‘This will make our town uninhabitable’: The long-awaited Delta tunnel strikes fear in locals

Change tends to come at a creeping pace, if at all, in the Sacramento River community of Hood. Families that settled in this Delta outpost generations ago remain today, and pear orchards planted decades ago are still the region’s signature crop.

Now Hood, population 271, is facing a formidable transformation that residents fear will shatter their sleepy agricultural community. One of the smallest towns in the region, Hood lies at ground zero of the main construction site for the Newsom administration’s proposed Delta water tunnel project. 

“This will make our town uninhabitable,” said Dan Whaley, who helps manage his family’s business, the Willow Ballroom, a community landmark across the main street from Hood’s post office. “There will be so much heavy equipment and traffic and people going through town that the locals will be driven out.”

The $20 billion water conveyance project will feature a 45-mile, 36-foot-wide tunnel beneath the West Coast’s largest estuary. Its two intake facilities — which will draw river water into the system — will be situated just a river bend north and south of Hood. 

Various versions of the tunnel concept have been discussed for decades. The goal is to upgrade the massive project that sends water to 27 million people, mostly in Southern California, and vast sprawls of farmland. By diverting river water miles upstream, the tunnel would bypass the ecologically sensitive Delta, where regulations restrict pumping, and allow more water to be sent south.

The tunnel project still needs several state and federal permits, and faces multiple legal challenges from environmental and community groups, including the Delta Legacy Communities, a nonprofit representing Hood and other small towns along the lower Sacramento River. In spite of these obstacles, state officials anticipate starting construction as soon as 2029. 

Standing north of town beside Highway 160, Mario Moreno pointed upstream, across an old Bosc pear orchard inside of a levee. The entire property, he said, could eventually become a complex of cement and steel, with a holding basin and a chasm that draws water into the tunnel system. 

Turning south, he gestured past Hood, toward the downstream intake site. “And my little town is right there,” said Moreno, who grew up in Hood and now lives in nearby Elk Grove but remains chairman of the Hood Community Council.  

The planned intakes will be massive industrial complexes, lining thousands of feet of riverbank and covering hundreds of acres of farmland with fuel stations, septic systems, sludge-drying fields, access roads, parking and grout-mixing stations.

Construction will mean years of noise, air pollution, dust and traffic. Once operational, the intakes will be capable of diverting 6,000 cubic feet per second of water — a fraction of the Sacramento’s flood-stage flows but more than its volume in dry periods.  

The water will flow by gravity through protective fish screens, under the highway and into sedimentation basins. As the water clarifies, it will move toward the intake shafts and drop into the tunnel system, which will lead to Bethany Reservoir, near Tracy. Eventually, the water will enter the California Aqueduct, the main artery that transports water south.

Major water agencies that could receive its water endorse the Delta Conveyance Project, as it’s officially called.  

But opposition runs statewide, with many environmentalists saying the project is a water grab that will destroy what’s left of the Central Valley’s fish populations. Anti-tunnel sentiment is especially fierce in the Delta, where many fear the project will leave them with the dregs of the river. 

Carrie Buckman, the tunnel project’s environmental program manager with the California Department of Water Resources, said pumping limits will protect the river, and existing rules that safeguard downstream water quality will remain in place. 

But Delta farmer Harvey Correia, who grows chestnuts and figs 25 miles downstream of Hood, said saltwater intrusion from San Francisco Bay is already a recurring problem for him, and he believes the tunnel will make it worse. 

“The farther upstream they divert the water, the lower our water quality will be,” Correia said.

Dirk Heuvel, of McManis Family Vineyards, said half of the 400-acre vineyard he leases will be lost to the southern intake. The facility will also cut off his access to clean river water, forcing him to draw from nearby Snodgrass Slough. Fed by irrigation runoff, the slough’s water quality is poor, which Heuvel said will reduce the quality of grapes and wine and harm his brand. 

“If you asked me today if I wanted to lease that property, I’d walk away,” Heuvel said. 

Modernizing the Delta water system

In an early iteration in 1965, the Delta tunnel was to be an aqueduct. Billed “the peripheral canal,” it was killed by voters in 1982. It reemerged in the 2000s as a pair of tunnels. In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom downsized the plan to a single tunnel and has promoted it since.

California’s Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot said the “whiplash between very dry conditions and very wet conditions” gives the project great urgency. In December, Newsom called the tunnel “the most important climate adaptation project in the United States of America.” 

According to state officials, the tunnel will increase annual Delta exports of water by half a million acre-feet, enough to serve almost 5 million people. Buckman said this will offset expected water losses this century due to climate change. 

Jay Lund, a UC Davis professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering and geography, said the upstream tunnel intakes will be much less vulnerable to saltwater intrusion from San Francisco Bay, adding a layer of protection to the state’s water supply. He said the tunnel will provide cleaner water than the supply pumped from the southern Delta, which must undergo costly treatment.

The tunnel’s upstream diversion point will avoid the earthquake risk of the levees rupturing and allowing seawater to flood water pumps and other facilities, according to state officials, though they acknowledge this danger is small.  

State officials routinely remind the public of potential water supply benefits of the tunnel with a “what if” recap of recent rainstorms. 

“If we had had Delta conveyance in place this year … by the time we got to that big three-day storm in February, we would already have filled San Luis Reservoir,” said Department of Water Resources Director Karla Nemeth during a March 4 presentation, referring to a large storage facility near Interstate 5 in Merced County. 

Chasms, cranes and boring machines

Such arguments about bolstering California’s water supply do little to gain the support of Hood, Courtland, Locke and other Delta communities south of Sacramento, where the construction will bring traffic, dust, and other daily disturbances.

Building the project will be a gargantuan undertaking lasting an estimated 13 years, and the intakes in Hood are just the beginning. Every few miles along the tunnel path, crews will dig vertical access shafts, some more than 100 feet wide. These will serve as entry, exit and servicing sites for tunnel-boring machines. 

The excavation will produce 14 million cubic yards of earth. This sludge will be tested for hazardous contaminants and, when necessary, disposed of offsite. Much of the rest will be spread across fields and, to suppress dust emissions, planted with cover crop seeds. 

To address the plethora of expected impacts on Delta residents, state officials have proposed a suite of “community benefits.” Outlined in the project’s Final Environmental Impact Report, these benefits include new recreation areas, swimming lessons for all Delta residents, support of local agriculture and various economic development programs. 

Gia Moreno, Mario Moreno’s niece and a teacher in Clarksburg, thinks the offerings will be too little, too late. 

“We won’t even be here to benefit from any of the things they’re offering,” she said.

While the proposed benefits include “marketing of the region for tourism,” restaurant owner Michelle Mota expects through-town traffic will decline. Mota, who runs the Hood Supply Co Bar and Grill with her husband, fears the project will displace residents, deter visitors and make her restaurant unprofitable. 

“It’s our only means of livelihood right now,” Mota said. “We’re really unsure about the future.” 

Rep. Josh Harder, a Stockton Democrat, described the benefits as “a bribe program to placate outraged communities.”

Michael Brodsky, an attorney for the town’s community council, believes Hood has been selected as the tunnel intake site not for any technical reason but because the town is small and lacks political power. 

“Hood doesn’t have any high-value land uses,” Brodsky said. He believes the state chose to place the intakes away from more prosperous (and much larger) communities, such as southern Sacramento, to “not bother people who can fight back and cause a problem.”

But Graham Bradner, executive director of the Delta Conveyance Design and Construction Authority — an assemblage of water districts supplied by the State Water Project — said river flow patterns, adjacent levee integrity and considerations of existing land use make the chosen sites optimal. 

Bradner helped oversee a series of 19 stakeholder engagement meetings held between 2019 and 2022. The meetings, including a team of appointed community representatives, aimed to address Delta residents’ concerns about the tunnel project. But they left some participants frustrated.

Several residents told CalMatters that moderators tightly restricted discussions and directed conversation away from topics including relocating the intakes farther from Hood. 

Osha Meserve, an attorney representing Delta community members in legal challenges against the tunnel, attended the meetings and said discussing project alternatives “wasn’t on the table.”

“The reality is this will be a mega-project constructed in a pretty rural area. It’s in everyone’s interest to ensure…that it moves forward in a way that respects the Delta and its uniqueness.”

Graham Bradner, Delta Conveyance Design and Construction Authority

Doug Hemly, a retired fifth-generation pear farmer who lives just south of Hood, has long challenged the idea of tunneling water from the northern Delta. Like many other locals, he thinks state officials have not given due consideration of alternative routes and different designs — or even a no-project alternative — that would have less impact on the region. 

“There were a lot of approaches that were dismissed by (state officials) for reasons that never made a lot of sense other than that’s not what they wanted,” said Hemly, whose house would be just a few rows of pear trees south of the southern intake.

For instance, fortifying levees protecting the Delta pumps from saltwater intrusion would be much cheaper, said Emily Pappalardo, a Delta levee engineer. 

Bradner, representing water districts, said project leaders have altered the plans in a variety of ways to ease environmental and community impacts, but he also recognized that the tunnel could significantly change the Delta. 

“The reality is this will be a mega-project constructed in a pretty rural area,” he said. “It’s in everyone’s interest to ensure, if this project moves forward, that it moves forward in a way that respects the Delta and its uniqueness.”

‘Negative outcomes for Bay-Delta fish’

Tunnel opponents also fear for the Delta’s fish, birds and other wildlife. Already strained by the state and federal pumps that can reverse river flows and derail fish migrations, the estuary has collapsed from a once-thriving ecosystem into an aquatic ICU of endangered species and harmful algal blooms.  

Officials say the tunnel will help because of the upstream position of the intakes. By skimming off river flows many miles from the heart of the estuary, the tunnel, state officials say, will produce more water for people with fewer environmental impacts. 

But Jon Rosenfield, science director at San Francisco Baykeeper, said the environmental analyses “of every iteration” of the tunnel “that’s been proposed since 2008 have pointed to negative outcomes for Bay-Delta fish, wildlife, and water quality.” The project’s final environmental report predicts, among many other impacts, lower survival of young salmon.

Rosenfield said chronically depleted river flow is the key driver of Bay-Delta fish declines. While the tunnel’s operating rules aim to keep flows downstream of the intakes at no less than 10,000 cubic feet per second, Rosenfield said this is a feeble protection. He cited 2023 research showing that juvenile Chinook salmon mortality rises rapidly once Delta river flows drop below 35,000 cubic feet per second.  

Tunnel opponent State Sen. Jerry McNerney, a Democrat from Stockton, said diversion limits ostensibly safeguarding the estuary would become unreliable if the tunnel is built.

He predicts that the cost will be at least twice the estimated $20 billion, and water agencies covering the bill, he said, will push for waivers on environmental rules protecting the Delta to maximize their return on investment.   

“If they have a drought in Southern California, they’re just going to try and turn it on,” he said. “I have every reason to believe that if that tunnel gets built, it’s going to get used in a way that’s detrimental to the Delta and the state of California.”

Water agencies poised to benefit from the tunnel have publicly endorsed it. These include the State Water Contractors, the Santa Clara Valley Water District, the Kern County Water Agency, and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which pledged in December to pay $142 million for the project’s environmental planning and pre-construction costs.

But tapping deeper into the Delta is not a fair solution to perceived shortages in other regions, said Max Gomberg, a water equity and affordability consultant and a former staff member of the state water board. He said cutting farm deliveries to Kern County, which receives Delta diversions, would free up enough water to solve urban shortages. 

“The core ethos of water since Europeans arrived is to take more, and it really hasn’t changed. The fundamental issue with the tunnel is it perpetuates that.”

Max Gomberg, water equity expert and former water board member

Agriculture consumes four times the water that California’s towns and cities do, and Gomberg thinks the state’s farm production has surpassed sustainability.

“The core ethos of water since Europeans arrived is to take more, and it really hasn’t changed,” Gomberg said. “The fundamental issue with the tunnel is it perpetuates that.”

The tunnel debate has many water supply experts touting alternative measures for reducing demand for Delta water. These include using less water, capturing urban stormwater, improved groundwater management and recycling more wastewater — all areas being pursued by water districts around Southern California. Per capita potable water use across Southern California has declined by almost 50% since 1990 in spite of a growing population.

Bruze Reznik, executive director of Los Angeles Waterkeeper, said focusing on increased Delta imports will divert interest and money away from local initiatives to conserve and recycle water.

“We’ll never wean ourselves 100% off imported water, but there’s a lot more we can do,” Reznik said.

As planning proceedings go on, Hood, which is unincorporated, and surrounding communities can’t shake the feeling that they are being sacrificed.    

“We’re small, we’re an easy target,” said Gia Moreno, who grew up in Hood and now lives in South Sacramento but routinely visits her hometown to see family.

Like so many others in the region, she has grown cynical about the state’s treatment of the town that her ancestors helped settle. Over the years, she said she’s noticed several times a conspicuous omission on some project maps: the community of Hood. 

To Moreno, it’s more than a mapping error, it’s a sign:  

“They don’t intend for Hood to be here,” she said.