Day 13: June 20th

We left Vegas and drove to Cali. We had an appointment with a professor a CSU Fullerton. The proffesor is Harmonie Hawley who is an environmental engineer. She discussed a lot about the water issues in California and touched on air quality as well. I enjoyed her talk because she talked a lot on how the state relies a lot on ground water and the Colorado River. California has more agriculture than any other state and it is in one of the driest areas. According to the book we read, California Water 55% of agriculture production comes from California.More people live in southern California than northern California as well which doesn't make a lot of sense because there is a lot more available water in the North. The state must pump large amounts of ground water which is showing signs of problems. The land is subsiding in places at unimaginable rates. She showed us a picture where a pole was placed in the ground in 1925 and now 40 feet of the pole is visible. The figures she gave were 500 production wells producing more than 250,000 acre feet a year. To solve the problem of subsiding land, California has about 1,000 spreading ponds to recharge the aquifers. I don't think the areas are enough but she didn't give exact numbers of how much water was being delivered back. The state also turns rivers into giant gutters to reduce ground seapage. Water is clearly a problem here.
The main problem is agriculture where they are using flood irigation in the desert. This causes problems for the soil. It destroys soil fertility by raising salinity levels. Before visiting here I thought maybe a good solution would be desalinating the Pacific Ocean's water because its such a huge resource. But she explained that the water is too cold so production is very inefficient. The best solution would be for people to lwave California but that clearly isn't going to happen. She also went into air pollution and the inversion that keeps the smog trapped in the L.A. area. I thought it was real cool when we left her talk because on the drive to Ventura, you could clearly see the smog everywhere and we also passed over a few of the giant gutters they call rivers.