Securing Our Imported Supplies

An aqueduct in California running through green farmland

Our Foundation: Securing Our Imported Supplies

It is a simple reality: Southern California doesn’t produce enough water locally to meet the demands of our population and economy. The region imports more than half of the water it uses, most of it through Metropolitan. We bring this water to the region from two sources: the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, via the State Water Project, and the Colorado River, via the Colorado River Aqueduct. Together these imported supplies provide a foundation of water reliability in Southern California. Knowing that these critical imported resources cannot easily be replaced, Metropolitan works hard to ensure their continued reliability in the face of climate change.

20% of our water comes from the Colorado River Aqueduct, 30% comes from the State Water project, and 50% comes from local stormwater, groundwater, recycling, and desalination

The Colorado River Aqueduct: Where It All Begins

The Colorado River has been the backbone of Southern California’s imported water supply for 80 years. Built and operated by Metropolitan, the Colorado River Aqueduct carries water from the river 242 miles across the desert to Southern California. It provides about 25 percent of the water used in Metropolitan’s 5,200-square-mile service area.

Lifeblood of the Southwest

Since Metropolitan’s first CRA deliveries in 1941, water from the Colorado River has helped transform Southern California into the thriving region it is today. The river also sustains people, farms, businesses, tribal nations, and wildlife across six other states and Mexico. But while demands for Colorado River water have grown, supplies from the river have not. The resulting imbalance will likely grow as the climate warms, reducing run-off in the river’s watershed. This is the latest challenge in the enduring struggle to share the Colorado River among the 40 million people and 5 million acres of farmland that rely on it.

The Colorado River starts from the Upper Basin in western Colorado and eastern Utah and then flows into Lake Powell From Lake Powell, the water flows into the Lower basin located in northern Arizona and then into Lake Mead in Nevada. Finally, the river follows the border of Arizona and flows into the Gulf of California in Mexico.

Aerial view of the dam in Lake Havasu, Arizona

A New Era of Sustainability

For the past two decades, Metropolitan has been committed to increasing the sustainability of the Colorado River by building partnerships inside and outside California to develop creative conservation and storage programs based on collaboration, not conflict. The agreements and trust forged provide a critical foundation as water agencies across the west negotiate the next steps needed to address the river’s imbalance.

 

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Building the Colorado River Aqueduct

Originally conceived by William Mulholland and designed by Metropolitan’s first Chief Engineer Frank Weymouth, the Colorado River Aqueduct was the largest public works project built in Southern California during the Great Depression. Over seven years, 35,000 people toiled across the desert to construct the engineering feat.

 

Learn more about the history

Aerial view of the State Water Project banks pumpoing plant building

State Water Project:
Delivering Sierra Supplies 

Southern California’s other main source of water — about 30 percent of the region’s supply — comes from the Northern Sierra. It is delivered here through the system of reservoirs and aqueducts known as the State Water Project, the largest state-built water and power system in the nation. The water collects in the Feather River, passes through Lake Oroville and weaves its way through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta before entering the 444-mile long California Aqueduct to Southern California. Along the way, the State Water Project provides a critical water supply to more than 27 million Californians from the Bay Area to San Diego and farmland that produces nearly half of the nation’s fruits and vegetables.

Infrastructure at Risk 

At the heart of this water delivery system is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a complex web of waterways, sloughs, canals and islands, where freshwater from California’s two largest rivers meets saltwater from the Pacific. Water resources from the north must pass through this unique estuary before being carried south.

The Delta is the linchpin of the State Water Project. And it’s at risk.  

Levees vulnerable to sea level rise and earthquakes, climate change altering the flow of water and the declining health of the Delta ecosystem threaten the reliable delivery of water supplies through the Delta. The California Department of Water Resources, which owns and operates the State Water Project, is leading an effort to modernize the Delta’s infrastructure with a new one-tunnel conveyance system that will provide much greater operational reliability and flexibility in the face of these challenges. Metropolitan, the largest contractor of State Water Project water, has provided preliminary support of this Delta Conveyance Project.

 

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Aerial view of a flooded region in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta

 

Earthquakes

With several faults running through the region, the U.S. Geological Survey estimates there is a 72 percent chance of a magnitude 6.7 earthquake hitting the region in next 30 years. Such an event could cause widespread failures along the 1,100 miles of levees that surround Delta islands, allowing seawater to rush in and could render the freshwater that travels between the levees undrinkable for months, even years.

Sea Level Rise

Rising sea levels will not only put more pressure on the Delta’s dirt levees, they will push seawater further into the Delta, impacting water quality, and threatening the intakes that draw water out of the Delta and into the California Aqueduct, which sit only a few feet above sea level.

Soil Subsidence

In the 1850s, the Delta was transformed from marshland to farmland, using levees to keep water back. The process exposed peat soils, which are rapidly vaporizing, causing the land levels to drop and turning the islands into bowls entirely dependent on the levees. As subsidence continues, water pressure on the levees increases, putting them at greater risk of collapse, which would draw seawater toward the Delta’s freshwater resources.  

Fishery Declines

Various endangered species call the Delta home. Regulators’ efforts to protect these species have largely focused on cutting back water exports through the State Water Project, though numerous scientific panels have attributed the decline in the Delta’s ecosystem health to various causes. Over the past three decades, export pumping capability from the Delta has been reduced by more than 2 million acre-feet a year.  

Aerial view of a train bridge that crosses the Feather River

Balancing Ecosystem Health, Water Reliability and Home 

The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is unlike any other place in California. Along with being the hub of the state’s water delivery system, the estuary is home to more than 300 species of wildlife – 29 of which are threatened or endangered, dozens of historical communities and hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland. The fertile peat soil of its islands annually produces $700 million in agricultural crops and its ecosystem supports the commercial salmon industry on the West Coast. The Delta is all at once an element of water infrastructure, a critical ecosystem, a statewide economic engine, and home to 500,000 people. Balancing those identities is the challenge of regulators, water managers, biologists and others.

How much water can be pumped out of the Delta for delivery south to cities and farms every year depends not only on the amount of snow and rain in the Sierra Mountains, but also on the condition of the Delta’s ecosystem and fisheries. For three decades, regulators have increasingly restricted deliveries in an effort to protect endangered species in the Delta, including the Delta smelt. Metropolitan understands that water supply reliability cannot improve without also improving the health of the Delta’s fragile ecosystem.

The Delta Conveyance Project is one part of the solution to help improve water supply reliability. But that alone won’t fix the Delta. Nor will simply releasing more water into the estuary. The Delta was once a vast marshland covered with tules and teaming with wildlife. In the mid-1800s, settlers built levees to drain and reclaim the land and today about 95 percent of the original wetlands and floodplains are gone. In this highly altered environment, non-native species have thrived, over-running native species. Striped bass, Asian clams and many other invaders, large and small, are either eating the native populations or the foods on which they rely.

Addressing these environmental challenges will take science-backed solutions, solutions that Metropolitan is helping research, in collaboration with state and federal agencies. It also will take partnerships with all the diverse interests in the Delta.

The Heart of California’s Water Supply  

The Delta is critical to the state’s economy, water supply, and quality of life for millions of Californians. It is home to an important ecosystem and legacy communities. Learn more about this place, its challenges and potential solutions.

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Saving for a Not-So-Rainy Day: Exchanges, Transfers & Water Banking

California has always had highly variable weather – swinging from very dry years to very wet ones. As the climate changes, those swings are expected to become even more extreme, which means greater fluctuation in the water resources Metropolitan imports. To ensure Southern California has reliable water supplies, regardless of these swings, Metropolitan has made significant investments in storage. We’ve increased our storage capacity by 13 times since 1990, so when there is a very wet year in the Sierra or Colorado River Basin, we can store water for use in dry years. Some of that storage increase has come through investments in surface reservoirs, like Diamond Valley Lake and Lake Mead, through the Intentionally Created Surplus program. But equally important is the storage capacity Metropolitan has developed through partnerships with water agencies across California for groundwater banking and exchanges.

Banking Across the State

 

Through its groundwater banking agreements, Metropolitan stores water with partner agencies along the State Water Project and the Colorado River Aqueduct. They either put the water into their groundwater basins using spreading grounds or exchange it for water that they would have pumped out of the ground for use. In dry years, when Metropolitan’s imported supplies are limited, these partners either pump up some of the stored water for Metropolitan’s use or provide their other supplies in exchange. 

Metropolitan’s Partners:  

  • Semitropic Water Banking and Exchange Program, Wasco
  • Arvin-Edison Water Management Program, Arvin
  • Kern Delta Water District Water Management Program, Taft
  • Mojave Storage Program, Mojave 
  • Antelope Valley-East Kern Water Agency (AVEK) High Desert Water Bank 
  • Desert Water Agency/Coachella Valley Water District Advanced Delivery Program, Coachella Valley

 

Other Water Transfers & Agreements

Metropolitan has developed other partnerships and programs to improve the reliability of imported supplies. This includes direct water transfers and exchanges, in which water is directly purchased in dry years, or exchanged for more water in wet years. Metropolitan’s portfolio includes such agreements with state and federal water agencies, water districts and individuals. On the Colorado River, Metropolitan also has developed specialized conservation programs in which Metropolitan invests in agricultural conservation and receives the conserved water.

Crops growing in a field located below arid mountains