Uncle Sam helped harpoon to near-death the Bay-Delta Conservation Plan, says Bill Jennings of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance
As I blogged yesterday (see item, below), public comment rained heavy blows on the destructive plan to two 35-mile long tunnels under the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to divert Sacramento River water to desert farms down south.
But the water grab “was placed on life support following the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) scathing 43-page comment letter on the BDCP’s draft Environmental Impact Report/Environmental Impact Statement (EIR/EIS).”
Want to relish the EPA’s dismantling of the tunnels plan? Here you go.
“The EPA comments coming on top of some 4,500 pages of searing reviews by municipalities, counties and water agencies that would be adversely impacted by the project, almost 2,000 pages of highly critical comments by environmental and fishing organizations, hundreds of pages of harsh analyses by government agencies and stinging comments from many thousands of California citizens reveal that BDCP is suffering from a congenital terminal illness,” Jennings said.
State officials have delayed the plan until next year. But, “Additional delay is unlikely to improve BDCP’s prospects for survival,” Jennings said.
I’ll give him the last word: “BDCP was doomed from the beginning because it was conceived on the fatal premise that you can restore an estuary hemorrhaging from a lack of flow by depriving it of another 2.5 million acre-feet of flow. Its two goals are fundamentally inconsistent …”
