Craig Miller

The Sacramento River is a lifeline for California.

By the end of the summer, you may be able to float down the Sacramento River from your computer, thanks to the Riverview Project. It’s an initiative to document and map rivers, using similar tools to the ones Google used to create Street View, and with similar results: the ability to drop into a place on a map, click to move down the street (or float down the river), and take a look around.

“There’s reams of data (about rivers),” Jared Criscuolo, one of the founders of the Riverview Project told me. “But the thing we’ve noticed we’re missing is a visual piece.”

He aims to change that by documenting 27 American rivers from headwaters to mouth, over the next five or six years. First on the bucket list is the Sacramento, where Criscuolo plans to start shooting this summer. The website will begin growing after that and include a crowd-sourcing element: a companion project called Streamview, also launching this summer, will offer a smartphone app you can use to upload images of any river or stream.

Criscuolo is collaborating with the U.S. Geological Survey on the project. Beyond being a good workplace distraction for those who’d rather be fishing or paddling, he says it has the potential to aid our understanding of changing river ecosystems.

The Riverview Project

When it's up and running, The Riverview Project will shows maps and images of rivers, like this sample from the Susitna River in Alaska.

“Things are changing,” he says. “Humans have an impact. We can show land eroding. Over time, we can see how vegetation changes.”

Criscuolo says he wants to create a visual record of how rivers look and are used now. And if he can get the funding, he’ll go back and do it again, to keep up with how they change.

The New York Times‘ Green blog also profiled the project this week.

This week officials made the uncomfortable decision to place thousands of homes and businesses in harm’s way, in order to avoid an even bigger catastrophe on the lower Mississippi River.

But as the opening of the Morganza Spillway was the subject of national media attention, California’s version had already been deployed a month earlier — and hardly anyone noticed.

The Yolo Bypass may be California’s most ingenious contrivance for flood protection and yet, many people drive over it every day without knowing its purpose.

The Yolo Bypass on March 1 of this year. The Sacramento skyline rises in the distance. (Photo: Craig Miller)

The bypass is a 59,000-acre funnel designed to catch the overflow of the Sacramento River and divert it harmlessly downstream, dumping it back into the main channel near Rio Vista. Generally speaking, it works like a charm. And it does so without fanfare because there are nobody lives there. That’s the idea.

Yolo Bypass on March 24, full of overflow from the Sacramento River. (Photo: Craig Miller)

“It is genius,” says Jeff Mount, who heads the Center for Watershed Science at UC Davis. “People come from all over the world to look at it because it the classic example of providing multiple benefits while managing floods.”

Upstream from Sacramento, the 31-mile Sutter Bypass serves a similar purpose. (Photo: Craig Miller)

Part of a system of weirs and bypasses that starts farther up the Sacramento Valley, the Yolo Bypass doubles as a wildlife refuge, providing wetlands habitat, and when it’s not flooded — which is most of the time — farmers grow rice there. Mount says the huge volumes of water creeping through the bypass also help recharge groundwater stores beneath the surface.

Part of the system is self-regulating. When the Sacramento River tops 33 feet at a point north of Davis, it flows over a fixed barrier known as the Fremont Weir, and into the bypass (captured in this video, posted in 2010). In more extreme situations, state water officials can open the Sacramento Weir, a series of manual gates that provides additional relief.

“It really is extraordinary,” Mount told me. “Sacramento would be wiped off the map by a vanilla (i.e. modest) flood, if it weren’t for the Yolo Bypass.” Mount has been a vocal critic of what he calls “serial engineering,” ongoing efforts to contain rivers to accommodate urban development. But setting aside buffers of land where rivers can flood naturally requires putting large swaths of valuable real estate off limits to development.

The idea is anything but new, first proposed by a 19th-century newspaper editor in the Sacramento Valley. But the idea took about 50 years to become reality. The Sacramento Weir was completed in 1916. To this day, when conditions warrant, crews from the state Department of Water Resources have to manually lift the cantankerous “timber-and-needle”gates, one at a time.

But the whole notion of the bypass has stood the test of time. “It is a miracle,” says Mount. “It’s the most happy accident you can come up with in this whole system (in which) somebody chose a dumb place to build the capital, at the confluence of these two rivers that get up and roar.”

But given the seemingly irresistible tendency to develop riverfront property, it’s a happy accident that’s not likely to be repeated.

Photo: U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

Policy makers have assembled “blue ribbon” panels to study the options and make recommendations. Volumes of studies and proposals line the shelves in Sacramento and elsewhere.

Last week a new idea surfaced for moving water through the Delta: Instead of channeling around it, tunnel under it.

This week the non-partisan Public Policy Institute of California released its recommendations for a mechanism to fund the enormous fixes that will be required: Those who benefit pay (ecologists use the term “ecosystem services” for all those bennies we get from natural resources and tend to take for granted).

Whatever the outcome, one thing seems inevitable, with or without human intervention. Driven by warming ocean temperatures, rising sea levels will continue to push saltwater farther upstream, changing the Delta’s character and the “services” it provides.

Recently a team of students at U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism produced a Flash presentation on some of the issues raised by advancing salt in the Delta. The multimedia report: Delicate Balance was produced for Climate Watch by Amanda Dyer, Martin Ricard and Jeremy Whitaker. We’re grateful to them for their time and creativity.

Australia's Simpson Desert. Photo: Mike Gillam

Referring to Australia’s seven-year drought, that’s how the state’s top water manager describes the new paradigm for water planning at the Dept. of Water Resources.

Speaking to a packed house at the annual forum of the Sacramento River Watershed Program yesterday, DWR Director Lester Snow said his staff is assuming that 2010 will be another dry year. Snow warned about “loss of resilience” in the state’s water system, calling it “completely unsustainable” in it’s present form, given predictions for population growth, coupled with anticipated effects of climate change.

All speakers at the forum seemed to agree that a paradigm shift is in order. Thomas Philps, a strategist at SoCal’s Metropolitan Water District, pointed out that in Victoria’s capital city of Melbourne (Australia), per capita water consumption runs about 40 gallons per day, while in California’s capital, it’s 280 gallons. As Sasha Khoka will report Monday morning on The California Report, Sacramento is just one of several cities in the Central Valley that still doesn’t meter its water use. Philps added that the Sacramento region is “on a trajectory” to use the same volume of water as Los Angeles, though he did not say by when.

UC Davis geologist Jeff Mount cautioned against relying on additional surface storage to secure California’s water future. Not only does storing water become “very expensive” year over year, but dams and reservoirs “don’t create any new water,” he said. (If some think Mount is taking a “jaundiced view” of the situation, it might be because he braved a bout of hepatitis to deliver his morning talk)

In a panel discussion on resource planning, moderator Greg Zlotnick of the Santa Clara Valley Water District asked panelists to respond with “true” or “false” to a quote from the Pacific Institute’s Peter Gleick in a story aired on NPR last week. The quote, as given by Zlotnick, was: “Government has built infrastructure and made promises that can’t be kept.” Here are the panelists’ responses:

Tina Swanson, The Bay Institute: “True.”

Philps: “True, but…” (Generally true but MWD doesn’t really expect to get its full contractual allocation of water anymore, anyway)

Don Glaser, US Bureau of Reclamation: “False, but…” (Water allotments from his agency’s Central Valley Project are intended to be “supplemental contracts,” to augment use of groundwater and other sources, but Glaser sees the statement becoming “more and more true in the future.”)

Snow: “Hell, no.”