Ripping a page out of the playbook the Los Angeles Water & Power Department used to desecrate the Owens Valley to try and quench its insatiable thirst for water, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is buying up land in San Joaquin County.
The deal for five Delta islands — Webb Tract, Bacon Island, Bouldin, part of Chipps Island and most of Holland Tract — could line the pockets of Swiss mega-corporation Zurich Insurance Group with as much as $240 million.
What, you might ask, would the almighty MWD want with 20,000 acres located mostly in San Joaquin County and partially in Contra Costa County. The short answer, water. The long answer, our water.
The islands happen to be in the path of Jerry Brown’s proposal to sacrifice the Delta to assure uninterrupted and  clean water deliveries to  MWD’s 19 million customers come hell or high water, drought, rising sea levels, or a 14.0 earthquake.
The Twin Tunnels or Version 2.0 of Brown’s wildly unpopular Peripheral Canal he tried foisting on Californians as his legacy in 1982 during his first go around as governor from 1975 to 1983, is supposed to simply ferry water already committed to MWD and the mega corporate farms in the southwest portion of the San Joaquin Valley.
The argument is spending $22 billion or so to bore twin tunnels beneath the Delta is simply a way to make sure the south state’s water supply is kept intact in the event of a major quake. Besides the fact there are no known active faults that pose a threat to Delta levees and that quakes from the 1906 San Francisco catastrophe to the 1989 Loma Prieta shaker only shook the levees as if they were Jell-O, what is the big threat to south state water? Actually, the correct question is what is the small threat to the south state water? Try the Delta smelt as well as drought.
Right now water flowing from the Sacramento River watershed that snakes its way through the Delta to the pumps near Tracy and into the California Aqueduct is part of the fresh water flows that have helped sustain Delta ecological systems. Removing the water that flows to Southern California by sending it beneath the Delta will make drought conditions permanent above the surface. That means salinity issues will worsen and strong fresh water flows needed to sustain the endangered Delta smelt and other fish such as the imperiled Chinook salmon will drop off significantly.
The fish protected by state and federal law as well as court order can’t be left to die. That is why the state is now in the process of working to commandeer more water from the Stanislaus, Tuolumne and Merced rivers from local water districts in a bid to increase unimpaired river flows and help flush the Delta.
Take more water now and once the Twin Tunnels are in environmentalists and bureaucrats won’t trip over themselves suing to get the courts to reduce water diversions into the tunnels to protect fish and Delta ecological systems.
The MWD knows this will work because the City of San Francisco has been getting away with a similar scam for almost a century.
It built the original Delta tunnel — the pipeline from Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park that goes beneath Modesto and under the Northern San Joaquin Valley — to bypass the Delta.
Since then, not a drop of Tuolumne River water that San Francisco captures and diverts has even been taken from them to help in a drought or meet court-ordered fish flows in the Delta.
By opting for the more expensive “tunnel” option a century ago and not simply taking the Tuolumne River water they captured behind O’Shaugnessey Dam, releasing it back into the river and taking it out of the Delta which is quite do-able and much cheaper San Francisco avoided having  its water supplies compromised by salinity questions, fish flows or droughts.
The Brown Administration in its eagerness to secure a legacy for their boss, is channeling Uber’s business model after studies showed that following established environmental regulations and identified environmental mitigations would be cost prohibitive. They have scaled back on environmental protections and decided they should just proceed and let the chips fall where they may. In other words much like Uber, it’s a stance of charging ahead and getting what you want and sorting out the damages later. And much like Uber once the Twin Tunnels are in place you’ve basically wiped out or weakened the other water users at the table.
Meanwhile the Northern San Joaquin Valley — including the Delta, Manteca, Lathrop, Ripon, Turlock, Tracy, Stockton, Merced, Ceres, and every farmer — will get to enjoy a downward spiral reminiscent of the wholesale destruction of the Owens Valley done in the name of quenching LA’s thirst.

This column is the opinion of executive editor, Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinion of The Bulletin or Morris Newspaper Corp. of CA.  He can be contacted at dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com or 209.249.3519.