April 7, 2017
CapitalPress.com
9
California
Huge snowpack prompts state
Growers still seeking alternatives
officials to revisit drought status
to chlorpyrifos despite reprieve
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By TIM HEARDEN
By TIM HEARDEN
Capital Press
Capital Press
SACRAMENTO — Is
California about to formally
declare an end to its five-year
drought?
After abundant winter
rainfall and snow accumu-
lation, state officials plan an
announcement about Califor-
nia’s “drought status” with-
in the next week, said Doug
Carlson, spokesman for the
state Department of Water
Resources.
Exactly when the state-
ment will come is still un-
known, as is when and if the
State Water Project will in-
crease its current allocation
of 60 percent of its 29 mem-
ber water agencies’ requested
supplies, Carlson said.
But the DWR’s manual
snow survey on March 30,
which found a season-high
snow-water equivalent of 46.1
inches in the Sierra Nevada
near Lake Tahoe, makes the
state’s rebound from drought
all the more evident, officials
say.
“I think that the winter
season has certainly been en-
couraging, and one might be
justifiably optimistic about
what our availability for wa-
ter distribution will be later in
the year,” Carlson said. “Cer-
tainly it’s a better picture than
we’ve seen the last five years.
I think anybody can take heart
in that.”
The manual survey at Phil-
lips Station, about 90 miles
east of Sacramento, was 183
percent of the late March
and early April average for
the site, which is 25.2 inch-
es. Snow accumulation has
increased each month since
SACRAMENTO — Don’t
expect a renaissance for
chlorpyrifos use among Cal-
ifornia growers now that the
U.S. Environmental Protec-
tion Agency has declined to
ban the pesticide.
So opines Pete Goodell, a
University of California Co-
operative Extension pest con-
trol adviser who held a series
of grower workshops last year
on the proposed ban.
Some growers may be
glad to still have chlorpyri-
fos available when nothing
else works, but in many cases
farms have already found al-
ternative treatments and pre-
ventive measures, he said.
“People have shifted away
for a number of reasons,” said
Goodell, an associate direc-
tor of the UC’s Statewide
Integrated Pest Management
Program. “One is that some of
the crop may require contracts
that say you aren’t going to
use certain products. For oth-
ers, with the restrictions and
regulations, they’ve moved
away because it’s not as dif-
ficult to use other products.”
In California, chlorpyrifos
is used to tackle pests that
can destroy some 60 different
crops, including almonds, al-
falfa, walnuts, oranges, cotton
and grapes, explained Char-
lotte Fadipe, spokeswoman
for the state Department of
Pesticide Regulation.
Use of the pesticide has
been declining over the last
decade, from more than 2 mil-
lion pounds in 2005 to about
1.3 million pounds in 2014,
the last year for which data is
available, Fadipe said.
Growers were sent scram-
bling for alternatives when
the EPA announced a plan to
revoke food residue toleranc-
es for chlorpyrifos, which is
produced by Dow AgroSci-
ences and acts as a contact or
stomach poison to pests. The
agency took comments in the
fall of 2015.
But on March 29, new EPA
Administrator Scott Pruitt
said the agency was denying
a petition by environmental
groups to ban the pesticide’s
use in agriculture. The EPA
banned home use of chlorpy-
rifos in 2000 and ordered
buffer zones around sensitive
Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press
Frank Gehrke, right, chief of the California Cooperative Snow
Surveys Program for the Department of Water Resources, places
the snow survey tube on a scale held by Nic Enstice, of the Sierra
Nevada Conservancy, while doing the manual snow survey at
Phillips Station on March 30 near Echo Summit, Calif. State water
officials are considering changing California’s drought status.
January, when just 6 inches
of snow-water equivalent was
found.
The survey came as elec-
tronic measurements showed
that water content in the
northern Sierra was 40.8 inch-
es on March 30, 147 percent
of the multi-decade average
for the date, according to the
DWR. The central Sierra’s
50.5 inches is 175 percent of
average, while the 43.9 inches
in the southern Sierra is 164
percent of average, the agen-
cy reports.
The big snowmelt will re-
sult in high water in many riv-
ers through the spring, state
climatologist Michael Ander-
son said.
“The snowpack at Phil-
lips today was almost 8 feet
deep,” Carlson said. “That is a
tremendous contrast for any-
body to recognize what kind
of a year it has been. Two
years ago … there was literal-
ly no snow there.”
Northern California leg-
islators and water district of-
ficials have urged Gov. Jerry
Brown to declare that the
drought is over, citing the
winter’s deluges and heavy
snowpack. The governor’s
executive orders mandating
continued, long-term water
savings were appropriate,
“but this power should not be
abused,” state Sen. Jim Niel-
sen, R-Gerber, said in Febru-
ary.
State water regulators
have so far been hesitant,
noting that some Central Val-
ley communities still depend
on trucked and bottled water
and that groundwater — the
source of at least one-third of
the supplies Californians use
— will need more than one
wet winter to be replenished
in many areas.
Roads bill would limit truck pollution mandates
SACRAMENTO (AP) —
A plan to raise taxes and fees
to pay for California road re-
pairs includes a concession
to the trucking industry that
would block the state from
requiring truck owners to up-
grade to lower-emission mod-
els.
The provision angered en-
vironmentalists, who implored
lawmakers to reject it Monday,
saying it would perpetuate
health problems in neighbor-
hoods around ports and other
areas exposed to a high vol-
ume of truck traffic.
Commercial truck emis-
sions are one of the largest
sources of pollution in areas
with the dirtiest air, but the
giveaway to truckers would
undermine future mandates
to deal with them, said Adri-
an Martinez, an attorney for
Earthjustice.
“Our communities cannot
breathe, and we thought that
our right to breathe would be
worth more than a few billion
dollars in transportation im-
provements,” Katie Valenzue-
la Garcia told the Senate Ap-
propriations Committee.
Valenzuela Garcia is the
co-chair of a committee that
advises the California Air Re-
sources Board.
Following a rare direct ap-
peal from Gov. Jerry Brown,
Democrats on the committee
voted along party lines to send
the measure to the full Senate,
which was expected to take it
up on Thursday.
Tim Hearden/Capital Press
Pete Goodell, left, and Lori Berger of the University of California’s
Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program prepare to give
a presentation on chlorpyrifos at an almond workshop last year in
Chico, Calif. Goodell said he doesn’t expect an upsurge in chlorpy-
rifos use in California now that the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency has declined to ban the substance for agricultural use.
sites, such as schools, in 2012.
In recent years, California
has put significant controls
on the use of chlorpyrifos,
requiring training, licensing
and local county approval for
anyone who uses it. Growers
must explain to their county
agricultural
commissioner
when, where and how they
want to use the pesticide, and
counties require buffers of up
to 150 feet between the user
and a school, river or other
sensitive site.
California’s rules remain
intact, and the DPR “may put
further restrictions in place if
warranted,” Fadipe told the
Capital Press in an email.
In 2014, the DPR con-
tracted with the UC’s pest
management program to
create commodity-specific
guidelines for using chlorpy-
rifos. Teams focused on its
use on alfalfa, almonds, cit-
rus fruit and cotton, identi-
fying alternatives as well as
instances when use of the
chemical is critical to pro-
tecting the crop.
A resulting report by
UC IPM examined other
pest-control tactics, including
pest-resistant varieties, mat-
ing disruption, field sanitation
and other insecticides.
But in some cases, no al-
ternatives were available.
For instance, almond growers
need chlorpyrifos to com-
bat leaffooted plant bugs and
stink bugs, which both feed
on and damage developing
nuts, scientists found.
“It’s still one of those tools
… that’s good to have there in
situations when you do need
it,” Goodell said.
Several farm groups
put out statements praising
Pruitt’s announcement. Cali-
fornia Citrus Mutual president
Joel Nelsen said the decision
shows that the EPA is taking
more of a science-based ap-
proach to regulating pesti-
cides.
Among chlorpyrifos’ uses
for citrus growers is to battle
the Asian citrus psyllid, which
can carry the deadly tree dis-
ease huanglongbing.
National Council of Farm-
er Cooperatives president
Chuck Conner said he hopes
the decision “can serve as a
roadmap as the EPA moves
forward in assessing other
crop protectants in the review
and registration process.”
But the Center for Food
Safety complained that Presi-
dent Donald Trump’s admin-
istration disregarded long-
term studies from the EPA and
National Institutes of Health
concluding that exposure to
chlorpyrifos could harm chil-
dren’s brains.
“This reversal … is a
frightening indicator that the
new administration will stop
at nothing to protect corporate
interests,” said Andrew Kim-
brell, the center’s executive
director.
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