Gary Frazer said the Interior Department disagreed with Wanger's comments and stood behind the work of its scientists.

"We also believe that, when questions arise regarding the integrity of scientific work, it is important to resolve them swiftly, independentlyand decisively," he said, adding that the agency has instructed its  scientific integrity officers "to retain independent experts to evaluate the allegations made by Judge Wanger."

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Photo: A delta smelt. Credit: University of California Davis

Group launches online environmental accident map

The nonprofit environmental monitoring group SkyTruth on Thursday launched a real-time alert system that uses remote sensing and digital mapping to track pollution events in the United States.

The SkyTruth Alerts system shows air and water pollution, toxic spills and other incidents on an interactive map, noting the time of the event and whether toxic materials are involved. Users can track specific geographic areas and receive updates via email or RSS feeds.

The group culls satellite images, aerial photography and reporting data from federal and state emergency response agencies to compile the maps.

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Photo: Fires burn off oil near the crippled BP well site in June 2010. Credit: Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times

 

Increased monitoring finds more water pollution in California

The latest review of water pollution data in California shows substantial jumps in toxic and pesticide contamination, the number of dirty beaches and tainted fish. But federal regulators attribute the rise to improved monitoring and data collection by the state rather than a tide of new pollution.

Under the federal Clean Water Act, states are required to monitor water quality and periodically submit the results to the Environmental Protection Agency. California's 2010 list, which the EPA finalized Tuesday, shows a number of dramatic increases compared with the 2006 list.

--Waters with toxic pollution increased 170%. 

--Locations in which bacteria levels were unsafe for swimmers climbed 90%.

--Waters fouled by trash jumped 76%.

--The number of waterways tainted by pesticides increased 36%.

--The number of waters inhabited by fish unsafe to eat was 24% higher. Mercury contamination was up  the most.

Although many of the more remote streams, rivers and coastline lack monitoring data, EPA Water Division Director Alexis Strauss said “California has done a a superb job" of assembling pollution information. The state used 22,000 data sets to compile the new tally, seven times the number reviewed for the previous listing.

More than 1,000 waterways are deemed "impaired" by pollution of one kind or another. “To me it was fairly shocking,” EPA Regional Administrator Jared Blumenfeld said of the new figures.  "That really does speak to the enormity of the problem in front of us."

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Photo: A man wades between Surfrider Beach and Malibu Lagoon in Malibu. Credit: Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times