Re: Democrat plundered Mono Lake was supposed to have been saved from going dry. Now, the 'white stuff' forces a reckoning

[But Trump!]

In article <t2qcrk$3q6q7$3...@news.freedyn.de>
forging asshole <governo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., misrepresented his wildfire preparedness and even disinvested in prevention.
>

LEE VINING, Mono County — The few who live along the shores of
Mono Lake are accustomed to the peculiarities of this high
desert basin.

Famously strange limestone spires known as tufa towers rise from
the water. The lake contains so much salt that it’s barren of
fish. In the arid sands beyond, sagebrush thrives, and that’s
about it.

But the alkali flats that are emerging from the lake’s surface,
ghost white, aren’t just another nod to the uniqueness of this
ancient place. They’re a sign of trouble. Amid a third year of
drought, the sprawling lake on the remote east side of the
Sierra Nevada is sharply receding, and the small towns and
wildlife so closely tied to the water are feeling the pinch.

Already, parts of the lake popular with kayakers, beachgoers and
tribal members have dried up. Fierce dust storms blow off the
exposed lake bottom and cloud the skies with some of the
nation’s worst air pollution. A land bridge is forming to
islands with tens of thousands of nesting gulls, threatening to
bring coyotes within easy reach of baby birds.

“It affects everybody, that lake — we all live around it,” said
Marianne Denny, a 40-year resident of the basin who says “the
white stuff,” indicative of the lake’s decline, is among the
most she’s ever seen. “Hopefully we’ll live to see more water.”

The drought bearing down on Mono Lake and the rest of California
picks up on a two-decade run of extreme warming and drying. It’s
a product of the changing climate that has begun to profoundly
reshape the landscape of the West and how people live within it.
From less alpine snow and emptying reservoirs to parched forests
and increased wildfire, the change is posing new, and often
difficult, challenges.

At Mono Lake, an emblem of the state’s wild and distinct beauty,
the reckoning has been a long time coming.

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For eight decades, the city of Los Angeles has piped water from
four creeks that feed the lake to its facilities 350 miles to
the south, sometimes diverting almost all of the inflow. It’s a
familiar California tale of old water rights yielding inordinate
benefit.

The concerns at the lake, though, were supposed to have been
resolved. In 1994, after a lengthy environmental campaign that
spurred “Save Mono Lake” bumper stickers on vehicles up and down
California, state water regulators put caps on L.A.’s exports.
Slowly, lake levels rose. But they did not rise as much as they
were supposed to.

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Drought, on top of a climate that’s changed faster than
expected, has slowed progress. On April 1, the typical start of
the lake’s runoff season, the water level measured 6,379.9 feet
above sea level, about 12 feet short of the state target. Before
Los Angeles began drawing water from the creeks here, the lake
was nearly 40 feet higher.

“A lot of Californians who know about Mono Lake think, thank
goodness, we got it on the success list,” said Geoff McQuilkin,
executive director of the nonprofit Mono Lake Committee, which
advocates for the basin. “The thing is we’ve given it 20 years,
now 28 years, and we’re still seeing the problems they thought
would be gone by now.”

McQuilkin and his staff run an information center and bookstore
out of an old dance hall in Lee Vining, the only community on
the lake with a gas station and grocery store. It’s about a five-
hour drive from San Francisco. Tourists on scenic Highway 395
can stop at the center and learn about the area.

If they spend some time, they’ll learn that many residents here
want the state to revisit its recovery plan for the lake — and
force Los Angeles to surrender more water.

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On a recent morning, McQuilkin walked along the quiet north
shore of the 70-square-mile lake.

Above, the Sierra crest loomed, and below stood the wide expanse
of the unveiled lake bottom. It’s colored white from salt that
rises to the surface with groundwater.

Like its sister, the Great Salt Lake in Utah, Mono Lake is
brimming with salt — about 2½ times more so than the ocean —
because it has no outlet for drainage. Thousands of years of
evaporation have concentrated minerals in the lake and the
groundwater beneath it. The lake is believed to be at least
760,000 years old, and maybe a few million, making it one of the
oldest in North America.

“There’s just all these interesting things here,” McQuilkin
said. “Californians do not want to let this go.”

The tufa spires that lift from the shallow water are also a
result of the lake’s unusual water chemistry. They’ve formed
over centuries as carbonates in the lake mix with calcium from
underwater springs and coalesce as mineral deposits that look
like giant slabs of coral reef.

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Because of the unique environment, the lake’s inhabitants are
limited: mainly brine shrimp and hovering alkali flies. These
critters, though, provide food for as many as a million
migratory birds annually, including eared grebes and Wilson’s
and red-necked phalaropes.

McQuilkin is watching, in particular, the California gulls. He
wants to make sure they’re safe. In the summer, about a quarter
of this gull’s total population nests on the lake’s Negit
Islets, which are at risk of being invaded by predators because
of a land bridge emerging in the increasingly shallow water. The
birds already abandoned one of the main islands, Negit Island,
decades ago because it became connected to the mainland with
lower lake levels.

“There’s no question that coyotes can swim across that,”
McQuilkin said, looking at the channel between the current
islands and the north shore. “We’re just hoping they don’t.”

Five cameras that McQuilkin and his colleagues have set up
monitor for coyotes. The Mono Lake Committee keeps more than a
mile of electric fence on hand that employees plan to string out
if the wild canines begin to amass. So far, the cameras have
picked up just two passers-by.

The group debuted the temporary barrier during last decade’s
drought, when coyotes started making their way to the islands
and scouting for eggs and young birds.

This year, the group hopes the lake bottom will remain partially
submerged at least until next month, when most of the newborn
gulls will have hatched and be ready to fly off to places like
San Francisco Bay.

Next year is a different story. Even if the Sierra gets a lot of
snow come winter, melt-off into the lake won’t arrive until late
spring and summer, so lake levels will likely be even lower when
the gulls return. McQuilkin said the fence will almost certainly
go up then.

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At the home of Priscilla and Cole Hawkins, the exposed lake bed
on the north shore means dust, and sometimes lots of it.

Strong desert winds can pick up the mineral-laden soil and carry
it for miles.

“We call them dust devils,” said Priscilla, whose off-the-grid
property backs up to the lake and offers big vistas of the tall
peaks in Yosemite National Park, at least when the air is clear.

Cole bought the house with his wife two decades ago, moving in
full time a few years back. The dust is not a problem that
often, he said, but when it is, it can be severe, limiting
visibility to less than a quarter-mile. He compares the dust
storms to fog banks with debris.

“When it gets really bad, we go inside or head for the hills,”
he said, looking out at a blue sky on this particular afternoon.
“We’ve come back to the house and it’s almost like sand on the
curtains.”

The dust, which is tracked by the local air district under the
label PM10, or particulate matter that is 10 microns in diameter
or less, is a health issue, district officials say. The
particles can lodge deep in the lungs and cause tissue damage
and lung inflammation.

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In nine of the past 10 years, the Mono Lake area has had the
distinction of racking up more federal air quality violations
for PM10 than any other place in the nation, according to the
district. In 2016, during last decade’s drought, federal air
standards were breached on 33 days.

The past few years haven’t seen as many violations, according to
data from the Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control
District. However, Phill Kiddoo, air pollution control officer
for the agency, says the trend line remains bad.

“Mono Lake probably has some of the best air quality in the
nation 90% of the days of the year, but on windy days, we have
some of the worst,” he said.

With less snow and less runoff in the Sierra to fill the lake in
recent years, Kiddoo, whose job it is to try to keep the skies
clean, believes it’s time for Los Angeles to further reduce its
draws from the basin.

“Every inch of lake-level rise that we can get protects air
quality,” he said.

The State Water Resources Control Board, which regulates water
draws, told The Chronicle that it is paying attention to the
lake, the basin and to the thirst that’s compromised them.

While acknowledging that the lake’s rise has stalled — lake
levels have generally hovered a little more than 10 feet below
the target for a decade — state officials credit water
restrictions for at least stabilizing things.

Owens Lake, about 150 miles to the south, was not so fortunate.
The lake was sucked dry by Southern California water diversions
almost a century ago and is nothing but salt flats today.

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The 1994 regulation at Mono Lake established caps on how much
Los Angeles can draw from the feeder creeks based on how high
the lake is. This year, the city’s diversions were limited to
4,500 acre-feet of water, about enough to supply 60,000
residents, according to the city. If the lake had been 3 feet
lower, no water could have been drawn.

Erik Ekdahl, a deputy director at the State Water Board, said
the changing climate, notably the “aridification” of the West,
has constrained lake levels more than regulators anticipated and
the agency will likely have to re-evaluate its regulation.

“We are at the point where we do want to start asking, ‘What are
the next steps?’ and ‘What’s the timeline for having a more
thorough discussion?’” he said.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power insists that
whatever comes of future deliberations, more water restrictions
are not the answer.

In an email to The Chronicle, the department’s managing water
utility engineer, Paul Liu, said the city’s draws had a
negligible impact on the lake’s decline, compared to drought and
other climate factors.

The city, in recent years, has reduced diversions to about 12%
of the water in the creeks flowing to Mono Lake where it has
water rights, he said. Meanwhile, the city has spent tens of
millions of dollars to help restore the creeks and promote
healthy runoff. About 3% of the city’s total water comes from
these creeks, Liu said, a supply that is small but considered
vital.

“In a scenario where Mono basin exports to Los Angeles are
reduced or cut off completely, that shortfall will have to be
made up by increasing exports from the State Water Project or
the Colorado River, which are both extremely strained and
limited as well,” wrote Liu.

But Christine Garrison, like many who live in the area, says
something has to be done, and sooner rather than later.

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On a recent morning, the Mono County native pulled into the Old
Marina near Lee Vining, a spontaneous stop at the lake that took
her back to her youth. A descendant of the Mono Lake Paiute,
Garrison used to watch her grandmother walk the lakeshore and
collect the pupae of the alkali fly, a traditional protein-rich
delicacy called kutsavi.

Garrison put on her “irrigation boots” with the intention of
scooping up pupae, but then stopped. The waterline was too low
to proceed.

“I had to go so far out that I was afraid I’d get stuck in the
mud,” she said. “I could still smell (the kutsavi), though.”

She added: “When there’s no water in the lake, everything goes.”

Kurtis Alexander is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.
Email: kalex...@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kurtisalexander

https://www.sfchronicle.com/climate/article/mono-lake-drought-
17318513.php