July 29, 2022 By Kathleen Ronayne 2 Comments

A new plan to reroute how water moves from wetter Northern California to drier Southern California would ferry some of it through a single, 45-mile (72-kilometer) underground tunnel, wrapping around the state’s existing water delivery system and dumping it into the main aqueduct that flows south to vast swaths of farmland and millions of people.

The proposal released Wednesday would build one tunnel to take water from the Sacramento River, the state’s largest, to the California Aqueduct for delivery further south. It’s scaled back from the two-tunnel plan championed by former Gov. Jerry Brown and the latest iteration of a project that has been talked about and planned in some form, but never constructed, for about half a century.

The Department of Water Resources plan analyzes the effects of the project on the environment, residents, fish and farmland. Critics say it will harm communities in the fragile Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, which rely on water that could instead be diverted to the tunnel.

Officials did not release a price tag. A prior estimate for a different single-tunnel route put it at about $16 billion. It would be paid for by water agencies that contract with the state to use it.

Still, even if the political support to build it is there, construction likely wouldn’t break ground until at least 2028 and would take more than a decade, said Carrie Buckman, environmental program manager for the project.

The preferred route would build two stations to pull water from the Sacramento River just south of the capital city, then carry that water south alongside Interstate 5 before breaking off toward Bethany Reservoir at the top of the California Aqueduct, the state’s main channel for moving water south, built in the 1960s.

Two in three Californians, or about 27 million people, rely on water that comes from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, a vital estuary where the two rivers mingle with tidal flows from the Pacific Ocean before it is conveyed south through the State Water Project.