The 1974 film Chinatown, starring Jack Nicholson and Fay Dunaway, “was inspired by the California Water Wars, a series of disputes over southern California water at the beginning of the 20th century, by which Los Angeles interests secured water rights in the Owens Valley. . . . The water rights were acquired through political fighting and, as described by one author, ‘chicanery, subterfuge … and a strategy of lies.'”

Only the players have changed in California’s new water wars. As the following article by Katy Grimes, writing for Flash Report, points out, “The water war is no longer between North and South; it is between radical environmentalists and the people.”

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While California’s drought conditions are actually historically normal, California’s current drought is being billed by government and media as the driest period in the state’s recorded rainfall history. Scientists who study the Western United States’ long-term climate patterns say California has been dry for significantly longer periods — more than 200 years.

However, it only takes reading the weekly California drought water-wise tips in statewide newspapers and local government websites to know the information the environmentalists are foisting on us is hogwash. While California is in the middle of an historic drought, radical environmentalists are not letting a good crisis go to waste.

“If your kitchen faucet was installed before 1994, its flow rate is likely between 2.75 and 7 gallons per minute,” the Sacramento Bee claims. “New water-efficient kitchen faucets deliver water at 2.2 gallons per minute, but that can add up quickly too; five minutes of running equals 11 gallons with an efficient faucet.”

Interesting. I ran my 2-year old kitchen faucet full blast for one minute and got just slightly over a gallon of water. And, my husband and I rarely run the kitchen faucet full blast, even while washing dishes.

Oh, the lies just keep piling on.

“With an inefficient faucet, that same five minutes of running time could mean 35 gallons down the drain.”

It would take me about 30 minutes of running my 2-year old faucet to get 35 gallons of water down the drain.

Pile these lies on to what is happening in the north state.

Drought, California Style

So if California’s drought conditions are actually historically normal, and California’s current drought is being billed as the driest period in the state’s recorded rainfall history, why is the government is breaking up hydroelectric dams, and letting much-needed water rush to the sea for Coho salmon instead?

The human cost of over-regulation is bleeding California businesses and middle-class families.

In California, there is a perceived water war between the North and South parts of the state. The State of Jefferson1 is making headway with its secession over this and serious representation issues.

But it’s a government-created problem; if the State of California didn’t allow billions of gallons of fresh water to spill into the Pacific Ocean every year, we wouldn’t have a water shortage.

The water war is no longer between North and South; it is between radical environmentalists and the people. Most think that the Colorado River is the largest river, but the Sacramento River is about 60 percent larger. The problem is that, while officials store 70 million acre feet of water from the Colorado River, only 10 million acre feet of water is stored from the Sacramento River. The rest is lost into the Pacific Ocean.

And now we are tearing down perfectly good hydroelectric dams at the behest of radical environmentalists. Environmentalists call these “fish-killing dams:” Iron Gate, Copco 1 and Copco 2 in California, and J.C. Boyle in Oregon.

Read more at Flash Report.

1. “The State of Jefferson is a proposed U.S. state that would span the contiguous, mostly rural area of southern Oregon and northern California, where several attempts to separate from Oregon and California, respectively, have taken place in order to gain statehood.” [↩]