San Francisco Chronicle Editorial Board, April 7, 2020
A health care worker speaks with a driver at a drive-thru coronavirus testing site in a parking lot of the old California Pacific Medical Center on California Street in San Francisco, Calif. on Thursday, April 2, 2020. The appointment only tests were provided for employees and staff of CPMC and Brown and Toland physicians. Photo: Paul Chinn / The Chronicle
California has so far escaped an exponential coronavirus outbreak on the order of New York’s thanks to nation-leading social-distancing measures, particularly in the Bay Area. But the state has lagged in testing for the virus, undermining a relatively encouraging trajectory and threatening its ability to combat the contagion over the long term.
While federal failures have plagued coronavirus testing across the country, California’s capacity to identify the disease it’s fighting has been particularly poor. About 126,000 Californians had been tested for the novel coronavirus as of Saturday, Gov. Gavin Newsom said, or 0.3% of the population. That’s only about half the per capita rate nationwide in a country that has been a global underachiever in tracking the pandemic, ranking 42nd among the states according to one analysis. New York, with about half the population, has tested more than 300,000.
Extraordinary delays in processing those tests that have been conducted exacerbated California’s shortfall. At one point last week, results were still pending for more than 60% of tests. Some patients reported waiting well over a week to find out whether they tested positive, defeating any attempt to quickly identify and contain infections.
To Newsom’s credit, he took responsibility for the problem Saturday and vowed to increase testing “exponentially” by forming a testing task force and several diagnostic “hubs,” coordinating the distribution of supplies, and working with UC Davis and UC San Diego. The governor also reported significant progress on the testing backlog, which had fallen from nearly 60,000 awaiting results to around 13,000 as of last weekend.
Federal miscues early on put the entire country at a disadvantage in detecting the pandemic. Although the World Health Organization had distributed hundreds of thousands of working coronavirus tests by early February, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention insisted on developing its own test only to discover flaws that made it largely unusable. The government nevertheless took weeks to relax regulations that prevented labs around the country from employing alternatives, finally doing so in late February.
Those difficulties were compounded in California thanks to shortages of testing supplies, a lack of coordination among dozens of public and private labs, and a huge backlog at one of them. Testing capacity has also been reduced by closures of about a quarter of the state’s public health labs over the past two decades.
If California’s relative success in slowing the spread of of the contagion continues, one likely consequence is that more of the population will remain unexposed and therefore vulnerable until a vaccine is developed, a process expected to take more than a year. A coherent testing regime will be that much more crucial to detecting and controlling any resurgence of the pandemic and beginning to restore a semblance of normalcy.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, an independent research center at the University of Washington, has released COVID-19 projections for all 50 states and for nations around the world.
The models predict “extent and timing of deaths and excess demand for hospital services due to COVID-19,” the institute says.
The model for California, as of April 7, predicted that COVID-19 deaths per day would peak on April 17. Projections assume “full social distancing” through May.
The pulldown box at the top of the graphic allows selection of other states and nations.
State shuts 33 wells injecting oil wastewater into aquifers
By David R. Baker, October 16, 2015
A person walks past pump jacks operating at the Kern River Oil Field in Bakersfield, Calif. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)
California regulators on Thursday closed 33 oil company wells that had injected wastewater into potentially drinkable aquifers protected by federal law.
The new closures bring to 56 the number of oil-field wastewater injection wells shut down by the state after officials realized they were pumping oil-tainted water into aquifers that potentially could be used for drinking or irrigation.
All but two of the latest closures are in Kern County, in California’s drought-stricken Central Valley. One lies in Ventura County, another in northern Los Angeles County. Officials with California’s Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources spent Friday verifying that they had, in fact, closed. Of the 33, only 21 had been actively injecting wastewater before Thursday.
“This is part of our ongoing effort to ensure that California’s groundwater resources are protected as oil and gas production take place,” said Steven Bohlen, the division’s supervisor.
California’s oil fields contain large amounts of salty water that comes to the surface mixed with the oil. It must be separated from the petroleum and disposed of, often by injecting it back underground. Much of the water is pumped back into the same geologic formation it came from. But enough left-over water remains that companies must find other places to put it.
Fears of contamination
The division, part of California’s Department of Conservation, for years issued oil companies permits to inject their left-over water into aquifers that were supposed to be off-limits, protected by the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.
The problem, detailed in a Chronicle investigation earlier this year, raised fears of water contamination in a state struggling through a historic, four-year drought.
So far, however, no drinking water supplies have been found to be tainted by the injections.
Still, some environmentalists expressed outrage that so few wells had been closed.
The division has identified 178 wells that were injecting into legally protected aquifers with relatively high water quality, defined as those with a maximum of 3,000 parts per million of total dissolved solids. More than 2,000 other wells inject into aquifers that would be harder to use for drinking water, either because they are too salty or because they also contain oil.
“This is too little, too late to protect our water,” said Kassie Siegel, director of the Climate Law Institute at the Center for Biological Diversity. “With each passing day the oil industry is polluting more and more of our precious water.”
The division reported Friday, however, that not all 178 wells required closure. Some had already been shut down by their operators, while others had been converted into wells for extracting oil — not dumping wastewater.
An oil industry trade group noted that all of the wells closed Thursday had received state permits, even if the state now acknowledges that those permits should never have been issued.
“Both regulators and producers are committed to protecting underground water supplies, and today’s announcement reinforces the seriousness of that commitment,” said Catherine Reheis-Boyd, president of the Western States Petroleum Association.
Safeguarding water supplies
“California’s oil and natural gas producers are committed to operating their wells in a manner that continues to safeguard public water supplies,” she said.
Revelations that the division allowed injections into relatively fresh groundwater supplies touched off a political firestorm, triggered lawsuits, and led Bohlen to launch a reorganization of his staff.
More well closures will likely follow. Under regulations adopted this year, wells injecting into aquifers with water quality between 3,000 and 10,000 total dissolved solids must cease injections by Feb. 15, 2017, unless granted an exemption from the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
How researchers measured history of California drought
By Valerie Trouet, September 22, 2015
Frank Gehrke, left, chief of the California Cooperative Snow Surveys Program for the Department of Water Resources, and Gov. Jerry Brown walk across a dry meadow that is usually covered in several inches of snow as conducts the snow survey, near Echo Summit, Calif., Wednesday, April 1, 2015. Gehrke said this was the first time since he has been conducting the survey that he found no snow at this location at this time of the year. Brown took the occasion to annouced that he signed an executive order requiring the state water board to implement measures in cities and towns to cut water usage by 25 percent compared with 2013 levels. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli) Photo: Rich Pedroncelli, Associated Press
In 2005, I moved to the United States from Belgium to study the influence of climate on wildfires in the Sierra Nevada over the last five centuries. As part of this work, I traveled for three months all around the mountain range to collect samples of trees and tree stumps. I stayed in remote service barracks and spent my days tromping through meadows and hiking up steep creeks to find trees that were scorched by past fires.
Thanks to the ample snows that usually fall, the Sierra has been California’s most efficient water storage system. In normal years, the mountain range’s snowpack provides 30 percent of the state’s water. It is the primary source for reservoirs that supply drinking water, agriculture and hydroelectric power. But this year, the snowpack was at just 5 percent of its 50-year average.
When California Gov. Jerry Brown declared the first-ever mandatory statewide water restriction, he chose a Sierra Nevada snow-measurement station as his backdrop. For the first time in 75 years, that station was surrounded only by dirt.
For me, Brown’s announcement worked as a call for action. After my time in the Sierra, I had realized that my main research interest — the interaction between climate and forest ecosystems — could best be pursued amid the majestic landscapes of the American West. So in 2011, I became a professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where I now lead a team that uncovers the past climate of California by studying its trees. I knew my research could put this year’s 2015 snow drought in a much longer context.
While there are no written documents about the climate in California from centuries ago that anyone knows of, nature itself has been writing the story of its past in many places — caves, shells, lakes and, of course, trees. My job as a paleoclimatologist is to decipher this story. Trees are remarkable creatures: In California’s Mediterranean climate, they form a growth ring every year, and the width of that ring depends, to a large extent, on that year’s climate. After a wet winter, the ring that forms is relatively wide; after a dry winter, the ring is narrow. By measuring the widths of these rings in trees that have lived for centuries, my team can “read” what the climate was like in each year over that time span. And we can extend this outlook even further by collecting older dead wood.
The amount of snow on the ground at the end of the snowy season in the Sierra is largely determined by two climate components: how much precipitation fell during winter, and how warm or cold the winter was. Temperature determines how much of the precipitation that fell was rain versus snow, and affects the speed of snowmelt. We put two tree-ring data sets together to represent precipitation and temperature over the last 500 years.
By measuring the width of the rings of more than 1,500 blue oak trees in central California, some of the most climate-sensitive trees on the planet, we were able to reliably trace Pacific Ocean storms that have traveled east over central California and brought precipitation to the Sierra Nevada. We complemented this data with a 500-year-long winter temperature record derived from tree-ring data from a variety of trees throughout the American West, which was provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
By comparing these two data sets with Sierra Nevada snowpack records dating to the 1930s, we were able to reconstruct the history of snowpack in the region all the way back to the year 1500. The results, which we published last week, made national headlines: The mountain range’s 2015 snowpack level is the lowest it has been in 500 years.
To put that in perspective, this means this winter has been the worst since the first European explorer, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, explored California in the 1540s —about 150 years before the first mission was established. When my team started our work, we thought this year’s snow drought would be extreme, but we did not expect it to be the absolute lowest.
Sadly, while this research sheds light on the past, it’s actually not a very good barometer for the future. It very likely will not take another 500 years to reach the next record snowpack low. California temperatures are only projected to rise over the coming century. Even if the projected strong El Niño in the Pacific dumps loads of rain on Southern California this year, chances are that the Sierra Nevada snowpack will be a less reliable water source for the state going forward. This means fish and wildlife will suffer and, of course, California’s growing population of farmers, gardeners, skiers and residents are only going to keep wanting more, much more.
As I write this, the summer monsoon is rolling in over Tucson, and I am reminded that it brings a chance of redemption after a dry winter in Arizona. But California doesn’t have monsoons. Instead, in the last few days, my Twitter feed has been filled with pictures and stories of the Butte and Rough fires that are raging through the region. To me, they demonstrate the well-studied link between low snowpack, earlier spring snowmelt, and the increased risk of wildfire.
Now the ancient giant sequoia trees that left me in awe when I first saw them are at risk of being felled by drought, and even under the immediate threat of the Rough fire. To a tree-ring scientist, these 3,000-year-old trees are the enigmatic face of the power and resilience of nature. They have doubtless survived many threats and disturbances that we are not even aware of. To walk among these giants for the first time was a dream come true. Little did I realize then that I’d be keeping my fingers crossed for their survival less than a decade later.
Valerie Trouet is an associate professor in the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona. She wrote this for Zocalo Public Square.
