Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

However, El Niño was soon to prove too much even for the big growers and the Army Engineers. By March of 1983, the flooding rivers were out of control and one of the lake levees was breached, inundating thirty thousand acres of farmland. The Tulare Lake Irrigation District immediately applied to the Corps for a permit to pump out the water and send it over the Tulare Basin divide into the San Joaquin River, which feeds San Francisco Bay. There was nothing inherently wrong with that idea, either—the bay and the Delta normally can use all the fresh water they can get—except that at least one of the reservoirs upstream had been illegally planted with a species of fish called white bass, which got flushed down by the floodwaters and were already flourishing in the reincarnated Tulare Lake. White bass are a voracious, opportunistic, highly adaptable type of rough fish and love to eat young salmon and striped bass. (Salmon and white bass have never managed to coexist, anywhere.) Unless a fish screen below the pumps could guarantee that 100 percent of the white bass would be removed before entering the San Joaquin, the bay and Delta’s two most valuable commercial and sports fish would be threatened with extinction. Just a handful of escaped white bass of opposite sexes could be enough to seal their doom. Even though no fish screen has ever operated 100 percent effectively, the Corps of Engineers, ignoring a cacophony of protest from sportsmen in several states, issued another “em...