By Wes Sims | KUSP News

During droughts cities tell residents to stop watering outside. Farms don’t have that option. This drought highlights the challenge growers face maintaining agriculture while preserving water supplies. It’s become part of the curriculum for a program that educates community leaders about local agricultural issues.

Drying Landscape
Marine Biologist Mark Silberstein is giving a walking tour of the Elkhorn Slough, near Moss Landing.

“From this vantage point you really get the broad sweep of Elkhorn Slough. You sort of get the big picture,” Silberstein says as the tour reaches a point offering a view of much of the preserve.

Silberstein is executive director of the non-profit Elkhorn Slough Foundation, and one of a dozen instructors at Focus Agriculture, an annual nine-week lecture series designed to give members of the community, an on-site understanding of farming in the Pajaro Valley.

“This is called the Springfield Terrace, where before the Second World War, there was artesian water,” he says. “There was so much water pressure that fresh water bubbled out of the ground.”

Contaminated Wells, Fallowed Land
But not anymore, because of salt-water intrusion, and more recently, a critical lack of rainfall. Jess Brown, the executive director of Agri-Culture, the Watsonville-based non-profit that administers Focus Ag, says the drought raised the priority water use discussions.

“We’re very lucky to have Lou Calcagno, who has been a supervisor for many years but he’s a dairy farmer,” Brown says. “And what’s interesting is that he talks about how Elkhorn Slough, where his dairy is, was a fresh water body, and now it isn’t. It’s salt water.”

Calcagno offered this example: “Just recently, the Fish and Game bought a property next to me. They had a well, it was 800 feet, it went salty. The 850 acres that was farmed, it’s no longer farmed. It’s growing weeds.”

Reclaimed Water or Taking Land Out of Production
Farming in California coastal areas has suffered from salt water intrusion for a long time, an issue Lou Calcagno deals with as a dairy farmer and as a Monterey County Supervisor. Calcagno supports the increased use of recycled water as one way to replenish the groundwater supply.

“When you leave Moss Landing and you drive to Salinas or you cross the river to Monterey, all that ground is being irrigated with reclaimed water, which we call purple line, sewer water from the City of Monterey, former Fort Ord, Marina, Seaside, Salinas, Moss Landing, and Castroville. We take all that water and reclaim it.”

Though the Elkhorn Slough Foundation maintains about ten percent of its surrounding lands in some kind of farming or ranching, Mark Silberstein says another way existing groundwater supplies can be preserved, is by not farming areas that are unproductive.

“We’ve taken 600 plus acres of steep – what we felt were overly steep or eroding hillsides – out of production. That equates to approaching 2,000 acre feet of water a year that was being pumped out of the ground year after year that’s now banked in the ground.”

The Task at Hand
Two thousand acre feet would be about four percent of the amount that farms take out of Pajaro Valley wells each year. Focus Ag class member and Watsonville City Council woman Trina Coffman-Gomez says, clearly, there’s work to be done.

“All of us need to take our part and be responsible for conserving what we can, because it, it’s basically the monetary value of our area. It’s no longer money. It’s water. Water is that gold that’s in our valley here, and we need to make sure we do the best with the resources that we have here and work together with it.”

2013 was one of the driest years on record, with water use in the Pajaro Valley, the second highest in the last decade. And that was before drought conditions got as bad as they are now.

Before rationing took effect, Santa Cruz checked water use with an aggressive public information campaign. Photo: Wes Sims.

By Wes Sims | KUSP News

Two of the larger districts in the Monterey Bay area rely on rivers for their water. Under rationing, in Santa Cruz, if your family uses fifteen hundred gallons over the limit, Water Director Rosemary Menard says “You’d be looking at about 75 dollars a month in fines.”

Meanwhile, on the Monterey Peninsula, there are no fines. Here’s why there’s rationing in one place and not another.

Since May 1st in Santa Cruz, if you use more than a certain amount of water in a month, you get fined. Water Director Rosemary Menard walked me through what would be a pretty big water bill, for someone trying to keep a green lawn, or a swimming pool that uses 9-thousand dollars a month. “If you’re a single family residential customer inside the city, you’d be looking at about 75-dollars a month in fines for, um, the 15-hundred gallons over your allotment of about 75-hundred.”

Rosemary Menard assumed directorship of the Santa Cruz Water District just in time to shepherd it through a historical drought. Photo: Wes Sims.

During the summer, the water in the San Lorenzo River usually doesn’t meet demand. The Loch Lomond reservoir fills in that gap. Santa Cruz’s rationing fines and a big publicity campaign are designed to reduce water usage.

So what we’ve been really working on is trying to maintain Loch Lomond at a high enough level at the end of the dry season this year 1:10 so that if we have another dry year next year, we have enough another dry year next year we have the flexibility and some additional capacity to meet customer demand kind of in the second or third or fourth or fifth dry year that might come in a row.

Toby Goddard, the districts’ administrative services manager explained why, at a public event.

“Well, the short story is, it didn’t rain this year. And the streams from which the city draws its water supply are expected to flow about one-tenth of their normal amount. And so our supplies are drying and our reservoir storage never recovered from last year, and we’re trying to reduce demand so that we have some water in storage for next year in case the drought drags on.”

“You know, we’ve been having a really good response from our customers. We have about 94% compliance based on the May consumption data, and that is really great.”

A minute ago, you heard Cal Am spokesperson Catherine Stedman say:

“On the Monterey Peninsula we don’t expect to impose rationing at this time.”

That’s because … “Water bills already already are priced so steeply that people have been using less water for years.”

The Monterey Peninsula Water District takes most of its supply through wells that draw from the gravel underneath the Carmel River. This dries up the natural habitat of Steelhead trout … and the district faces an order to cut back most of what it draws from the Carmel River by the end of 2016. Water Demand Manager Stephanie Locke:

“The Monterey Peninsula has lived in a conservation mode for the last twenty years. What we do on a daily basis is what other agencies are putting into place in response to the drought.”

For the past several years the Monterey District has encouraged conservation by charging increasingly higher rates. Remember that water bill in Santa Cruz … how before rationing, it would have been about thirty one dollars? Cal-Am’s Catherine Bowie says the same usage would cost twice that much in Monterey.

“You’d have 60 units in the first tier and 60 units in the second and the total would come out to 63 dollars.”

The peninsula has been paying a lot for water since before the drought. This may be why Stephanie Locke expects the district to use less water than it can take from the river … even during this historical drought year.

“So I think that overall our savings, we’re at just below sixty gallons per person per day, making us one of the lowest water users in the state of California, has been to our advantage and is keeping us from having to go further at this time.”

There is the hope that warming of the Eastern Pacific could result in an El Nino that might bring substantial rainfall. But Toby Goddard says there have been dry El Ninos.

“It really doesn’t factor into our dry year planning this year because we can’t count on it.”

What water users in both districts can count on is dryer lawns and shorter showers.

Collecting sea water samples in Santa Cruz.. Photo: Courtesy of http://www.ourradioactiveocean.org/

By Melissae Fellet | KUSP News

The ocean is calm on the Sunday in April when surfers and activists gather on Pleasure Point to test the water for radiation.One places a plastic case and a 5-gallon jar on the end of his surfboard, paddles out beyond those waiting to catch a wave, and fills the jar with water.

“We’d like to do three to four samples a year,” says Robin Brune, a resident of Felton. “This is just the first one.”

Brune says her heart grew heavy when she learned about the radiation coming from Japan. “Santa Cruz is so much about surfing and [I wondered] what would it be like, what would our lifestyle, what would our city be like if it was not safe to surf,” she says.

Brune started a MeetUp group called Save Our Surfers Fukushima Response Santa Cruz so people could gather to share information about radiation. The group identified a scientist analyzing samples of seawater for radiation from Fukushima, and Brune arranged to send him some water collected in Santa Cruz.

“There are a lot of people who have more questions than answers, me being one of them,” she says. “But I felt like it was really important to meet each other, and work together and build community around this issue.”

Citizen monitoring

Brune saw a video online made by Tyler Fox, who runs the surfing website Santa Cruz Waves. In January, Fox took a Geiger counter to popular beaches around Santa Cruz, trying to detect radiation coming from the Fukushima plant. He also asked surfers and fishermen if they had safety concerns about the radiation.

“I was really moved that we have a lone surfer trying to take on a very big issue and I felt like he needed help,” Brune says. “And I also feel like government should be doing more to be testing our environment and keeping us informed. And they are not testing our oceans.”

Ken Buesseler, a marine radiochemist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, sees two sides to monitoring radioactivity in the ocean. “One is, we’re not predicting [high levels]; I’m not trying to get people overly concerned. But on the other hand, since our governments aren’t monitoring this, it’s time people should be actually able to know what those levels are so we can talk about that.”

Radiation Levels in Context

Buesseler’s program measured radiation levels in the water collected at Pleasure Point.

“I’m not one to say that radioactivity isn’t dangerous,” Buesseler says. “The levels really matter. If it’s 10 million, I’m concerned for being there. If it’s tens of thousands, I’m concerned about seafood contamination. And if it’s one to ten, that’s within what we see already in the ocean from prior things like testing of atmospheric nuclear weapons.”

He calculates the dose of radiation someone would get from swimming in ocean water with a cesium concentration of 10 Bequerels per cubic meter (Bq/m³) would be several thousand times less than walking through an airport x-ray scanner.

Buesseler says people are surfing off Japan where cesium levels around are 100 Bq/m³ range today.

Models predict levels of cesium from the Fukushima accident could range from 1 to 30 Bq/m³ when the radiation reaches the United States. That’s similar to current levels of radiation from the Chernobyl disaster in the Baltic Sea and Black Sea.

“There are no obvious health effects,” Buessler says. “You’re getting to numbers so small, you can’t see them in the population.” For comparison, drinking water standards are in the tens of thousands of Bq/m³. “That we try to avoid,” he says.

Buesseler hopes groups along the Pacific Coast collect samples every few months for analysis. The results from Pleasure Point are available now, and they’re comparable to a sample taken further south at Granite Creek: No detectable radiation from Fukushima yet. I’m Melissae Fellet.

See results of the sampling program and how you can participate at Buesseler’s program’s Web site ourradioactiveocean.org.

“Fish from Ueno market” (in Japan) Photo: Gideon/malias-flickr

By Melissae Fellet | KUSP News

Wind Euler is with the group MamaBears Against Nukes in Arizona. In April, she spoke to a community group in Santa Cruz County about exposure to low levels of radiation. Eating contaminated fish, Euler says, carries more risk than swimming in lightly contaminated water.

“Maybe eating one fish, might not hurt,” she says. “But if you keep on eating fish and keep on eating fish, you get a chronic internal exposure. And that’s where the danger lies.”

Concerns over contaminated seafood arose about five months after the Fukushima disaster, when bluefin tuna caught off the coast of San Diego contained radioactive cesium released during the accident. Ken Buesseler studies marine radiochemistry at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. He explains how the US Food and Drug Administration sets safety standards for an acceptable amount of radiation in fish destined for market.

“Since there is no such thing as zero risk, they’ve set a number that you’d have to be eating contaminated fish for an entire year at those levels, you would have a slight increase in cancer,” Buesseler says.

The amount of cesium in the San Diego tuna was about 100 times lower than FDA limits. Someone would have to eat about 275 pounds of that fish in one year to get approximately the same dose of radiation that you get during a dental x-ray.

Fish contain more cesium near the damaged power plant, but those fish are not likely to be caught for market. Buesseler says he eats seafood when he’s in Japan because they’ve stopped fishing near the power plant.

“They literally don’t fish. They did not rebuild the canneries, the docks, the fishing fleets,” he says. “Remember, the tsunami damage was extensive: 100,000+ buildings, 20,000 people lost their lives.”

Radiation Decline Rates

Fish living on the bottom of the ocean near Fukushima continue to accumulate radioactivity possibly released from the power plant or the seafloor. Models can predict how quickly radiation levels will decline in fish, but that speed depends on what happens to them.

“If you took contaminated fish right from the source and put it in a can, it would take 30 years for cesium-137 to decay, or disappear, by half,” Buesseler says. “That’s its half life. That’s how long it stays around because of radioactive decay processes.”

But that time changes when radioactive elements interact with the biochemistry of a fish.

“That same fish, if it was alive and swimming in clean water, it would lose half its cesium in 50 days, because cesium goes right through the fish,” he says. “It doesn’t bioaccumulate to degree like you hear about mercury and other things in tuna.”

The Situation With Strontium

That’s why Buesseler doesn’t worry about cesium-containing fish swimming across the ocean and appearing in other fisheries. The situation is different for strontium-90, another radioactive element in the oceans near Fukushima. Strontium behaves like calcium, and it can replace calcium in your bones.

“Instead of 50 days, think of more like 500 days, a couple of years, before it it would be released back through natural processes,” he says. “So this biological half-life is important as well as the radio half-life for these isotopes.”

In the ocean near the power plant, levels of strontium-90 have grown since the accident. But Buesseler says he hasn’t seen alarming numbers for strontium in fish yet. “Down the road, as we see strontium becoming more of concern, that isotope in the food chain will have to be studied more carefully,” he says.

Buesseler hopes to monitor strontium levels in the ocean and seafloor near Japan in the future. Should that strontium move across the Pacific Ocean, it will take three years for it to reach the West Coast of the United States.

Community activists gather in Live Oak to take the first of what they hope will be several periodic samples of ocean water to monitor radiation from Fukushima. Photos: Melissae Fellet

By Melissae Fellet | KUSP News

Scientists predict that radioactivity from the Fukushima nuclear disaster three years ago could reach the west coast this year. There’s no government monitoring of radioactivity in the ocean, so researchers are teaming up with citizens and groups along the West coast to do sampling.

As the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant developed, radioactive water streamed into the Pacific Ocean, where it mixed with the Kuroshio Current, a strong current moving from Japan, into the ocean just south of the major releases.

Ken Buesseler studies marine radioactivity at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. He’s running a program to measure the amount of radiation from Fukushima that reaches the West Coast. That information helps scientists track how ocean currents transport and dilute the radioactive particles.

“We’re seeing the front edge; we often use the word plume,” Buesseler says. “Think of dye moving across the ocean. It’s a little bit streaky; it gets kind of blurry. But there’s a front edge we can detect.”

Once that front edge reaches the coast, models predict levels of radioactive cesium from the accident will keep increasing for two or three years.

“The exact numbers differ by a factor of ten,” he says. “I think that’s a pretty high difference between these models. Yet all of the numbers are pretty low in terms of what’s accepted human health and safety standards. On the other hand, if no one is measuring it, how would you know?”

Community Seawater Collection

In January, Buesseler’s program first analyzed seawater collected in California and Washington State. Donations and private funds cover the costs of measuring the radiation levels in the samples.

“I didn’t know what the response would be, but we’ve had over 300 individual donations made to our effort,” he says. “We’ve started over 30 sites, about 15 analyzed. Some with long-term support from Alaska down to San Diego and Hawaii.”

In April, when the radioactive water might have appeared in the Monterey Bay area, community members collected water at Pleasure Point and sent it Buesseler for analysis. Nina Moore is a resident of Felton and a member of the Meetup group called Save our Surfers Fukushima Response Santa Cruz.

“There might be trace elements,” Moore says. “But there might be none. We have to keep testing so at least we have that reference of the first test, the third, and on.”

Measuring to Improve Models

Radioactivity is measured in units called becquerels. Each becquerel corresponds to one radioactive particle released by a particular element in one second. Radioactivity in the ocean is measured by counting becquerels in a cubic meter of water.

Before the accident, levels of cesium-137 in the ocean ranged from 1-2 becquerels per cubic meter (Bq/m3). “[That] isotope has been with us ever since we started nuclear weapons testing,” Buesseler says. Models predict additional cesium from Fukushima could add 1-30 Bq/m3 of radioactivity to the ocean.

The largest prediction is more than 200 times lower than standards for cesium in drinking water set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. That means additional marine radioactivity from Fukushima is not expected to bring significant health risks. But Buesseler says accurately measuring its levels might help scientists better understand how radioactive elements move across the oceans.

“If there are other accidents [or] other sources that happen along the coast, when we’re more concerned about health effects, we really want to know better than a factor of ten how that isotope is transported across the ocean,” he says.

If Fukushima has taught us nothing else, Buesseler says, the ocean is involved when something goes wrong with nuclear reactors on coastlines. More than 90 percent of the radioactivity from this disaster ended up in the ocean.

Cliff Stout, general manager of Classic Salads, demonstrates the harvesting of kale that his company grows in the Salinas Valley. The fresh stalk cracks and snaps in his grip.

“We take our hands around the top few leaves, leaving those behind, and we basically strip the plant of all its leaves, removing kind of the yellow ones or the not so good-looking ones and under…”

Now in its 14^th year of operation, Classic Salads, farms 850 acres of specialty salad and vegetable items. All while keeping an eye on drought conditions throughout California.

“So we’re very thankful for these wells and not depending necessarily on surface water to take care of our crops.”

While surface water from rivers and streams,supplies urban users in Monterey County, the engine that powers agriculture is the Salinas Valley Groundwater Basin;a massive underground aquifer filled with fresh water that growers access from their own wells.  But a lack of adequate rainfall impacts that water source too. Robert Johnson, Assistant General Manager of the Monterey County Water Resources Agency says Nacimiento Reservoir is down to 22% of its capacity. Lake San Antonio is down to 2%.

Conservation Through Technology

Johnson’s figures show Monterey County agriculture pumped well over 446,000 acre feet of groundwater in 2012.  And that was before the onset of drought conditions.  He says farmers are getting the message.

“They know that they need to conserve water because it’s the life blood of their business,” he says. “And they’ve put numerous conservation methods in place, like drip irrigation.”

Which is a method that Cliff Stout already has in place at Classic Salads.

“The drip lines put the water right at the plant base and the root,” Stout says.

With the possibility of continued drought, Christina McGinnis … who manages resources and policy in the Agricultural Commissioner’s Office, says new technology can help.  One such device is called the soil moisture sensor.

“And essentially what it does, it provides computer data to monitor what kinds of moisture levels are occurring in the soil so that the farmer knows when to irrigate more or less,” she says.

Assistant Agricultural Commissioner Bob Roach says technological improvements will continue to make farming more efficient.  But it takes time.

“It’s not like all of a sudden you’re going to find the magic bullet that’s going to cut your water use in half.  You just have to keep working at it.”

And that works for Cliff Stout.

“We’re always trying to conserve,” he says, “whether there’s a drought or not.”

San Clemente Dam. Photoby Wes Sims.

With the threat of winter storms mostly faded, California American Water is continuing its $83 million project to remove the San Clemente Dam and restore the river to its original state. The work, located 18-miles up the Carmel River from the Pacific Ocean, involves capturing 2.5 million yards of mud and rerouting the river.

A Dam That Has Outlived Its Usefulness

A stairway leads to a narrow concrete walkway, separating the top of the reservoir from the spill-way, one-hundred-ten feet below. Built in 1921, the San Clemente Dam is set to be torn down because of diminished functionality, seismic vulnerability, and threatened fish habitat on the Carmel River. The dam hasn’t been used for water supply since the mid 1990s, because 95% of its storage capacity is silted up with sediment. CalAm Engineer, Aman Gonzales is manager of the San Clemente Dam Removal Project.

“The challenge was what do we do with the sediment?” he says. “There’s about two and a half million cubic yards of sediment here. At a ten-yard dump truck, you’re talking 250,000 truck loads to get that sediment out of here.”

So instead, the sediment is being left in place. Loren Letendre president of the Carmel River Watershed Conservancy explains the process.

“They’re going to drain the sediment field that’s behind the dam so that it basically will stay in place,” Letendre says. “Remove the dam and leave a small amount of concrete in place to keep the sediment from moving anywhere, take all the concrete from the dam and put it up above the gap to make sure the river never migrates back and pushes all this sediment, this 3-million tons of sediment, downstream. The end benefit is to restore the river back to its original functioning and to allow another eight miles of steelhead passage for rearing.”

Future Uncertain for The Other Dam

There is one other dam on the Carmel River. Located 7-miles further upstream, the Los Padres Dam serves what CalAm spokesperson Catherine Stedman refers to as an environmental function.
“Because during the summer when the Carmel River dries up, we are able to make releases from Los Padres Dam to have water flow down the river which helps keep it running and which is good for the habitat” Stedman says.

It seems there’s no clear agreement on the future of the Los Padres Dam. Dave Stoldt is the general manager of the Monterey Peninsula Water Management District. The agency that manages water service provided by CalAm.

“There are some fisheries biologists who would like to see the Los Padres Dam eventually removed,” he says, “and there are others who think that a regulated river benefits the fishery far more than removal of the dam would. California American Water is starting to look at options to remove the dam in the long term. We’re starting to look at options to keep the dam or some other form of regulation on the river.”

In the meantime, contractors on site at the San Clemente Dam continue their prep work for demolition to begin this summer, with the entire dam removal project wrapping up in late 2016 or early 2017.

55 gallon barrels of compost tea bubble behind ‘Soil Solutions’, James Neve.

In the parking lot of Soil Solutions, there are the bags of prepared compost and soil you might find at any garden store. But the store in Santa Cruz’s Harvey West neighborhood isn’t a typical garden store. Owner James Neve advocates a whole new approach to gardening.

Helping You Raise Good Microbes

“What we offer is a non synthetic, a non-chemical way of feeding your soil,” Neve says.

When he says “feeding your soil,” he means he doesn’t sell chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Instead everything he sells is intended to cultivate the biology of your soil so it’s more nutritious for your plants.

There’s an assortment of mylar bags with concentrated compost. Some composting equipment. And in one corner some big plastic barrels, one of which is bubbling.

Neve is an arborist, specializing in urgent care for sick trees and gardens. He says used to feed the plants synthetic chemicals: “This chemical plus that chemical equals a tree the same thing for diseases and pests. That’s what you’re supposed to do.”

Good for Plants and Non-Polluting

But the approach didn’t jibe with his training. For one thing only a small portion of the chemicals he used were being absorbed by the plants. The rest, he asserts, were becoming pollution.

He began researching recently developed techniques aimed at cultivating beneficial bacteria, fungi and protozoa in the soil.

“Below our feet is millions and millions of microbes,” he says, “and what that soil biology, what those microbes do is they turn carbon and organic fertilizers in to plant available food.”

Soil Solutions owner James Neve interviewed by KUSP’s J.D. Hillard.

Making Compost Tea

He tried it in the field and it worked. Trees that would have died with synthetic approaches had full recoveries with compost derived treatments. In 2011 he started the store to sell some of the products he was using. One key product is the brown liquid in that bubbling barrel mentioned above.

“What we’re brewing in these 55 gallon barrels where you see all the bubbles is compost tea.”

The stuff starts out as compost. Neve demonstrates: He puts compost that’s been sifted to a fine consistency into a mesh bag which he kneads in a bucket of water. The water darkens.

“We’re releasing this material into this liquid solution,” he says. “If I were to plate this right now and put it under the microscope, you’d be amazed at the things you would see. Even though most of it is dormant and still a lot of it is alive.”

The next step is to feed it something like fish emulsion and put it in the barrels where the bubbles provide oxygen. Then the microorganisms multiply rapidly. It’s like a probiotic for plants. In addition to making soil more nutritious, it can be sprayed on the leaves to prevent sickness.

But Neve knows he’s selling something most people aren’t familiar with. So the business holds workshops and offers samples.

“We’re doing that knowing we know how well it works,” he says, “and we always like to put something in somebody’s hands ad say here don’t just listen to us go out there and try that.”

The drought offers up a big reason for gardeners to try to make more of their compost. Soil with compost in it helps keep water in the root zone.

Photo: Michael L. Baird/Flickr

By Melissae Fellet | KUSP News

More than two million dollars have been contributed to the California Sea Otter Fund through donations on the state income tax form. The fund has become an important source of support for sea otter research and conservation programs in the state. But the program will only continue if donations reach a mandated minimum target this year, which is the largest in its seven-year history.

“Anytime anyone tells me that they donate, I always thank them because it really affects me directly,” says Francesca Batac, a laboratory technician with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. The tax check off program provides all of her salary. “The tax payers will be happy to know that most of my life revolves around sea otters. They’re getting what they’re paying for.”

Working in the office of spill prevention and response, Batac’s first priority is helping wildlife during an oil spill. The rest of the time, she helps with otter research, both in the field and in the lab.

Melissa Miller, a wildlife pathologist with DFW, performs animal autopsies, called necropsies, on many dead stranded sea otters found on area beaches. She considers Batac her right hand person during that process.

Batac says getting things ready for a pathologist to do a necropsy can take practically an entire day. That includes preparing to collect tissue samples to send out for tests and sampling labels for the 50 or so samples that are saved in the freezer. Batac also gathers any clinical or field observations from when an animal was alive.

Learning about life from death

“When an animal comes into us for an exam, I see that as an opportunity for that girl to tell us her whole story,” Miller says. During a three to four hour exam, Miller learns how an otter lived by looking at at the type and amount of food it ate. She learns more about female otters by determining how many pups they had during their lives.

Another part of the necropsy, Miller says, is determining the things that limited an otter’s lifespan. Often, she finds clues that otters have encountered pollution coming from land. That includes chemicals and biological contaminants like bacteria, parasites or fungi.

“A lot of times what we’re finding is problems getting into sea otters are really watershed problems,” Miller says. “In order to fix the problem in sea otters, we’ve got to fix the watersheds, and that provides huge benefits all the way up the chain.”

Research funded by the tax check off program is being used to inform policies for watershed management. Miller is grateful that the program continues to exist. She says that the economic downturn during the last five years made it difficult for groups working on sea otters in California to get the funds they needed.

“It was humbling because during that time, I know how tight things were for the tax payers of California,” Miller says. “Just as much as it was bad for state programs, it was bad for everybody. In spite of that, they continued to fund that program.”

Contribution apportionment

Contributions get split into two portions. The California Coastal Conservancy uses some of the money to support research into improving nearshore habitats and reducing sea otter mortality. DFW receives the other portion of the funds.

Traditionally the agency has used those funds for investigating the main causes of otter mortality, says Laird Henckel, an environmental scientist at DFW. But a recent case of shot sea otters provided an opportunity to use the money for enforcement as well.

Last September, three sea otters were shot near Pacific Grove. About 20 percent of the reward for information on suspects involved in the incident is from the tax donations.

The Sea Otter Tax Fund needs to raise more than $277,000 in 2014 to remain on income tax forms for the next year. As of February, they’ve reached 15 percent of that goal.

Keep up with the status of contributions to the Sea Otter Tax Fund on Facebook.

Learn about other research supported by the tax fund program.

Loch Lomond from above.

Low water levels reveal more than 20 vertical feet of dry lake bed.

Chris Berry leads us to the water markers.

In a good water year, all but the closest staff plate would be under water.

Preparing for a dry year means clearing shaded fire breaks on Highland Road.

Monterey office for the National Weather Service.

Warren Blier at the NOAA weather maps.

Story and photos by Wes Sims | KUSP News

The serenity of Loch Lomond, near Lompico, belies the critical nature of drought conditions affecting the backup water supply for the City of Santa Cruz.  This man-made reservoir was created a half century ago with the construction of a dam across Newell Creek.

Yes, the Levels are Low
On our recent trip to the Loch Lomond, we were shown the water level indicators: a series of staff-plates with five hard-wood measuring sticks descending the shore line.  All five are bone-dry, indicating current surface water elevation at just over 550 feet, which is very low according to Chris Berry who is the Santa Cruz Watershed Compliance Manager.

“We like to see the lake right now is up here on this top staff plate in the range of 577 feet.”

Chris is charged with protecting the city’s water supply at its source and sustaining the fish population of Newell Creek and the San Lorenzo River. He adds, “Our outflow is ten times greater than our inflow right now. We are losing capacity just by virtue of the fish release.  So we need several feet of rain, frankly, and we need it over a prolonged duration.”

Drought Conditions Persist

Warren Blier is science and operations officer with the National Weather Service in Monterey. He said, “were at least seeing a glimmer of hope for some local moisture … but not nearly enough to make up the deficit. If we were to end up anywhere near normal we would have to have extraordinarily, unusually wet months of February and March.  And nothing says that couldn’t happen, but it’s certainly not likely.”

And that has Chris Berry and Ranger David Brooks ramping up their efforts to protect the Loch Lomond Reservoir against the threat of wildfires. With a crew, they’re expanding  fuel breaks in the park and then on Highland Road on the ridge – between Lompico Creek and Newell Creek.  But the road is nothing more than a rough and tumble dirt trail, wide enough to accommodate fire trucks. The roadway is considered critical infrastructure in the event of wildland fire … especially a crown fire racing across the tree tops.

Planning for the Worst

Chris mentions how damaging a fire would be to the watershed, needing to draw water out of the reservoir  with smoke and ash blowing directly onto the water surface.  And that would be just the beginning. He adds, “there would be more nutrients going into the reservoir, meaning we’ll have more likelihood of algae blooms which can be problematic for treatment.  There’ll be more sedimentation of the reservoir, meaning that we’ll lose capacity.”

But capacity is already reduced by the drought.  That’s why this summer, even if persistent dry weather conditions force the cancellation of the summer recreation season, as is now being suggested, Loch Lomond will remain fully staffed, to protect the reservoir and its natural resources.

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