LOS ANGELES
Efforts to restore steady flows to a part of the Owens River that all but dried up after much of its water was diverted to Los Angeles decades ago are ahead of schedule and should be completed next year, city officials said Friday.
Water from the Los Angeles Aqueduct should begin flowing into the Owens River in December and reach a court-ordered 40 cubic feet per second by next July, according to the city's Department of Water and Power.
"LADWP has been meeting all deadlines and we are actually ahead of schedule to have the first water flows released into the river this December," said DWP spokeswoman Carol Tucker. The court-ordered deadline is Jan. 25, 2007.
The DWP issued a lengthy statement on the status of its Owens River restoration efforts after an appeals court on Wednesday upheld a ruling banning the city from using one of its aqueducts if deadlines aren't met.
The $29 million project would divert water from the Los Angeles Aqueduct to a 62-mile section of the river as well as to the Owens Lake delta more than 200 miles north of Los Angeles. The flow is expected to create hundreds of acres of wetlands and maintain area lakes and ponds.
Its completion will close at least one chapter in a century-old fight that began when Los Angeles officials bought up land and water rights in the rural, sparsely populated Owens Valley along the Eastern Sierra and began diverting its water to their rapidly growing metropolis.
After the first Los Angeles Aqueduct was completed in 1913 sections of the Owens River were reduced to a trickle. After the second one began operations in 1970 the Owens Lake dried up.
Los Angeles agreed to the restoration project in 1997 to mitigate damage caused between 1970 and 1990. The city was sued in 2001 after critics complained it had missed more than a dozen project deadlines.
Last year, Inyo County Superior Court Judge Lee E. Cooper threatened to shut down the second aqueduct if the deadlines weren't met. He also imposed fines of $5,000 a day until water is flowing at 40 cubic feet a second.
DWP officials said they only appealed to prevent the aqueduct from being closed if they couldn't meet the deadline.
Together the two aqueducts deliver about 430 million gallons of water a day to Los Angeles.
___
On the Net:
Inyo County Water Department Lower Owens River Project page: http://www.inyowater.org/LORP/default.htm
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power: http://www.ladwp.com/ladwp/cms/ladwp008679.jsp
Published: Friday, September 29, 2006 12:55 PDT
BSRanch Perspective:
Looks like they are finally going to do what they said that they would do back in 1997 and that was to fix the lower Owens River, a River Bed that has not seen any water in over a 100 years or so. It is going to be great to have a little run off there and if they do fill up the Owens Lake enough water to have a Boat Launch and the like it would even get better!!
BSRanch
No comments:
Post a Comment