Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta becomes water war's front line

Bumping along a rutted levee road in his pickup, Steve Mello surveys some of the 3,100 acres he and his son farm in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

The sinking sun warms the landscape to shades of gold and pink, and Mello's fingers trace the upward arc of sandhill cranes, geese and egrets abandoning their evening meal in an old corn field.

Mello, 53, took over this land from his father, who started as a field hand.

More than a century before, farmers carved the Delta from a swamp.

They built earthen levees to protect crops from the rivers' rising tides, pushed inward with saltwater from nearby San Francisco Bay.

Little did those early settlers know, California's modern-day struggle for water would zero in on this verdant estuary along Interstate 5, just south of Sacramento.

This triangular slice of land, a checkerboard of green and brown fields dotted with quaint farmhouses and serpentine rivers and sloughs, is the cornerstone of the state's fresh-water system.

Rainfall and snowmelt from the Sierra feed the Sacramento, the San Joaquin and smaller rivers.

That water is channeled through hundreds of miles of canals and pipelines making up the federal Central Valley Project and the State Water Project that ends at Lake Perris.

Two-thirds of the state's water comes from the Delta.

It quenches the thirst of 23 million Southern Californians and supplies farms in the San Joaquin Valley that grow much of the country's grapes, almonds, cotton, tomatoes, apricots and asparagus.

But those supplies are threatened.

Delta exports have been drastically reduced under a court order to protect threatened fish species.

The cutback, paired with ongoing drought, has caused water agencies statewide to dip into reserves and impose rationing, and forced farmers to fallow their fields.

In addition, the Delta's 1,100-mile levee system is vulnerable to failure from rising sea levels and a large-magnitude earthquake.

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