never see . I know the difficulty Kaiser had closing the last two sluiceway gates on the Guri Dam in Venezuela . I keep watch on evaporation behind the Aswan in Egypt . I can put myself to sleep imagining the water dropping a thousand feet into the turbines at Churchill Falls in Labrador . If the Churchill Falls Project fails to materialize, I fall back on waterworks closer at hand—the tailrace at Hoover on the Colorado, the surge tank in the Tehachapi Mountains that receives California Aqueduct water pumped higher than water has ever been pumped before—and finally I replay a morning when I was seventeen years old and caught, in a military-surplus life raft, in the construction of the Nimbus Afterbay Dam on the American River near Sacramento . I remember that at the moment it happened I was trying to open a tin of anchovies with capers . I recall the raft spinning into the narrow chute through which the river had been temporarily diverted . I recall being deliriously happy .
I suppose it was partly the memory of that delirium that led me to visit, one summer mornin g in Sacramento, the Operations Control Center for the California State Water Project . Actually so much water is moved around California by so many different agencies that maybe only the movers themselves know on any given day whose water is where, but to get a general picture it is necessary only to remember that Los Angeles moves some of it, San Francisco moves some of it, the Bureau of Reclamation’s Central Valley Project moves some of it and the California State Water Project moves most of the rest of it, moves a vast amount of it, moves more water farther than has ever been moved anywhere . They collect this water up in the granite keeps of the Sierra Nevada and they store roughly a trillion gallons of it behind the Oroville Dam and every morning, down at the Project’s headquarters in Sacramento, they decide how much of their water they want to move the next day . They make this morning decision according to supply and demand, which is simple in theory but rather more complicated in practice . In theory each of the Project’s five field divisions—the Oroville, the Delta, the San Luis, the San Joaquin and the Southern divisions—places a call to headquarters before nine a . m . and tells the dispatchers how much water is needed by its local water contractors, who have in turn based their morning estimates on orders from growers and other big users . A schedule is made . The gates open and close according to schedule . The water flows south and the deliveries are made .
In practice this requires prodigious coordination, precision, and the best efforts of several human minds and that of a Univac 418 . In practice it might be necessary to hold large flows of water for power production, or to flush out encroaching salinity in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the most ecologically sensitive point on the system . In practice a sudden rain might obviate the need for a delivery when that delivery is already on its way . In practice what is being delivered here is an enormous volume of water, not quarts of milk or spools of thread, and it takes two days to move such a delivery down through Oroville into the Delta, which is the great pooling place for California water and has been for some years alive with electronic sensors and telemetering equipment and men blocking channels and diverting flows and shoveling fish away from the pumps . It takes perhaps another six days to move this same water down the California Aqueduct from the Delta to the Tehachapi and put it over the hill to Southern California . “Putting s ome over the hill” is what they say around the Project Operations Control Center when they want to indicate that they are pumping Aqueduct water from the floor of the San Joaquin Valley up and over the Tehachapi Mountains . “Pulling it down” is what they say when they want to indicate that they are lowering a water level somewhere in the
I suppose it was partly the memory of that delirium that led me to visit, one summer mornin g in Sacramento, the Operations Control Center for the California State Water Project . Actually so much water is moved around California by so many different agencies that maybe only the movers themselves know on any given day whose water is where, but to get a general picture it is necessary only to remember that Los Angeles moves some of it, San Francisco moves some of it, the Bureau of Reclamation’s Central Valley Project moves some of it and the California State Water Project moves most of the rest of it, moves a vast amount of it, moves more water farther than has ever been moved anywhere . They collect this water up in the granite keeps of the Sierra Nevada and they store roughly a trillion gallons of it behind the Oroville Dam and every morning, down at the Project’s headquarters in Sacramento, they decide how much of their water they want to move the next day . They make this morning decision according to supply and demand, which is simple in theory but rather more complicated in practice . In theory each of the Project’s five field divisions—the Oroville, the Delta, the San Luis, the San Joaquin and the Southern divisions—places a call to headquarters before nine a . m . and tells the dispatchers how much water is needed by its local water contractors, who have in turn based their morning estimates on orders from growers and other big users . A schedule is made . The gates open and close according to schedule . The water flows south and the deliveries are made .
In practice this requires prodigious coordination, precision, and the best efforts of several human minds and that of a Univac 418 . In practice it might be necessary to hold large flows of water for power production, or to flush out encroaching salinity in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the most ecologically sensitive point on the system . In practice a sudden rain might obviate the need for a delivery when that delivery is already on its way . In practice what is being delivered here is an enormous volume of water, not quarts of milk or spools of thread, and it takes two days to move such a delivery down through Oroville into the Delta, which is the great pooling place for California water and has been for some years alive with electronic sensors and telemetering equipment and men blocking channels and diverting flows and shoveling fish away from the pumps . It takes perhaps another six days to move this same water down the California Aqueduct from the Delta to the Tehachapi and put it over the hill to Southern California . “Putting s ome over the hill” is what they say around the Project Operations Control Center when they want to indicate that they are pumping Aqueduct water from the floor of the San Joaquin Valley up and over the Tehachapi Mountains . “Pulling it down” is what they say when they want to indicate that they are lowering a water level somewhere in the
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