Excerpt
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): Now: California's water wars are back, as the state struggles to transfer a vital resource from where it falls to where it's needed.
NewsHour correspondent Spencer Michels reports from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the area south of Sacramento where most of the state's water converges and an area that's crucial to new plans.
SPENCER MICHELS: At the center of a century-long debate over California water is the delta, a jumble of rivers, sloughs, canals and islands surrounded by levees.
It's the spot where the water and snow that falls on the Sierra Nevada Mountains ends up, on its way to San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. It's a beautiful area for fishing, boating and farming. The land is fertile. The water is plentiful. Farmers can pump right out of the Sacramento River for free, and the crops are robust.
Much of this water is pumped across the delta and sent to where the people are, in the arid and populous southern part of the state and to some parts of the San Francisco Bay area. But residents of this half-a-million-acre watery landscape in northern California are concerned that the state and federal governments, along with powerful, thirsty interests further south, some of them corporate farming operations, will divert more of their water and ruin their land and their livelihoods.
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