Water Archives · Randy McFarland second interview

Title

eng Randy McFarland second interview

Description

eng Talks about the history of water development on the Kings and San Joaquin rivers.

Creator

eng McFarland, Randy

eng Holyoke, Thomas

Relation

eng Water Archive Oral Histories

Coverage

eng California State University, Fresno

Date

eng 7/27/2015

Format

eng Microsoft Word document, 23 pages

Identifier

eng SCMS_waoh_00038

extracted text

>> Tom Holyoke: Back with Randy McFarland for a second round. Now last
time we left off, Kings River, Temperance Flat Dam was built, talked
about some of the political issues.
>> Randy McFarland: Pine Flat Dam.
>> Tom Holyoke: Pine Flat Dam, sorry. Did I say Temperance Flat Dam?
>> Randy McFarland: Uh-huh.
>> Tom Holyoke: Oh, sorry, that's what you're wishing would happen.
>> Randy McFarland: Wrong river there.
>> Tom Holyoke: Pine Flat Dam, the Kings River. We talked about some of
the issues around it being built, and you had then left off with this
cryptic remark about we haven't talked about the fisheries - what about
the fisheries?
>> Randy McFarland: Well, the fisheries on the Kings River present an
interesting set of contrast to what has unfolded in a similar timeframe
on the San Joaquin River where there was litigation that lasted for 18
years brought by the Natural Resources Defense Council and about 15 other
environmental and commercial fishing organizations against the Bureau of
Reclamation and ultimately in the case with the Friant Water Authority
and many of the Friant Districts over fishery issues and salmon and so
forth. On the Kings River there was also much concern by the public on
the fishery and how it had been affected in the years following the
construction of Pine Flat Dam, but the complaint that was ultimately
brought was not a lawsuit, it was a public trust complaint and it was
brought by a group of mostly local anglers, with a couple of
environmental or fishing groups and so forth that were involved, but not
really actively. And what was so fortunate about this was that it
permitted an open dialogue to eventually become established. It took a
long time. There was tremendous distrust over the fishery, but ultimately
success emerged and we came to the Kings River Fisheries Management
Program. But this started in the '80s, the late '80s, we - I've got to
stop a second and think myself here - there was concern over the - what
had been happening on the river or what was perceived to be happening to
the fishery as a result of operations at the new Pine Flat power plant,
which had been constructed and opened 30 years after the dam was built.
So for the first 30 years of the dam's existence there was no power
plant. The releases to the river came through the dam, itself, either
through the low-level sluice gates, the mid-level sluice gates or the
high-level Tainter gates right at the spillway. And the power plant was
perceived by a number of individuals as having a terrible effect and
deadly effect on the fishery downstream and even though it was a
streamflow plant that was not being operated just to generate power, but
it was using the water that was going to the water users, as it still
does. That led to this sort of feeling and the distrust between the water
users on the one hand and the anglers on the other led to a public trust
complaint in April of 1991 being as filed against the Corps of Engineers,
against the Kings River Water Association, against the Kings River
Conservation District and also against several of the water users, the

units on the Kings River. And there were a number of allegations in this
public trust complaint, which is not a lawsuit, it was a - public trust
complaints are a bit outside of the written law, but they have been used
effectively by those who wish to see environmental changes take place in
a number of arenas.
>> Tom Holyoke: Famously at Mona Lake.
>> Randy McFarland: Mona Lake is the best known. And that after this was
filed and it became a subject of discussion, which was right at about the
time I started working with the Kings River Water Association in Kings
River Conservation District, our attorney pointed out repeatedly over
time that those who had brought public trust complaints had never lost
one. And so we had - this was something that had to be taken very
seriously and look for I don't want to say a soft landing, but certainly
a good resolution in this that would really accomplish something and
eliminate the threat to the water supply. And the water supply threat was
very real. We were going through a dry period at that time, the late
'80s, early '90s were a terrible drought, a six-year sequential drought
which although not as bad as what was experienced in 2014 and 2015 was
still enough to drive Pine Flat Reservoir down to its record low. At one
point Pine Flat had reached in late summer of I believe it was in 1990 or
'91 of 28,000 acre-feet, which is less than 3% of capacity and that
coupled with the fact that there wasn't much water running in the river
because even during the irrigation season there wasn't enough runoff to
generate the entitlement to the water users, there wasn't much water
downstream and then the water that was there was quite warm and the
fishery wasn't doing well. And so we had this public trust complaint and
among other things the public trust complaint had a demand that there be
a minimum flow established, a high minimum flow, much higher than we had
at the time, which was 50 cubic feet per second at the head of the
Centerville Bottoms. And unless the creeks below the dam were running and
then there was less of a - there it went down to 25 as a minimum release.
This, the most commonly spoken of demand for a minimum flow was 250 cubic
feet per second and there was also a demand for about 350,000 acre-feet
of minimum pool storage in Pine Flat. Well, this was in the middle of a
drought and you didn't have to be a water engineer to be able to do the
math to know that you couldn't have that kind of a flow 365 days a year
when there - as well as that kind of a - that high a minimum pool, a
third of the capacity of the reservoir. In a dry year, there wouldn't be
enough runoff to do it, it wouldn't work and it wouldn't leave any water
for the water users and the farmers who count on that and a million acres
in the Kings River service area. So this is where we were after 1991, and
it was the two sides appeared to be digging in. There was talk of a
lawsuit coming out of it. The Kings River Water Association was really in
the lead position on this from the river's point of view because their
water rights were being threatened, and there was a lot of discussion and
this was all new territory. The KRWA had thought it had back in 1954 or
back in - I beg your pardon, the dam was finished in '54 - it was in 1963
when the Fisheries' agreement with the Department of Fish and Game was
finalized by the Kings River Water Association, which established this
50-cubic foot per second flow from Pine Flat when there was no demand.
And the KRWA had felt that it had done what it needed to do to maintain a
live stream below the dam. So when we - when this came along and the

threat that was posed was really very alarming to the water users,
especially when some of the more vocal of the plaintiffs in the case
started saying, well, gee whiz, you know that 250 cubic feet per second
in the public trust complaint really needs to be a lot higher, you know,
500 to 700 cfs and a higher minimum pool, which is just really impossible
to do under a wide variety of hydrologic conditions. And so to make a
long story short there were efforts made internally to look at ways,
ideas that how could we resolve this problem and do it in such a way that
we had some positive good for the fishery on the Kings River and at the
same time do so in a way, in a form that we on the river, as part of the
Kings River Water Association could live with and our users. And a number
of ideas were looked at and there was a program that came to be framed
that looked really good, but it needed the cooperation of Pacific Gas and
Electric Company to cooperate. They have - PG&E has agreements from its
upper reservoirs on the Kings River that, without getting into the
details of how they work, in very low flow times, low water times they
have to be able to - they have to bring water down to meet - keep water
in Pine Flat and the amounts of water didn't add up to what was being
talked about for a temperature control pools creation in Pine Flat
Reservoir. The - it was a very frustrating position to be in because the
talks that had been taking place between the KRWA, KRCD and the - also
the Department of Fish and Game as it was then known, and the anglers had
been proceeding fairly well. There were rough spots along the way, but
this - the final piece in the puzzle to make it work was with PG&E. And
then all of a sudden PG&E agreed to redo its agreement and the planets
lined up. And in 1998, the Kings River Fisheries Management Program and
all the necessary agreements were approved. On the Kings River, they were
approved by all 28-member units of the Kings River Water Association,
which is quite a feat to get a bunch - 28 water guys from widely
different perspectives and parts of the river to agree unanimously on
anything, especially something so important as this. And the Fisheries
Management Program was established; it was meant to be and continues to
be a fairly economical program. It doesn't have a whole lot of money, but
it has done a lot with very little. Its three major agencies are the
KRWA, the KRCD, and what is now known as the Department of Fish and
Wildlife. And there was an Executive Policy Committee formed, the EXCOM
as it is known has one representative from KRWA, one from KRCD and the
Regional Director for the Department of Fish and Wildlife, and all
decisions had to be unanimous because the water agencies obviously could
have a two-to-one sway over the environmental side so it was agreed that
all decisions had to be unanimous.
>> Tom Holyoke: When you say the environmental side, do you mean the
California Department of Fish and Game?
>> Randy McFarland: That's right. Another thing that was done, as a
couple of other points that were written into this, there was a Technical
Steering Committee that was established and that was the three agencies
had a staff level biologist or technical person assigned to that. And
those meetings have always been working meetings and they're not public
meetings because they're usually working over ideas and putting plans
together and so forth. Nothing is put into place without approval of the
Executive Policy Committee. Perhaps the most successful element of the
program as far as boards and so forth are concerned was the establishment

of a Public Advisory Group. And the Public Advisory Group doesn't
technically have a say, but everything that's going on in the program is
presented to the Public Advisory Group, which meets monthly, to get its
input and see if whether or not they will agree with it. What has
happened since 1998 when this program was put into place is that a
tremendous level of trust has been built. The anglers have learned a
great deal about water operations and they understand now in great detail
what happens if we have too much water or not enough water. And at the
same time, the KRWA and the KRCD have learned a lot about fishing. We
have folks who are involved from a technical aspect, including our Kings
River Water Master, who probably spends almost as much time at various
times, if not more time, on the Fisheries Management Program than they do
on their day-by-day work in managing the river. And so it has been
extremely helpful in that regard to bring the two sides together and
establish this trust because we no longer have complaints being filed or
we have people working together. And there may be disagreements, but
they're from a - they're not personal type things, they're not based on a
lack of facts, they are things that reasonable people can talk about and
work out and it has been extremely effective. As for some of the details
of the program, the framework agreement among the KRWA members included
every member contributing part of its share of the storage in Pine Flat
Reservoir to establish a temperature control pool of 100,000 acre-feet.
That is 10% of the reservoir's capacity and notice I said temperature
control pool, not minimum pool.
>> Tom Holyoke: I was going to ask you kind of what you meant by that?
>> Randy McFarland: Yes, it - in a sense it's a minimum pool, and going
into 2015 had never - it had been a minimum and we had never encroached
upon it. There are formulas within the KRWA that permit units to
basically borrow water or, as we put it, encroach on it if they can
replace the water in 120 days. But not until 2015 was there a formal
proposal made because 2015 was proceeding to be the all-time record dry
year on the Kings River and there's so little water that the KRWA
proposed and the EXCOM, all three of the partners in it, agreed to allow
the temperature control pool to drop to 80,000 acre-feet during the late
summer of 2015. As this is being recorded, we don't know if that will be
necessary or the reservoir will even go below 100,000 acre-feet in 2015
because there's been more rainfall this year it's improved the water
situation a little bit in the reservoir, but you get the idea. This was a
- this temperature control pool, this is strictly an environmental thing;
it's not really saving water. It makes less water available to the users,
but it improves the pool of colder water in Pine Flat Reservoir that is
available for the trout fishery downstream. And the trout fishery is what
the program, in all honesty, basically has worked on to make better in
the mile, several miles downstream from Pine Flat Dam to about Highway
180.
>> Tom Holyoke: Like salmon, trout require cold water to thrive?
>> Randy McFarland: Yes, they - for trout the dividing line, you don't
want your river to get above 25 degrees Celsius and if it does, they can
last for a while in that, they don't like it, they'll weaken and it just
is not a good situation and it could lead to mortality among the fish.

And so in a very dry year, such as 2015, it's very possible that the
reservoir can run out of cold water and then really all bets are off.
Every year in a dry year the KRWA works very closely with the Army Corps
of Engineers to manage the reservoir and how water is released from the
reservoir through different elevations to preserve the cold water that's
remaining in Pine Flat Lake as long as possible and to blend it so that
the temperatures, by taking water from different elevations out of the
lake it is a way to manage the temperatures with some water that's real
cold, but some that's closer to the service that's a little bit warmer
and blend it so that when it gets downstream it's still acceptable to the
fish. But there may come a time when in a really dry year and the lake is
low and there hasn't been enough precipitation all the elements that
basically existed in 2015 combine in kind of a perfect storm when it may
not be possible to meet that temperature threshold of 25 degrees Celsius
downstream.
>> Tom Holyoke: So here in late July that hasn't happened yet, you're
still talking like it could happen?
>> Randy McFarland: Yes, we're still in our water run at this time in
July of 2015, and so we're - but we're pulling water from different
elevations to - it's being blended now. Actually, in 2015 our temperature
management on the Kings River really began in March this year because it
was a very dry year, it was a very warm spring for much of the time, and
we'd never - usually this is a late summer, fall sort of thing when we
manage for temperatures. This year it's turned out to be more of an all
year's phenomena. And it's - fortunately, the KRWA and the Corps and KRCD
have gotten very good at it, in managing, trying to maximize the amount
of cold water availability without exhausting the supply of cold water.
And so the Fisheries program has also, along with the temperature
management and keeping an eye on water supplies and so forth has involved
financial contributions from the three partners - the KRWA and the KRCD
have each contributed $50,000 a year, so $100,000 from the river, and the
Department of Fish and Wildlife is - makes a similar contribution from
the State when the Legislature makes funds available. They haven't always
been able to, but the Department of Fish and Wildlife is very good about
providing in kind services and so it's been a good partnership there.
This may not seem like a lot, but this - that - these amounts along with
some contributions and grant monies and so forth have resulted in a
tremendous number of habitat projects that have occurred in the several
miles between Pine Flat and Highway 180. Probably the most noteworthy was
the creation, actually it was a project that was underway at the time the
program was started and that was the Thorburn Spawning Channel, it's a
side channel, an old high flow channel that was recreated and the nonnative vegetation, huge amounts of Arundo, false bamboo were removed. The
channel was excavated out to carry a controlled flow of about 30, 35
cubic feet per second all the time, and it has come to look like a
natural stream. And it isn't really proven to be a real spawning channel,
but juvenile fish like it and also wildlife of all kinds in the area have
flocked to it so it's a rather pretty spot. This is along the river in
the Piedra area and it's on land that was provided by the Thorburn family
for this project and both of them are gone now, but the project is living
on. Other sorts of work that have been accomplished under the Fisheries
Management Program include boulder projects, and if you should drive to

Pine Flat you look down on the river and see these boulders sticking out
of the river and say, gee, whiz, those are a little strange but because
they were put there by heavy equipment. They're from a quarry. The entire
purpose is to break up the flow, give smaller fish a chance in high flow
conditions, of which there are many below Pine Flat Dam when releases are
being made for the water users downstream in the peak of the summer the
flows are very high, but that gives the fish a place to hide and breaks
up the flow a little bit and gives them some shelter, otherwise they
would be like somebody riding a tricycle out on a busy freeway. This is a
place where there's a little bit of respite from all that traffic. A lot
of shoreline projects, woody debris has been - that you would expect to
find along shores placed in several locations, there have been coves and
jetties that have been created along the shoreline in various places,
again to create sanctuaries of calmer water. And then there have been a
lot of efforts made to try to get a population, a resident population of
trout into the river. There are eggs that are brought in from hatcheries
and we now have a little hatchery facility that was in a building that
the county owned and was not using, along the - right along the river.
It's been made available to the program and has been rigged up with its
own water supply from the river, and these little eggs hatch and little
tiny, itsy-bitsy trout start swimming around in it and eventually they
are transplanted out into various locations in the river. The fishery
below Pine Flat has been, never been studied more than it has under this
Fisheries Management Program. Kings River Conservation District has
biologists on its staff; they've done probably more research than the
State ever has been able to do on the Kings River and really come to
understand it. The number of fish that are in the river are counted,
there's a fish census taken every year in the fall when low water times
and it's been disappointing to see the number of trout is rather low. All
the other fish species are very good and the Department of Fish and
Wildlife has been very encouraged by the general health of that reach of
the river. But the number of trout seems to not be there, it's - and one
of the big reasons why, many of us believe, is it is the heavy fishing
pressure, recreational angling pressure that - and poaching, there's a
poaching problem out on the river, people fish parts of the river that
are catch and release but keep the fish anyway or overfish and take
beyond limits on the what's called the put and take section, up higher
above the Alta Weir for food purposes. And the result is that despite
planning and the efforts to raise fish the fishing pressures are intense
out there, especially now that there is not no longer planting being done
of trout on the San Joaquin River in anticipation of salmon run
reestablishment, that has focused the pressure over onto the Kings River.
And, as a result, if you're looking for numbers in our fish counts every
year you're probably going to be disappointed, but certainly, it won't be
for lack of effort on the part of the folks running the Kings River
Fisheries Management Program.
>> Tom Holyoke: When the original public trust complaints were brought by
anglers it was it with the hope of reestablishing trout populations in
particular?
>> Randy McFarland: Yes, the trout population below Pine Flat is an
interesting story. It was a - under natural conditions, pre-project
conditions before the dam was there, it was kind of an opportunistic

trout fishery and by that I mean the flows, the natural flows in the
river occasionally would get down in the summertime to 150, maybe 100
cfs, maybe even less in a really dry year. And the river coming through
the reservoir site is in a very hot canyon surrounded by granite. It gets
- if you've ever been to Pine Flat on a hot summer day in Fresno where
it's about 103, chances are it's 110 right around where the dam is. The
result is if you have low flows, if there's no water in the reservoir,
there's no reservoir there, no dam and you have water coming down the
river in very small amounts it's going to warm up very quickly and it's
going to be too warm, too hot for trout. And so the trout had to go
upstream in search of colder water or they wouldn't survive. The result
is that the result at Pine Flat Dam created the opportunity for a trout
fishery to exist below Pine Flat Dam by providing what most of the time
is a steady supply of cold water that did not exist in the state of
nature. And so it, but it's a bit of an enigma, we're trying to achieve
something that wasn't there under natural conditions, but something which
the public really wants and that's to have a good trout fishery, which is
easily accessible to a major metropolitan area.
>> Tom Holyoke: Something else about the story that kind of fascinates
me, back at the beginning you were talking about when the angler groups
were first bringing the public trust complaint, that users of the Kings
River decided to go immediately into negotiations. That's such a contrast
to what happened on the San Joaquin.
>> Randy McFarland: Well, it wasn't immediate, it took awhile. It was a actually, it took a few years to - there was a lot of barbs going back
and forth and folks didn't know what to think, but I think eventually it
came to be a feeling that the among the water users and especially the
leaders of the association that everybody, the water users were going to
be far better served if it took a proactive role in assisting and finding
a workable solution than in attempting to fight what might well be a
losing battle. And on the San Joaquin River it's tempting to compare
that, gee, whiz, the Kings has this program in place, it's worked well,
it hasn't cost a fortune. The San Joaquin River the program is kind of in
place, but they've spent $100 million and have yet to build anything.
It's easy to say, try to look for what, where's - what's happening here,
why is this so out of kilter? But it is really an apples and oranges sort
of thing. In the case of the San Joaquin River, the San Joaquin
restoration would be the biggest river restoration the world has ever
seen. It - there was in 2014 and 2013 there was a lot of press given
nationally and particularly in Southern California to the restoration of
the lower Owens River in Owens Valley that had been dried up by
diversions to the City of Los Angeles and as part of the settlement more
water had to be released into Owens Lake and there were efforts made to
restore the river. Well, the Owens River is about the size of a fairly
modest sized canal on the Kings River, it's not very large, it never
carries very much water. And on the San Joaquin River we're talking about
basically well over 60 miles including the part, section below Friant Dam
of river which has, nobody has paid much attention to since the Friant
Project became operational in the late '40s and early 1950s. And the
salmon population has been gone since then and it was well on its way to
going before Friant Dam was being built. Friant gets blamed for the
demise of the salmon, but the fact is that on the San Joaquin River there

were other barriers that were put in place at a much earlier time, such
as Sack Dam on the little diversion dam on the San Joaquin River east of
Dos Palos or Mendota Dam at Mendota or upstream of the site of Friant Dam
north of Auberry, Kerckhoff Dam in 1916, which completely blocked the
spawning upstream into the higher mountains by salmon. And so the number
of salmon that were in existence at the time that Friant Dam was being
built was far reduced from the old days when the counts were so big and
there was too much water being diverted on the west side, there were
these barriers and so forth. And so to replace that and try to establish
a naturally reproducing salmon fishery is incredibly more difficult on
its face given the length of the dry conditions, the length of time
that's intervened and so forth compared to what we had. This was a
channel on the Kings River that always had water, at least some water in
it, and at least in the reach they're working on, and it's much shorter,
it's less than 10 miles that the program is looking at. The program
technically is looking at a much broader area, but this has been the
focus at this point. The river, the lake, itself, has a very good fishery
in it and the fishery in the river upstream from Pine Flat is a favorite
of a lot of anglers, and the river downstream from Highway 180 there has
- there are those who like to fish down there, but there frequently are
times when there isn't very much or even any water and so it's been the
case in 2015 the water, the river basically ended just below Reedley [for
many months. And so the San Joaquin and the Kings are very different in
terms of the circumstances that fishery restoration, the challenges that
are being presented. And so far they're still being presented on the San
Joaquin and they have a long way to go before there's anything
implemented.
>> Tom Holyoke: Okay, well, anything else about the Kings River we should
talk about? Got the fisheries thing done.
>> Randy McFarland: I think the Kings has been a - is really a study in
how folks working together and pulling for a same cause can make things
happen, make good things happen. On - The San Joaquin River has been a
case where even after the settlement the parties involved, especially the
plaintiffs in the case led by the NRDC and the water users on the other
hand have not seen eye to eye on much of anything a lot of the time.
Contrast that with the Kings where the anglers are local people, they
know the river very intimately from a natural history perspective. The
water users and their leaders are every bit as dedicated to the river and
know it intimately, but from a managerial point of view with the water.
And it just was to everybody's benefit to work together and I think some
really good people realized that and made it happen. And the result is,
is a program which is being - I know the Department of Fish and Wildlife
feels is a model program for - and they have cited it repeatedly in other
parts of the State about how it's so valuable getting people to work
together and it certainly has - seems to have worked here. It would be
nice if we get a few more fish in there, but there's always those anglers
who want to take them out, so.
>> Tom Holyoke: Okay, then so should we shift over a bit to the San
Joaquin River?
>> Randy McFarland: Sure.

>> Tom Holyoke: All right. So what about human alterations to the San
Joaquin River?
>> Randy McFarland: San Joaquin River is a stream which today functions
in a way that is virtually nothing like it was in the state of nature,
with the exception of those reaches that are above the highest reservoirs
and are unimpeded. And there are a lot of reservoirs on the San Joaquin
River, much more than on the Kings, much more so than on any of the other
San Joaquin River, San Joaquin Valley rivers and streams. The San
Joaquin, of course, is one of the two primary rivers in Northern and
Central California in the Central Valley that drain the Central Valley.
The San Joaquin River's southerly side as it cuts across the Valley marks
the divide between the San Joaquin Basin to the north and the Tulare Lake
Basin to the south. Now Tulare Lake Basin where the Kings' natural flow
discharges is a terminal basin in which the water cannot get out unless
old Tulare Lake gets up to a level of 207 feet where it would spill over
the intervening land out by Riverdale and flow north into the San Joaquin
River. That last happened in 1878. The San Joaquin River just flows, it
flows out to the west side, makes a sharp right turn at Mendota Pool, and
then flows toward the northwest. It's unusual in that it flows north. I
don't know, most of us seem to think the rivers flow south, but the San
Joaquin goes against the grain as it seeks to reach the San Francisco Bay
and the ocean and it does so by going through the delta and in the
process it picks up a number of tributaries. The largest ones all being
from the east side of the valley and then there's some small seasonal
creeks that flow out of the coast range to the west during the wintertime
and can contribute a lot of water to it, but basically it's the streams
from the east and those are the Fresno River and Chowchilla River, which
are two of the smaller ones, then the Merced River, the Tuolumne River,
the Stanislaus, the Cosumnes and Mokelumne, all of those flow into the
San Joaquin River and are tributary to the San Joaquin side of the delta
coming in from the south. And so the San Joaquin River was at times and
still can be in a big water year a wild and big river, but basically it
is so controlled today that it actually ceases to exist at all along
probably about 20 miles of its course out on the west side north of Dos
Palos. Yes, there's a little channel there, but the river hasn't flowed
there since about 1969 or even earlier and the river is managed so
heavily, in use for so many different things, and those of us in the
water business really can't imagine it not being used for lots of things.
It provides by its diversions at Friant, the San Joaquin River provides
water to a million acres that could not possibly all be in production.
Some would argue that it shouldn't be in production for that very reason,
but it's incredibly productive farmland, all the way south to Bakersfield
and Kern County and to the Tehachapi Mountains and then north into
Southern Merced County. So the river today is not what it used to be. Now
the river as it used to be is not what a lot of us, a lot of folks today
think it was then. It's a favorite pastime on the part of editors and
authors who are writing about the San Joaquin River and criticizing how
it has been managed, to run photographs of the San Joaquin River that
show this massive stream that you might mistake for one of the great
rivers in the east, might be a quarter of a mile wide and it's huge, it's
flowing, there might be boats on it and so forth. Well, that's how it
could be and it would be like that for a few weeks in the springtime.

There are other times when the San Joaquin River would be like it is 2015
and that is almost dry. We know what the flow of the San Joaquin River
would be under natural conditions. Every day the natural flow of the
river as it would occur without dams is calculated by the Bureau of
Reclamation and, yes, it is a calculated number, it might be off a little
bit, but it is amazing how many times in a year, sometimes even in a
fairly decent water year that for a few days in the late summer or fall
the natural flow of the river at Friant is listed as zero. With zero
there is no stream a quarter of a mile wide, it's just what it is this
year and that's a great big sandbar or what it would be this year if
there weren't releases being made down the San Joaquin mouth to the
exchange contractors. So the San Joaquin has been made over many, many
times. Obviously, it was from the human perspective its first users were
the Native Americans, there were the Miwok to the tribes to the north in
the far, far north end of the San Joaquin Valley and the Yokuts tribes,
the central and southern Yokuts, the foothill Yokuts, further south in
the Valley who also lived along the Tulare Lake and the other big lakes
in southern end of the valley and the streams, including the Kings. But
certainly, there were tribes who lived along the San Joaquin River, that
was their lifeblood. They were the first water users in the San Joaquin
Valley, were the Yokuts and among humans, and they used it a lot because
they for the most part lived right on it. It was a great place to live,
to be right there next to a stream full of fish, wildlife coming to get
water, pleasant surroundings because the riparian growth, trees and so
forth. It wasn't like that out on the plains, the plains were pretty
barren, there was no water, it was dry, it was desolate, but the rivers
were a great place to live. And the writings about these tribes tell us,
particularly the Yokuts, that they had a great appreciation of water,
they had a great appreciation of where they lived, and that they were
very peace loving people and who welcomed the Europeans when they
arrived, the Spanish and so forth. Well, of course, ultimately that
changed here as it did everywhere else in the country and so much of the
Americas it changed their entire way of life. But the river then, itself,
changed its way of life and that was the result of development and to put
the water to work as a resource. And it's - I've always kind of looked at
water resources and how they were treated by those generations that came
so far, long before us on all of these rivers in the Valley and how those
water resources were put to use as being a lot like what we hear in the
timber industry. There's another resource, you've got to have timber,
you've got to have wood. And lumbermen were good at harvesting it,
sometimes too good, sometimes they cut it all. But in those days the
attitude of the lumbermen really summed up the attitude of America and
Americans to resources, natural resources. There's always plenty over the
next hill, and so here we're talking about rivers instead of hills that
there seem to be no end to being able to engineer solutions of needs of
people in a dry land by making use of the water and water storage was
that solution. Now the San Joaquin, as far as water storage for
irrigation purposes and domestic purposes, on its upper end that
development came very late in its history. The San Joaquin was different
for a couple of reasons. One was a question of topography, where the San
Joaquin River emerges from the foothills at Friant and then flows out
north on the north side of Fresno, separating Fresno and Madera counties,
until it gets well west of Highway 99 it's down in a little gorge,
there's bluffs on each side of it and it wasn't really very practical in

those early days to divert the water at gravity out onto the planes. It
was tried once in Fresno in the 1880s, a canal was built beginning at the
present site of Lost Lake below Friant and it was built and found its way
and you can still see the cut, it's still there, it's a road in some
places, on the southerly bank, the left bank of the San Joaquin River and
the bluff. And it went way out and gradually by gravity it found its way
onto the plains, and that was swell until they put water in it and the
water just seeped out and back out onto the - down the bluff. You could
have lined it with concrete, in those days that lining with concrete
wasn't done. They abandoned the canal in 1887. So there was no diversion
for irrigation on the east side of the Valley until Friant Dam was built
and Friant Dam came into service, it came into service in the Friant-Kern
Canal in 1951, although there were deliveries being made in the FriantKern Canal in 1948, and the first deliveries down the Madera Canal were
about 1943. So that's a long time after deliveries were made from the
Kings River starting in 1858, that's almost a century earlier that the
eastern side of the Kings River began getting water out onto for its
users away from the river as compared to the San Joaquin River.
>> Tom Holyoke: Just a question, I'm sure you know the Central Valley
Project was originally conceived of as a state project.
>> Randy McFarland: That's right.
>> Tom Holyoke: What was thought that the state would do it was
diversions on the San Joaquin part of the original plan or was the
original plan just...
>> Randy McFarland: Yes.
>> Tom Holyoke: Okay.
>> Randy McFarland: The original plan, there had been a number of plans
that had evolved over time for - with state officials and even the Feds
to some extent on how to move water from the far north where it was in
abundance to the part south where it was needed. And the project that was
designed starting in the 1920s and finished in the early 1930s as the
State Water Project did just that and basically it designed the initial
development of the Central Valley Project as it was built, which that
included Shasta, Friant, Friant-Kern Canal, the Madera Canal, the DeltaMendota Canal on the pumping plant, and a few other facilities along the
way. And that, and then of course later on the Central Valley Project was
expanded to include the San Luis unit with the Federal portion of San
Luis Reservoir, the San Luis Canal with the state, and that made possible
a lot of cultivation on the west side, in the west side district. But the
State was the lead agency, they designed the State Water Project, now
known as the CVP, they put it before voters in a special election in 1933
for bonding purposes and it narrowly was approved, the bonds were
approved. There was a lot of opposition, particularly in Southern
California, but it did pass, but then the state could not in the depths
of the depression sell the bonds. Well, fortunately, coming into office
about that time was President Roosevelt and then his New Deal, which was
looking for all sorts of public works projects, building dams and
projects like the CVP was just, fit right up that alley. And so the state

approached the federal government and persuaded Congress to vote in 1935
and then reaffirming in 1937 to make the Central Valley Project a federal
reclamation project. And immediately the Feds took over work on it. The
first construction in the Central Valley Project anywhere occurred at
Friant in 1937 when a warehouse was built, and then the next year Shasta,
work started at Shasta on the dam, and in 1939 ground was broken for
Friant Dam, and it was moved very quickly. It had only took three years
to build Friant Dam, except for the finishing touches; it took a few more
years to get them all in place because of wartime equipment shortages.
But the State by all means had the idea, but just didn't have the means
given the times that they were going through to put it together,
otherwise a lot of history might have been a lot different had the State
Water Project included Friant Dam and the Friant Division and Shasta and
all those facilities.
>> Tom Holyoke: So the building of Friant, the Friant Dam, when did you
say that began again, '39 or?
>> Randy McFarland: Ground was broken for Friant Dam in 1939. The dam,
itself, was essentially finished in 1942. The - it was really finished by
1944 with one big exception, the spillway gates weren't installed, those
were the drum gates, they were not installed ‘til 1947 because of wartime
equipment shortages and supply shortages, it took a little time to get
that done. But the dam, itself, was viewed by the federal government as
an essential wartime project and so the start of the war did not
interfere at all with construction. It was a massive job. At the time it
was the largest concrete gravity dam in the San Joaquin Valley, that was
later eclipsed when Pine Flat Dam was built. It came right after Hoover
Dam was built. Many of the people who had worked on the Hoover Dam
Project were hired by the contractors for the Bureau of Reclamation to
build Friant Dam and Shasta Dam. And they are all Bureau of Reclamation
facilities. They all three were very well built and very well engineered.
They left nothing to chance in those days. If there was any question
about something they would build it about 10 times bigger than it needed
to be so that it was going to last. The dam itself spanned the lowest end
of the San Joaquin River Canyon. Unlike Pine Flat Dam 10 years later,
this was a - the hills on each side of where Friant Dam is located are
rather low, and so although the dam we know could be, the Friant Dam
could be raised, the fact is it would probably take a few miles of saddle
dams around the sides of the lake to keep water from spilling out around
it and around the sides. So 520,500 acre-feet became the capacity of
Friant Dam. And there were other things in the design that were rather
strange. The - well, strange or as it turned out perhaps didn't work as
well as was intended. The engineers wanted the two canals flowing out of
Friant Dam, the Madera Canal to the north which goes 35 miles up to the
Chowchilla River, and the Friant-Kern Canal to the south which flows 152
miles to the Kern River on the west side of Bakersfield. The designers
for the Interior Department and Bureau of Reclamation wanted both of
those canals to be operated by gravity all the way, no pumping. Well,
that was swell, the trouble is that meant that the outlets from Friant
Dam had to be quite a ways up the dam; they weren't in the bottom. And,
in fact, there the lowest sluice gates on Friant Dam are not at the
bottom either, so there's probably the original pool was when they
started putting water in the lake was about 5,000 cfs, which is really

dead storage, you can't get it out, it just there's no way, you'd have to
pump it out to get it out. Then if you - you can run the lake as low as
you want down to these gates at the bottom, toward the bottom of the dam,
but after you get below a level of 135,000 acre-feet of storage in
Millerton Lake you can no longer release water to the canals, the Madera
Canal or the Friant-Kern Canal. And the way it was designed there's no
way to build, put pumps on the face of the dam and bring pumps in and
then pump water into the outlets. And so Pine Flat, I'm sorry, Friant
Dam, Millerton Lake have effectively a minimum pool of 135,000 acre-feet,
it's dead storage below that point. That means that the active storage
for Millerton Lake is 385,000 acre-feet compared with a million acre-feet
on the Kings River. Both the San Joaquin and Kings River generate about
the same amount of runoff in an average year, roughly 1.7 million acrefeet. If you have a reservoir that holds a million acre-feet it's a lot
easier to hold a runoff of 1.7 million acre-feet than in a reservoir of
385,000 acre-feet, which exists on the San Joaquin River. And so the
result is to this very day in even in average water years there's a real
good chance the San Joaquin River will have a flood release because
there's not a place to put it and there's - they just can't move enough
water in the off season for recharge or people don't want to irrigate if
it's a wet year and so it gets flood released down the San Joaquin River
and it's lost to the service area, and then it causes flood type problems
and seepage problems on further down the river. So this is a problem,
which was not really well recognized. The other mistake perhaps that was
made in retrospect, this is a little Monday morning quarterback several
decades after the fact, that Friant Dam was built in the wrong place.
That there is a location about six miles upstream which is currently
under consideration to build a new dam called Temperance Flat, that today
is envisioned as creating a reservoir of 1.3 million acre-feet and it
could have created a reservoir of that size in the late 1930s just as
well. But there was a token effort made by the Bureau of Reclamation to
study the site. There actually were some borings made for to test the
geology at the site, which is excellent by the way, that has been well
studied again now in the current feasibility study. The difference was
that it was fairly remote and Friant Dam couldn't have been more
convenient to build. It was right at the end of a branch of the Southern
Pacific Railroad, so all sorts of heavy equipment and supplies and
materials could be brought in by train. And it was also owned, the site
was owned by the Madera Irrigation District and they were - it was going
to be available at no cost; that Madera had wanted to build a dam at that
location in order to be able to divert water into Madera County. Madera
County at that time was nothing like we know it today, which is a
beautiful land of high value grape and nut and fruit crops that are all
over the place and most of it is watered from the Madera Canal from
Friant. In those days, it was mostly dryland farming because there was no
water, there was a little water from the Fresno River that was delivered
to farms right around Madera, otherwise there was no water except what
you could pump. And at that time the aquifer in Madera County was not all
that great, and so there really was no high value agriculture as we know
it today. So Madera, the Madera Irrigation District really wanted to have
a dam that they could divert into Madera County through their own version
of the Madera Canal and they became a big supporter and backer at an
early time of the Friant Project, for the Central Valley Project and
provided the site for it. So those are all reasons why Friant Dam was

built where it was, but it certainly has caused no end to operational
problems, both in dry years and in wet years. One of the things which is
so intriguing about Millerton Lake is that it doesn't matter if it's a
wet year or dry year, every year it gets down usually quite a bit below
200,000 acre-feet because it has to be brought down in anticipation of
the next year's snow melt. There isn't a whole lot of room for flood
control, as we found out in the 1997 flood that when that came down and
the lake was above the flood control criteria and the Bureau of
Reclamation did a great job, but they still couldn't improve it, had a
tremendous amount of flooding downstream. A bigger reservoir would have
prevented that, especially at that time of the year.
>> Tom Holyoke: Actually, a reservoir at Temperance Flat would have about
what capacity?
>> Randy McFarland: About 1.3 million acre-feet and that would then Temperance Flat is an interesting project in that the dam would be
located in what is now a part of Millerton Lake, up above the San Joaquin
River's confluence with Fine Gold Creek coming from Madera County. The
dam would be built; it'd be isolated by cofferdams on each side,
temporary cofferdams. And Millerton Lake then would cease to exist at the
new dam and it would be reduced probably by - I haven't heard the exact
figure, probably around 80,000 acre-feet I would imagine from what it is
today. But Millerton Lake would become the after bay to the new
reservoir, which would be the reservoir that would capture the main
flows. And Millerton Lake would probably stay fairly steady in the amount
of water that it has in it by operation. The San Joaquin would have its
storage needs met for all time, would solve a lot of environmental water
problems and also flood control problems with the construction of a dam
at Temperance Flat, which has been found to be feasible. Whether in
today's society the public, the general public and politicians have the
will to do it is another matter.
>> Tom Holyoke: I have a question about Friant Dam when it was being
conceived, you know, Shasta Dam provides a lot of hydroelectric power.
>> Randy McFarland: Uh-huh.
>> Tom Holyoke: Was there ever any thought about Friant Dam also being a
hydroelectric dam?
>> Randy McFarland: Initially there was not. One of the things that was
done that was so advantageous at Pine Flat on the Kings River, a power
plant was not built at the time Pine Flat Dam was constructed in 1954,
but was added 30 years later. And it was really made possible, it was
made so much easier by the fact that when the dam was built three
penstocks, the big pipes that carry the water to the powerhouse had been
built into the dam at Pine Flat as part of the initial development so
those didn't have to be built with the tricky thing of having to bore
through the dam to build the penstocks. That was not done at Friant,
there was no power plant envisioned in the initial plans. And in a sense
that's strange. The San Joaquin River had at that point was best known
from a development standpoint for hydroelectric power development. The
very first hydroelectric power plant in our entire region was San Joaquin

Number One, which was north of Auberry, it's next door to - the site is
next door to what is now the Wishon powerhouse of Pacific Gas and
Electric Company, the tail end of the system that begins at Bass Lake,
the Crane Valley system. And, of course, an even better known system is
upstream that was built by Pacific Light and Power Corporation, now
Southern California Edison Company and its Big Creek Project, where there
are now five major reservoirs all dedicated to storing water for
hydroelectric power generation and a number of smaller operational
reservoirs and a bunch of tunnels and an amazing number of power plants
that use and reuse the water and put it back in the river and send it
downstream. And that does have a real storage benefit on the San Joaquin
River, especially given the size of Millerton Lake, but that water is
there for the power project and only under certain circumstances can the
Bureau of Reclamation call for it to be brought down and that's usually
in a really dry year. So it is odd that they didn't think about it at
that point and perhaps it was thought about and rejected. It came later
is when power was developed. There is power produced at Friant Dam, in
fact, there are four power plants on the face of Friant Dam. The largest
is located on the head works of the Friant-Kern Canal, and the second
largest is on the head works of the Madera Canal, and the third is on the
outlet works to the San Joaquin River, and those are owned by the Friant
Power Authority, which is put together by a number of the Friant member
districts separate from the Friant Water Authority. The Friant Power
Authority runs those powerhouses. They're - all three are relatively
small compared - but they do generate a lot of, a fair amount of power
which is sold and like all power generation, hydropower is great because
it's nonpolluting. And in a usual water year they generate all the time
because there's flows down the Madera Canal and the Friant-Kern Canal. In
2014 and 2015, Friant had no water and most of the water went down the
San Joaquin River. In fact, between the feeling that there may be more
releases to the downstream exchange contractors with what has always been
considered to be Friant water in the years ahead and also future releases
for the San Joaquin River Restoration Program that will go into the
river, the San Joaquin River plant of the Friant Power Authority is in
the process of being expanded now with another unit being added. There's
also one other power plant at the base of Pine Flat, or at the base of
Millerton's Friant Dam. That power plant at Friant is the property of the
Orange Cove Irrigation District, which has a small power plant, which is
on the line of water, which goes from the dam to the fish hatchery a mile
downstream and they call it their Fish Water Plant. So there's actually
four power plants at the base of Friant Dam, but all were added after the
fact.
>> Tom Holyoke: And of the designs that are being done for a possible
Temperance Flat Dam would have that hydroelectric power as a component?
>> Randy McFarland: It would, it would have hydroelectric capability at
the new Temperance Flat Dam. It's something of a wash because in
constructing the reservoir if it ever were built the reservoir would
drown two PG&E power plants; they'd have to be removed. Those are the
power plants that are supplied with water from Kerckhoff Dam north of
Auberry and are down in the San Joaquin River gorge above Millerton Lake.
The idea is to build a larger power plant that will actually in the end
produce more power than the two combined and it would be because of the

potential head of the elevation difference from the top of the reservoir
to the bottom could be a very efficient power plant, more so than the
existing plants. And it would be located just on the ridgeline just below
Sky Harbor Road, which goes along the back side of Millerton Lake. And
interestingly the spillway for the lake would be in the same ridge that
would be there. The spillway would not be on the dam, itself. The dam is
going to be a rock fill dam and so the spillway would go through solid
granite within the mountain and be a tunnel, as would the power plant
which would actually bring its water to the power plant through a
pipeline around the lake so that it would be elevation wise it would be a
very good head and very efficient for generating lots of power.
>> Tom Holyoke: I'd like to go back to something you talked, back when
you were talking about Kings River Fisheries. And that’s - you were
talking about the decline of salmon in the San Joaquin River, the River
Restoration Agreement to a large extent is about trying to reestablish
the salmon run.
>> Randy McFarland: Uh-huh.
>> Tom Holyoke: And you had said that one of the enduring myths is that
there was a very healthy salmon run in the San Joaquin River up to the
point where Friant Dam came online. You had said that that’s not
necessarily true.
>> Randy McFarland: Well, yes, there were salmon in the river right until
the time when Friant Dam was built and passage was blocked and, in fact,
there were still some salmon in the river after that time until - because
the Friant operations, the Friant-Kern Canal did not become fully
operational until 1951 so there was a few years in there in which the
river continued to achieve flows out, probably all the way out the
system. But the number of salmon in the river had continued to decline in
the decades from the start of - well, particularly since the upper end
spawning was cut off above Kerckhoff Dam and also with the Miller & Lux
diversions on the west side, both at Mendota Pool and at Sack Dam east of
Dos Palos, those - they were both barriers and they both had fish ladders
built into them. But the fact is they also were entirely capable in a dry
year since those two facilities watered lands that held the senior rights
to all the water in the river, they could dry up the river and did dry up
the river downstream from Sack Dam on a number of occasions. Well, then
as now, salmon and other fish have trouble swimming through sand and so
there was a natural drop-off. There are doubtlessly other factors. There
were decreased flows from other tributaries downstream coming into the
San Joaquin River as a result of upstream diversions because the San
Joaquin was not the only stream being developed. The Merced, the
Tuolumne, the Stanislaus, there were water users at work up there, too.
Again, water was a resource and in those early years, I'm sure there were
folks who thought about salmon, but it wasn't like how we embrace, the
public embraces environmental matters today and the priority that is
placed on their maintenance and restoration. Instead, our forbearers
looked at resources as something to use to make life better and to make
it possible for more people to live in a dry land, and that's what they
did in building the Big Creek Project. The Pacific Light and Power
Corporation built a project in the wilderness; that was all wilderness at

that time, a project which was seen to be from a construction point of
view probably the equal of the Panama Canal's construction in its
difficulty. They did it by building a 56-mile standard gauge railroad
from just north of Clovis to Big Creek. They did it and they built that
in 156 days, and I've often felt - my wife and I have a cabin up there at
Camp Sierra and I see - every time I go over that I think, gee, in 156
days they built the San Joaquin and Eastern Railroad, now it would take
156 centuries before you'd get the first permit for any part of the
project.
>> Tom Holyoke: EIR.
>> Randy McFarland: Yes, it just wouldn't happen.
>> Tom Holyoke: Actually, about when was that built?
>> Randy McFarland: The Big Creek Project just marked its 100th
Anniversary in 2014. Big Creek Number One began operation; the power
plant there began operation in 1914. The construction began, the planning
began big time in about 1909 and the actual construction started in 1911,
1912. And what amazes me about Big Creek Number One is it's a beautiful
old building, big, it's a very large building. A lot of the equipment,
particularly in the generators and the turbines, a lot of the equipment
is original and talk about being well built in those days. There are lots
of other projects, parts of the project that are newer. Shaver Lake, for
example, was built in - the present dam was built in 1927 for
hydroelectric purposes and Edison built a powerhouse that is powered out
of Shaver Lake. Mammoth Pool came along around 1957 and it has a
powerhouse that was built at the same time and as was powerhouse four
downstream at the very end of the system. So and then the Eastwood
powerhouse, which is the underground pump storage plant above Shaver
Lake, that was built in the 1980s. So the Edison project has been very
dynamic, but the original part of it was built, it was conceived of at a
time when hardly anybody knew what hydroelectricity was.
>> Tom Holyoke: Actually, was that some of the earliest serious
development of the San Joaquin River, hydroelectric power rather than
irrigation?
>> Randy McFarland: Actually, the first development on the San Joaquin
River was irrigation and it was by Miller & Lux, the big cattle company
on the west side. Miller & Lux had been around since the 1860s. It was in
the 1870s when they really started developing water and water resources,
and they did so and it's a long story which I'm certainly not an expert
on how, all the nuances. But they built a brush dam at Mendota, the
forerunner of today's Mendota Dam to create a pool to get water into a
series of canals. They had built their main canal, which was to be a
continuation of the San Joaquin and Kings River irrigating canal. It was
seen - originally it had been proposed for transportation purposes, for
barging and so forth, kind of like the Erie Canal back East. It is still
there, but it's been an irrigation canal all the time and there are
several others that Miller & Lux built emanating from, not only from
Mendota Pool but also the one that comes out of the river downstream
several miles past Firebaugh that is the last diversion to the exchange

contractors. And so that basically was pretty much developed long before
anybody started building dams, except for these little diversion dams at
Mendota and at Sack Dam downstream, but there was no irrigation
development upstream. Then the power project came along. Miller & Lux
controlled the river because they had the senior rights to the San
Joaquin River, but Henry Miller, who was really the brains in the
partnership of Miller & Lux, realized that this big power project with
the reservoirs up there was really going to help the Miller & Lux
properties on the west side because it would provide a summertime supply
of water. The water instead of - it would capture the natural flow, more
of the natural flow, and then release it in the summer. That was when the
power company really wanted to use it anyway to meet the power demands in
Southern California. And so agreements were reached between Miller & Lux
and Pacific Light and Power Corporation for use of the water. Those
agreements continue in various forms to this very day between the San
Joaquin River exchange contractors, the successors to Miller & Lux, and
Southern California Edison Company on how water is handled and also a
party to those agreements now is the US Bureau of Reclamation, which had
to acquire water rights on the San Joaquin River from Miller & Lux in
order to make the Friant Project possible.
>> Tom Holyoke: The Mendota Pool structure, you had said that Miller &
Lux originally built that?
>> Randy McFarland: They originally built a rock and brush dam, and
typically in the old days that's how these diversion structures, which we
call weirs today for the most part. They're small dams, but originally
they were brush and rock structures and they had a bad habit of every
year during the spring floods from the snowmelt or from big rainstorms in
the winter, they'd just wash out so you had to replace them every year.
But eventually, and I can't tell you the exact time, but they did build,
Miller & Lux did build a wood dam just upstream from the present
structure. In fact, when the Mendota Pool is low you can still see some
remains of it. And that served for several years, and then in the World
War I era the present dam at Mendota Pool was built. It's a concrete
structure with wooden boards to control the release of water and it has a
couple of interesting features in it. At that time, the San Joaquin River
actually was still navigable. It's easy to say that streams might be
technically navigable today, but it was still occasionally being used as
far as Firebaugh by boats for water transportation. And they built the
dam, the present dam at Mendota with a lock in it in order to allow a
boat to make it into the pool to go upstream. It also had, and that was
used, from what I understand was used exactly once. And then there was in
the middle of the dam and it's still there as a fish ladder. It isn't
used anymore, but it's still there. And there was a fish ladder built at
Sack Dam into the present dam, too, when it was done. It's a very low
structure, but the Sack Dam fish ladder did permit salmon passage
upstream because there still were enough salmon that then they were
cognizant of it and trying to accommodate it.
>> Tom Holyoke: Actually, what is Mendota Pool used for now, what's...
>> Randy McFarland: Mendota Pool is used to - as a holding basin before
water goes into the canals. It continues to maintain a level of water

high enough to be able to release it into the canals coming out in order
to deliver by gravity. And the old Miller & Lux canals that are run by
the San Joaquin exchange contractors, the largest of which is the Central
California Irrigation District based in Los Banos. The territory, the
service area goes all the way up to around Orestimba Creek near - between
Patterson and Newman, so it goes over a large area. And it's going
downhill, of course, it's going north and that's going toward the Bay up
there, but they wanted to be able to go by gravity all the way.
Interestingly enough, in exactly the same area is the Delta-Mendota
Canal, which comes from the delta to Mendota Pool and provides the
substitute supply of water that normally makes possible Friant
diversions. In 2014 and 2015 because the Bureau of Reclamation could not
provide adequate supplies of water, the San Joaquin River was called upon
to provide the senior rights to the exchange contractors from Friant Dam.
But when things are working as planned there's a couple places where you
have the Delta-Mendota Canal flowing south to Mendota Pool and the canal
right next to it literally feet away flowing north, kind of a strange
thing to look at.
>> Tom Holyoke: One other question, is it true that Sack Dam was
literally made out of sacks originally?
>> Randy McFarland: I think it was. I think it was built out of grain
sacks and the name has stuck on it. It's a concrete structure. There are
plans in place to replace both the Sack Dam and Mendota Dam and, of
course, the San Joaquin River Restoration Program is going to result in a
lot of operational changes at Mendota Pool with the largest of which is
going to be a plan to bypass channel around the north end of Mendota
Pool, bypassing Mendota Dam, so that salmon from the San Joaquin River do
not get mixed in with the water coming from the delta that will continue
to be imported into Mendota Pool. As it now, the Delta-Mendota Canal
terminates in Mendota Pool, water is put in the pool and then it goes out
into the other canals or down the river to Sack Dam. And that's going to
continue to go on after the Restoration Program takes place, but the new
channel will isolate the flows coming from Friant.
>> Tom Holyoke: Let's talk a little bit about the River Restoration
agreements. Now we've interviewed plenty of other people about the
litigation and this, you know, how the settlement was reached. I think
all those people got out of it before we've really gotten to the
implementation of the agreement.
>> Randy McFarland: Well, here we are in 2015 and the implementation has
really not advanced beyond the planning stage. The project is supposed to
be operational by now, and it isn't even started. There are many reasons
for that, along with the fact one of the biggest is that Congress has not
had the will to fund the program. And a lot of the work that has been
done has been using other funds to make it work. The Bureau of
Reclamation has been trying to move ahead. Certainly, it's moved very
slowly for whatever the reasons. A lot of the folks who are involved on
both sides of the equation are critical of the fact that it just it's
taken so long to make decisions, plus there were a couple of big problems
that came up. One of the biggest was when the interim flows, kind of the
test flows down the river started a few years ago, there was something

the Bureau had never realized, even though it occurred every time there
was a flood release, and that is those levees out there along the San
Joaquin River are literally built of river sand, sugar sand and the water
- they don't do a real good job of holding water back and it just seeped
through. And so farmers' fields along the river were being flooded and
crops were being lost and a lot of farmers were very upset about it. They
didn't mind so much when it was a flood, but for something like this, it
just didn't go over very well. And so the Bureau, that was a real
curveball, they swung and missed probably pretty badly on that one and
they've been trying to find a solution ever since. And that was a big
factor. There's lots of others. There's been a - the design of the bypass
channel at Mendota is one of them. Downstream is a huge hurdle that has
never been resolved and that is what channel to use to get the fish to
the Merced River confluence. That's because the old river channel, the
natural channel hasn't been used in decades and is all overgrown with
trees and there's a house built practically down in the river channel. It
just doesn't even look like a river, it looks like one of the many other
sloughs in that regions. Or should they use the flood control channel
nearby. But, unfortunately, the Federal Government doesn't own the flood
control channel, the growers in that area own it and they have given a
flood control easement. And so they oppose the use of the flood control
channel. The property owners along the old river oppose the use of the
old river. And no decision has been made.
>> Tom Holyoke: Curious, when the Bureau releases water, the exchange
contractors, how do they get it down there?
>> Randy McFarland: Well, that - water for the exchange contractor, the
area we're talking about where the old river is north of Highway downstream from Highway 152 and so it's many, many miles downstream of
the exchange contractors' diversion points.
>> Tom Holyoke: Okay.
>> Randy McFarland: Sorry I didn't make that clear.
>> Tom Holyoke: My geography was a little off. So does the Bureau have
any plans for dealing with this problem?
>> Randy McFarland: Well, they're dealing with that. They also have
challenges on temperature, temperature management. Salmon are like trout,
they need cold water. Well, here we have a couple of problems, two or
three different problems. First of all, the source of the water.
Millerton Lake is a small lake, we talked about that earlier, has a
capacity of 520,500 acre-feet. It is spread out over a much wider area,
has a bigger surface area for its size than Pine Flat does. It's
shallower than Pine Flat is by a great amount. The result is that it
heats up a lot faster. Also, a lot of the water has been stored in other
reservoirs upstream and may have warmed, even at higher elevations may
have warmed up there, as well. So the water is already fairly warm, and
then you put it into a channel to convey it downstream for salmon, that
channel is almost flat, when you get below Highway 99 from there out to
the delta the fall is almost insignificant. Yeah, it does drop, but it's
very - the river meanders, it goes back and forth and it's sandy and hot,

and the temperature measurements in the interim flows for - when they
were still running full interim flows I believe show this that there's a
real problem in getting water that's going to be of the adequate
temperature, especially in the summertime for salmon at some crucial
times. What's the solution? Who knows? And there's all sorts of projects
that are in the works. Costs are much, much higher than was anticipated
and, of course, there is within the valley, itself, there is growing
opposition and it's not just among water users, it's among Congressional
delegations. And so where it goes remains to be seen. In my years with
the Friant Water Authority I was well aware, and I was there through the
settlement when it was reached, that it was approved without objection by
the Friant water users because they didn't like it, but it was better
than the alternative and the alternative was that they were losing the
court case and the only question was how much water was the judge going
to order down the river at that point, his remedy for it. And the amount
of water is fixed by the settlement; it's 15 to 20% of the Friant supply.
It's a lot of water, but it beats the unknown on the other end of it. So
is that enough to overtake all of these problems? Is that enough to keep
the settlement from changing course or ending up in litigation? I don't
know and I have no idea.
>> Tom Holyoke: Originally, the settlement, as I understand, there was
supposed to be, you know, to mitigate the damage to Friant users there
was supposed to be water recapture and return. I think that's out of
Mendota Pool maybe?
>> Randy McFarland: The water management goal was viewed by the water
users and ostensibly by the plaintiffs in the case as being a co-equal
goal of river restoration. Water management in this case meant Friant
getting water back, and in so doing the idea was through a number of
means, some of which have been implemented, like in really wet years when
there's surplus water Friant users are now allowed by the Bureau to buy a
certain amount of water, excess surplus water very cheap, for like $10 an
acre-foot and that is seen as a chance to get water into the ground. It's
kind of an exchange in anticipation of getting water back. Another is to
improve the Friant-Kern Canal and possibly the Madera Canal because there
are areas where there's been land subsidence and the canal capacity has
been reduced. And the idea is to restore that capacity, build up the
canal in different locations. There's other things like that, but the big
things would be getting water back either through exchanges, which has
been done to some extent through the exchange contractors on the west
side and Friant has actually been storing some water in the last few
years at times in San Luis Reservoir and then can exchange it back or get
it around the backend of the system through the Cross Valley Canal in
Bakersfield. Water manager is an incredibly clever at being able to
manage water and seemingly make it flow uphill at times. You can do great
things with it and make the system work much more efficiently. I think
the big one is to try to find a way to run water on down the river to
either the tail end and pump it back through the Tracy pumping plant, but
we all know the problem with pumping water out of the delta and that
probably isn't going to go away anytime soon, or building a new facility
at the Delta-Mendota Canal waste way near Patterson where water could be
pumped uphill to the Delta-Mendota Canal from the San Joaquin River and
the flows recovered in that means. Bring it back down into O'Neill

Forebay, then it could go into O'Neill Forebay, it can go into San Luis
Reservoir, and it can go a number of directions either to be physically
returned or returned by exchange.
>> Tom Holyoke: Sounds terribly complicated.
>> Randy McFarland: And it's important, that is still part of the
arrangement, but from the - even though I'm not with Friant anymore I
think it's fair to say that Friant does not believe that the water
management goal has gotten the attention from either the Bureau of
Reclamation or the plaintiffs that it should and to make it - put it in
place at the same time as the river restoration goal becomes reality.
>> Tom Holyoke: Sounds like it might be a certain amount of buyer's
remorse amongst Friant users over the settlement?
>> Randy McFarland: Well, you'd have to ask. There certainly are members
of the valley Congressional delegation who are not pleased with the way
things have gone. I think there's probably a lot of people in the Bureau
of Reclamation if - who really honestly are kind of embarrassed about how
slowly things have gone. And the public support among Friant water users,
it's really hard to gauge, but that rumble you hear could be grumbling
and who knows? It's a difficult thing and the drought certainly hasn't
helped it. Although, we have to say, the restoration program is not
responsible for the fact that in 2014, 2015 that Friant did not get any
water because the releases, the interim releases down the river have been
suspended for these - in 2014 and 2015.
>> Tom Holyoke: Water moving down it's been for the exchange contractors?
>> Randy McFarland: That's right.
>> Tom Holyoke: Just one other thing, the Bureau - last, as I recall, the
Bureau's most recent feasibility study for Temperance Flat Dam seemed to
be all about river restoration and environment rather than irrigation?
>> Randy McFarland: The Friant Water Authority, when the feasibility
study came out was not real happy about a lot of aspects of the program,
about the Bureau feasibility study. And I'm not sure at this point where
things are going. The feasibility study and the Temperance Plant Project
remains alive. There are a lot of efforts, there's a lot of interested
agencies as we talk at this time, there's a lot of interested agencies
and many of them are not water agencies in the San Joaquin Valley who are
ready to dive into this project and help push it forward because they see
the importance of more water storage. But, yes, there was a lot of
unhappiness over various aspects of the feasibility study and some of the
things it looked at. Now the feasibility study did show that the project
is feasible, which was a major factor.
>> Tom Holyoke: Okay, well, anything else that you feel we need to be
discussing right now about San Joaquin River?
>> Randy McFarland: Could talk about anything for a long, long time.

>> Tom Holyoke: Well, maybe for the moment this is a good place to stop.
>> Randy McFarland: Okay.
>> Tom Holyoke: And we can maybe have you back another day.
>> Randy McFarland: That'll be good, be the third time.
>> Tom Holyoke: Thank you very much.
>> Randy McFarland: Third time is a charm. It's a pleasure.

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