Water war highlights old Californian rift

Press, 13 July 1982, Page 16

Water war highlights old Californian rift

From

JOHN HUTCHINSON,

in San Francisco

The latest, controversy over water in the rivers has laid bare significant outright hostility between northern and southern California. Their traditional, jocular, and sarcastic rivalry is no longer a joke. The recent poll, in which northern Californians united to defeat the more numerous southern Californians on a proposal to shunt more water from the north to supply everthirstier southerners, exposed with vivid emphasis the true enmity with which the two regions regard each other. The vote jolted open a rift between northern Californians and the people "south of the Tehachapi” that promises to grow wider. The Tehachapi is a mountain range. Although southern California has more voters than the north, and although the proponents of the 45-mile Peripheral Canal spent- a great deal of money campaigning for it, the huge ditch project went down to defeat. The southerners voted for it, 61 per cent to 39, but in the north, 92 per cent opposed it and one county turned out a 97 per cent vote - of "No.” Shocked pollsters who had predicted a pro-canal victory are still trying to explain their failure to foresee the.outcome.

A political scientist called the . vote an “earthquake,” reflecting a moral attitude with .which northern Californians regard the southerners as waste- . ful of natural resources and insensitive to nature. A sense of outrage pervaded southern California after the vote, in some part directed at the “snobbery” of northerners who voted out of contempt for the south rather than on the merits of the canal. The intensity of feeling was illustrated by a cartoon of startling impact on the leader page of the customarily dignified "Los Angeles Times.” It showed a man standing in northern California, his back to the reader, relieving himself on southern California. The “San Francisco Chronicle” reprinted the cartoon and precipitated a spate of letters protesting the drawing as crude and offensive. The fight over water here has a long history and the issue is complicated. Cultural dislikes between the two parts of the state certainly had a great deal to do with the northern vote, but the rational issues were concerned with fears that the immense canal (roughly comparable to the Suez) would not only destroy the character of the wild and beautiful river

system of the north, but would radically alter the rich and fragile delta lands north and east of San Francisco Bay, accelerating the invasion of seawater and damaging agriculture and wild life. Also important to' many voters, including large numbers in southern California, were the staggering outlays required: ?4000 million to build the canal, and possibly four times that much for associated projects, pumping plants and power installations. The vote has by no means ended the struggle. Southern Californians are keenly aware that they live in an area that was a desert until well into the last century, and that they must have more water to support growth. Farmland, much of it owned or controlled by huge corporations, needs ( more water. ' ' Northern California has the water, in the only significant rivers still exploitable, and the water is the state's single most precious natural treasure. Already approved for a new referendum in November is another measure, proposing radical changes in the management of water resources, and the' battle lines are forming. The water war will last as long as the rivers run.