It’s taken eight years of planning, contains roughly 34,000 pages, and as designed holds a price tag of $25 billion, but officials say the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) is a comprehensive overhaul of a major water system several decades overdue.
About half of Califoria’s annual water runoff from rivers and mountain snowpack runs through the roughly 1,100-square-mile Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, on which is then pumped as far south as Los Angeles to 25 million people and some 3 million acres of farmland along the way.
In recent years, the delta has made headlines because pumps on its southern end faced intermittent closures due to the presence of endangered fish species like the Delta smelt.
Nancy Vogel, spokeswoman for the California Department of Water Resources, said that there are two main goals to the 50-year BDCP, and the first — in the project’s preferred design but with at least nine available alternatives — is construction of new pumps on the delta’s north end some 30 miles away...