Aaron Crowe

Climate change is affecting everything around us. How utilities deal with it as far as planning for flood and drought is the main focus of this story I did for Brown and Caldwell, an engineering firm in Walnut Creek, CA.

Brown and Caldwell’s special edition of Water News, an e-mail newsletter it sends to clients, focuses on climate change. The Web site also has links to other climate change stories, along with videos.

Instead of putting the entire story on my Web site, follow the link to the main story. The sidebar about California’s unique problems relating to climate change is below and also linked.

By Aaron Crowe

California has the worst of both worlds of climate change problems – flooding and drought.

From 1,100 miles of new sea walls and other flood protections that are needed at an initial cost of $14 billion, to possibly more desalination plants to combat less rain and droughts, the state is in for a full dose of the effects of climate change.

Rising seas caused by a warming climate could cost California an estimated $100 billion in property loss by the end of the century, according to a state study, as reported by the Associated Press.

The study by the Pacific Institute is one of 40 reports to be presented to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on the financial and environmental impacts of global warming. The report estimates that 3,500 miles of roads, 30 power plants, 29 wastewater treatment plants and San Francisco and Oakland international airports are at risk of being under water. The state will lose 41 square miles of coastline by 2100.

Someday a seawall will have to be built near the East Bay Municipal District’s wastewater treatment plant in Oakland, said Doug Wallace, environmental affairs officer for EBMUD.

And then there’s the drought.

EBMUD is in the third year of a drought and was criticized last year for being one of the first water agencies in California to declare a drought so early – May 13 – and institute mandatory rationing.

Since 2008 EBMUD has incorporated climate change into its strategic plan to deal with its effects on water resources. According to its Web site, the agency’s response to climate change includes focusing on assessing potential effects on its watersheds, reducing the district’s greenhouse gas emissions, and integrating climate change in its budgeting decisions.

“We like to think that we are doing as much or more as any other water agency,” Wallace said.

Half of EBMUD’s water comes from snowpack. More storage is needed in February when its storage reservoirs are already full because the snow is melting earlier, said Katy Foulkes, an EBMUD board member for 14 years.

“The worst part of climate change for anybody who has a water reservoir, is we count on snowpack to be our second reservoir,” Foulkes said.

The California Department of Water Resources estimates that a 5 degree rise in temperature could reduce EBMUD’s watershed snow pack in the Sierra Nevada by up to 60 percent.

But even the state’s executive manager for climate change, John Andrew, says that while water problems are becoming worse for water managers, change has been a problem they’ve had to deal with for a long time.

“It’s definitely something that’s becoming mainstream in our business,” Andrew said of climate change talk, but as with many outlooks on the future, it’s difficult to get firm assessments of the future of climate change.

With less snowpack and more rain, it’s more a matter of when the water shows up than that it won’t, he said.

“Overall we’re uncertain if we’re going to see less water,” he said.

In the 1960s the idea of towing glaciers to California was looked at and found to be too expensive. Now, EBMUD has joined other Northern California water agencies in looking into desalination again. EBMUD studied desalination in the early 1990s but the high cost and environmental impacts of disposing of brine, the waste product of desalination, didn’t make it feasible. New technology now makes it worthy of looking into.

The agencies are exploring the development of desalination facilities that would serve more than 5.4 million San Francisco Bay Area residents and businesses and would have an ultimate total capacity of 71 million gallons per day. The water would be used during emergencies, as a supplemental source during extended droughts, allow major facilities to shut down for repairs, and increase reliability.

EBMUD is also working to lessen its carbon footprint, most of which comes from transportation fuels and electricity for pumping water, Wallace said. The idea is that if the water district does its part by cleaning up its act, then rate increases can be justified more easily, he said. While the district hasn’t had big rate increases yet related to climate change, it eventually will, Wallace said.

“The much better bet is to start planning for emergency” instead of waiting for climate change to force it upon agencies, he said. Water agencies are very capital heavy and work can take decades to plan.

With climate change affecting floods and drought, water agencies may not have decades to plan.