Wednesday February 5, 2025
The Seattle Times —
Days after President Trump startled some of his most ardent supporters in California’s San Joaquin Valley by having the Army Corps of Engineers suddenly release water from two dams, many in the region and beyond were still perplexed.
Acting on an order from Washington, the corps allowed irrigation water to flow down river channels for three days, into the network of engineered waterways that fan out among farm fields in the San Joaquin Valley. Coursing from rivers to canals to irrigation ditches, much of the water eventually made its way to retention basins, where it soaked into the ground, replenishing groundwater.
“It’s been recharged to the ground,” said Tom Barcellos, president of the Lower Tule River Irrigation District and a dairyman and farmer. That sounds good, except farmers in parts of the San Joaquin Valley typically depend on water from the two dams to irrigate crops in the summer. In other words, the release of water this time of year, when agriculture usually doesn’t require it, means that growers are likely to have less water stored in the reservoirs this summer, during a year that so far is among the area’s driest on record.
“It would have been better utilized if we could keep it there and use it this summer for irrigation,” Barcellos said. The loss of that water — equivalent to about two days of maximum water use during the summer irrigation season — amounted to “not a lot of harm, not a big foul,” he said.