WATER MANAGEMENT


This portion of the California Aqueduct is in the high desert in Southern California, which is part of the area that cannot get all of its water since the capacity has dropped due to subsidence.


allows for “appropriators” such as cities who move water as municipalities, not landowners. Surface water rights were fully governed by legislation in 1914 using a permit structure. SGMA was adopted exactly 100 years later.


While groundwater regulation has taken longer, it has had several key milestones spanning from groundwater management being added to California water law in 1961 to a critical drought in the mid 1970s


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leading to a review of water rights law to new and changing water laws throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.


FINAL IMPACTS


The final event that brought SGMA to fruition was the 2011 to 2017 Califor- nia drought. By 2013, the impacts of drought-related groundwater pumping became very visible. Two impacts stood out. One was the loss of shallow water by


small domestic wells throughout the state with some whole subareas going dry. The poster child for area-wide loss was a small San Joaquin Valley community above the City of Porterville called East Porterville.


The other impact, sinking land, was presented using new visuals created by a novel radar technique that colorfully showed the areas sinking due to the collapse of clay layers in the deeper subsurface. This impact, which geologists


Winter 2021 | Irrigation TODAY 21


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