Los Vaqueros Reservoir expansion called future of water storage
Mike Taugher
Contra Costa Times
05/07/2011
The $120 million expansion of one of the East Bay's biggest and newest dams is the latest example of a new generation of state water storage projects that have collectively turned the page on an era of enormous dams built in river canyons.
Near Brentwood last week, bulldozers were scraping the top off the dam at Los Vaqueros, built just 13 years ago, in preparation for raising it 34 feet.
Locally built and environmentally sensitive, the expansion of the Contra Costa Water District's biggest reservoir is a "great example of the innovative thinking that is going on as we evolve into 21st-century water management," said Tim Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies. Fifty years ago, water projects involved building a dam in a river to store lots of water and deliver it wherever it was needed, even if it was far away, Quinn said. But times have changed.
"They moved closer to the ultimate user of the water, and they moved off-stream and underground," Quinn said.
The original Los Vaqueros dam was built to store Delta water drawn during less salty, high-flow periods to use for diluting Delta supplies at saltier times of the year. The expansion will increase the reservoir's capacity by 60 percent to also provide a drought reserve.
The project, financed by the Contra Costa Water District's 550,000 customers, is scheduled to be completed next year.
Though there is ongoing debate over building more major reservoirs in California, the suggestion that water storage has not increased since 1979 when the New Melones reservoir filled, as the California Farm Bureau Federation nearly argued when it endorsed a bond measure last year, is wrong.
The group's president said at the time that $3 billion contained in the bond for new storage projects represented an "overdue" commitment to new dams because "it's been decades since California has made a significant investment in water storage."
By the time the state's last major federal water project was finished on the Stanislaus River in 1979, nearly every Sierra Nevada river had been dammed, making life as we know it in California possible.
Though state and federal investments in storage have ebbed, local and regional water agencies picked up by building Los Vaqueros Reservoir in East Contra Costa County, Diamond Valley Lake reservoir in Southern California and many regional groundwater storage projects in the San Joaquin Valley, some of which Bay Area agencies use to store and trade water.
Collectively, those projects can hold about 4 million acre-feet or more, nearly as much as at Lake Shasta, California's largest reservoir.
"If you look throughout the state, there's all kinds of developments: recycling, conservation, offstream storage," said Jerry Brown, general manager of the Contra Costa Water District.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Los Vaqueros expansion is the nearly complete lack of opposition. Environmental groups often target water development projects, particularly dams.
Though any surface reservoir inundates wildlife habitat, and sometimes archaeological resources, this project's benefits and the commitments by the Contra Costa district to offset damage have all but silenced critics.
"There's a fair amount to like about the project," said David Nesmith, facilitator for the California Environmental Water Caucus, a Delta-centric statewide environmental advocacy group.
Los Vaqueros does not induce growth and is equipped with effective screens that prevent small fish from being killed at its intakes, a problem with larger and older Delta water intakes. The district also has purchased and preserved land to offset the inevitable inundation of wildlife habitat.
"Most environmentalists are not anti-dam," Nesmith said. "We're anti-dumb-dam."
Brown said the Contra Costa Water District is careful to work with others while addressing problems early in the planning, a formula that is not always followed in the contentious arena of California water politics.
"When we design our projects, we try to minimize (environmental) impacts to the extent possible," Brown said. "We try to work with other stakeholders to develop solutions and we don't work behind closed doors so they can't see what we're doing. We try to produce a benefit to the Delta."
