PART 1: TAKING ON WATER

Who are the players and what’s at stake?

Everardo Villanueva, a skilled equipment operator, back flushes the filter on the drip irrigation that comes directly from the Sacramento River at a Delta farm on June 8, 2024. (Ruth Dusseault/Bay City News)

By Ruth Dusseault • Bay City News

October 22, 2024

BARRELING DOWNHILL, FRESH snowmelt flows from the Sierra Nevada into the Sacramento River. In the wet season, high water pulses through the river into the Delta, a hidden estuary east of San Francisco, and pools before escaping to the sea through the narrow Carquinez Strait.

That tension, that outflow, must be constantly sustained in order to keep salt water out of the estuary. The Delta is the exchange point for half of California’s water supply. In the middle of the Delta are the intake pumps for the State Water Project, a 700-mile system of canals and aqueducts that carries Delta water to farms and cities in Central and Southern California. The pumps sometimes draw fish astray on their way to the sea.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.