January 21, 2024 - SACRAMENTO— Environmental groups sued the California Department of Water Resources last week for approving the Delta Conveyance Project without considering ecological and wildlife harms. The tunnel project would divert billions of gallons of water from the Sacramento River, dramatically reducing river flow to the environmentally sensitive San Joaquin Delta and harming Delta smelt, Chinook salmon and other imperiled fish.

“The last thing California needs while fighting the climate emergency is a gigantic tunnel wreaking havoc on a sensitive ecosystem and the communities that rely on it,” said John Buse, senior counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Instead of doubling down on this disastrous project, the state needs to take a hard look at groundwater storage, water conservation and other alternatives that don’t leave a trail of environmental destruction.”

The proposed tunnel — 36 feet wide, 45 miles long and 150 feet deep — would reduce freshwater flows to the delta by siphoning water to Southern California for agricultural and urban use. The tunnel will have the capacity to carry about 6,000 cubic feet of water per second, or about a third of the average Sacramento River flow at the point of diversion. Under the state’s own assessment, climate change is expected to profoundly alter snowpack and reduce the freshwater flows available for diversions.

The Center joined more than a dozen other groups in today’s lawsuit, filed in Sacramento Superior Court. The lawsuit says the Department of Water Resources violated the California Environmental Quality Act when it approved the project in December.

“The Department of Water Resources’ environmental impact report is profoundly deficient,” said Robert Wright, an attorney at the Sierra Club. “Perhaps the most astonishing of these deficiencies is the report’s acknowledged omission of the changes to surface water resources that will undoubtedly result from the tunnel project.”

“The department’s environmental report says that increasing flow through the Delta is not consistent with the Delta tunnel project,” said Chris Shutes, executive director of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance. “The report also says restoring the Delta is someone else’s problem. So we are suing the department to stop its tunnel project from destroying one of the world’s greatest estuaries.”

Today’s lawsuit comes days after a court ruled that the state’s efforts to fund the Delta Conveyance Project were unlawful. The Sacramento Superior Court found that the Department of Water Resources lacked the authority to issue $16 billion or more in revenue bonds to finance the project.

The single-tunnel project replaces the twin-tunnel California WaterFix project, which was abandoned in 2019.

The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1.7 million members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.
Source: Center for Biological Diversity