SACRAMENTO, Calif — We often talk about water infrastructure as it relates to reservoirs, aqueducts, levees, and other means of water storage and flood protection. But California’s water infrastructure isn’t just made of concrete.
Floodplain restoration is fast becoming a key part of California's water puzzle.
Dos Rios Ranch Preserve – near Modesto at the confluence of the Tuolumne and San Joaquin Rivers – became Dos Rios Ranch State Park in April, and officially opens to the public in June. It’s California’s newest state park, and the first since 2014. It’s what’s known as a multi-benefit project; Dos Rios supports wildlife from fish to birds, is a place for recreation, and also a place for floodwater to go during wet winters.
Dos Rios was a flagship project of River Partners, a not-for-profit organization focused on creating wildlife habitat while at the same time benefiting people and the environment.
River Partners President Julie Rentner recently sat down with ABC10 to discuss the Dos Rios project and the importance of river restoration as a climate adaptation tool.
Here are some of the key points of the conversation. The whole conversation can be seen above.
1. Why river and floodplain restoration is important
“We have one of the most complicated water delivery systems ever created,” Rentner said. “All the reservoirs and all of the big concrete lined canals and aqueducts and all of the facilities that we have, have supplied freshwater to this growing economy and this growing population in really reliable ways.”
Climate change poses a great risk to California’s water supply. The likelihood of multiyear droughts increases, but so does the potential for fewer but wetter winters. And the type of precipitation that falls is also likely to change, with more rain and less snow in the Sierra. This poses challenges both in the way California captures and stores water, as well as how it handles floodwater.
“What this translates into is kind of regulatory conflict and challenges, especially as our climate continues to change, around how we're going to have safe and reliable water for people to drink safe communities from flood risk and wildlife populations that aren't going extinct,” Rentner said. “So when you pile all those things up together, it turns out that rivers are kind of the heart of both keeping our water supplies reliable, but also keeping California living and thriving and vibrant for generations to come.”
River and floodplain restoration benefit Californians through groundwater recharge. Floodplains are a dedicated space that allows for excess water to flow into freely, without the risk to people and infrastructure.
“We can put almost 10 times as much water underground as we can in surface storage reservoirs in California,” Rentner said. “Turns out that to get water to sink into the ground, it's pretty simple. What you need is sandy, gravelly places where you spread that water out, let it sink in, get deep, deep underground, then when we need to in the dry times – when we have dry years or successive dry years – we have groundwater wells that can pull that water back out and use it.”
And river corridors and floodplains, like Dos Rios, are the best places to achieve groundwater storage.
2. Dos Rios State Park
“If you look at it on a map, the Dos Rios Ranch State Park is like this heart in the center of our water system,” Rentner said. “It's at this location right where the San Joaquin River and its largest tributary, the Tuolumne, come together.”
With eight miles of riverfront property and a 1600-acre restored floodplain, Dos Rios Ranch State Park is the flagship for River Partners’ restoration work.
“We were fortunate to buy this property with public funds back in 2012 thinking it would be lovely if one day this was part of a wildlife refuge, a park, regional park, a state park, who knows what,” Rentner said. “And it was very exciting to engage with the administration and with California State Parks over the last few years to turn this baby, this enormous restoration project into a state park that everybody in California can enjoy.”
Dos Rios is more than just a place for recreation. It also has benefits for water recharge and for taking pressure off some of the levees in the San Joaquin Valley.
“We all know levees have a chance of breaking every time there's high water,” Rentner said.
Dos Rios, upstream of places like Stockton and Modesto, can take in some floodwater that otherwise would flow through urban areas. This serves to relieve some pressure on flood protection infrastructure upstream in addition to allowing that water to seep in underground.
3. Apple, Google, and public-private partnerships
Here’s the thing about floodplain restoration projects like Dos Rios: it’s not cheap. Dos Rios cost 40 million dollars and was funded by both public and private entities. But it’s not the only project River Partners is working on.
“We've got projects as far south as Holtville, down in the Imperial Valley, all the way up to near Redding, on the Sacramento River,” Rentner said. “Some of the largest ones that I'm most excited about are in the hundreds of 1000s of acres in size.”
Renter said River Partners recently closed on a property near where Bear Creek flows into the San Joaquin River in Merced County.
There’s also soon to be a several hundred-acre project in the Sacramento Valley where the Sacramento and Feather rivers meet.
“When I think about the future, River Partners alone is looking at something between 50,000 to 60,000 acres of projects like this over the next decade or decade and a half,” Rentner said. “That's not going to be cheap. But when we think about the scale, that we can get investment from federal partners, state partners, local partners, corporate partners, all coming together, I think it's doable.”
River Partners has received funding from some corporations that are recognizable around the world, including the tech giants Google and Apple.
“Bringing in partners from the corporate sector is something that I think we've all in the water world been thinking about for a long time. But we're finally at the moment where it's time to launch. Where the projects are ready,” Rentner said. “The outcomes have been studied enough. And we can say reliably, that when an Apple or a Google invests this money in a project here, they're not just getting a water stewardship outcome that's commensurate with their own water use in that watershed or in that space or in this region. But also incentivizing and investing in a whole bunch of co-benefits, which makes us proud, makes the corporation proud. It makes our public funding partners and programs proud as well.”
MORE CLIMATE CONVERSATIONS: Tony Meyers sits down with ABC10 to discuss the State Water Project, the future of water transport, and the latest on the Delta Tunnel.