CADIZ, Calif. — Off historic Route 66 in the heart of the California desert the barren landscape of dry scrub and rock abruptly gives way to an oasis of tall green trees heavy with lemons and grape vines awaiting next month’s harvest. Some believe this lush farm in the unlikeliest of places also sits atop a partial solution to Southern California’s water woes. By tapping into an aquifer the size of Rhode Island under the 35,000-acre Cadiz ranch, proponents say they can supply 400,000 people with drinking water in only a few years. If the plan sounds familiar, it is. A decade ago, Los Angeles’ Metropolitan Water District narrowly rejected it when it faced widespread environmental opposition. A scaled back version has resurfaced with a greener pitch, momentum from five water agencies and what the company claims is better science to win over skeptics. “Do we need additional water supplies? Yes. Do we need groundwater storage? Yes,” said Winston Hickox, a Cadiz board member who headed the California Environmental Protection Agency. “The question is `OK, environmental community, what are your remaining concerns?’ I don’t know.” But conservationists including the Sierra Club remain worried. Critics say the company has misrepresented the size of the aquifer and that mining it could harm the threatened desert tortoise, bighorn sheep, as well as the nearby Mojave National Preserve which has some of the densest and oldest Joshua tree forests in the world. Concerns over rare desert species were also echoed by state Department of Fish and Game biologists in March. Conservationists also worry tampering with an aquifer in a place where water is so scarce could cause dust storms. “There’s a lot of unknowns here but we think this project has the potential to adversely affect air quality, draw down water resources and alter the flow of groundwater beneath the Mojave Preserve,” said Seth Shteir with the National Parks and Conservation Association, which plans to scrutinize an environmental review of the project, expected to be released this month. Groundwater has long played a part in the West’s age-old water wars, which are increasingly being waged underground. These large unseen reserves of underground water nourish a place that would appear to most observers as dead. California has few regulations when it comes to groundwater pumping, according to Carolyn Remick, who heads the Berkeley Water Center at the University of California. Consequently it is often weaker local agencies that largely oversee such extraction, leading to a raft of problems ranging from groundwater contamination to over-pumping and ground sinking. Last year a conservation group sued the state water board in an effort to force the agency to regulate groundwater pumping that has depleted Northern California’s Scott River, threatening salmon populations. In arid Kern County, north of the Mojave Preserve, a local water utility filed suit against wealthy farming interests claiming their enormous withdrawals of water lowered the water table and caused service disruptions. Cadiz officials say they are aware of the concerns and promise an extensive monitoring system. The water in question begins in springs high atop desert mountains and travels under the Cadiz ranch before it resurfaces in dusty lake beds dozens of miles away where it evaporates. The plan could cost as much as $225 million to sink 34 wells into the desert and build a 44-mile pipeline along a railroad right-of-way that intersects with the Colorado River Aqueduct. In dry years, water would be pumped to burgeoning communities in Southern California. During years with above-average rainfall, Colorado River water could be pumped to the aquifer for storage. Proponents say the water would offer a much-needed alternative to boost supplies in a region hard hit with water cutbacks during the state’s recent three-year drought. For years the project was led by a colorful British businessman, Los Angeles-based Cadiz founder Keith Brackpool, who has since taken a more behind-the-scenes role. Brackpool, who also heads the California Racing Board, has deep political connections, contributing to past gubernatorial candidates, serving as a water consultant to former Gov. Gray Davis and whose company once employed Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa as a consultant. Brackpool, however, became something of a distraction when it was revealed by the Los Angeles Times that years earlier he pleaded guilty in London to criminal charges that included dealing in securities without a license and that his expertise before becoming the governor’s water consultant was overseeing a food company. His company reports having $145 million in assets, but generated revenue of just $1 million last year. It also is being investigated by shareholders unhappy with recent executive bonuses. Brackpool, through a company spokesman, refused repeated requests for an interview with The Associated Press. Cadiz ranch is the company’s only water project. The Cadiz proposal was rejected in early 2000 by the Metropolitan Water District in part after conservationists raised concerns over possible environmental damage. A scaled-back version resurfaced in 2008 with a new spokesman, Scott Slater, a new greener pitch that they were conserving water that would otherwise evaporate and new studies that showed how much water they could safely pump. “We’re not taking water from anyone,” Slater said. “It sincerely is depriving only the atmosphere of water that would actually evaporate.” Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has called the proposal “a path-breaking, new, sustainable groundwater conservation and storage project.” But Sen. Dianne Feinstein called it a “serious threat to the desert” in a 2008 letter to the Department of the Interior, potentially depleting water supplies which plants and wildlife rely upon for survival Since 2010, the Santa Margarita Water District, Three Valleys Water District, Golden State Water Company, Suburban Water Systems and Jurupa Community Services District entered into agreements with Cadiz to receive water. These agencies supply water to parts of Los Angeles County, Orange County, Riverside County and eastern San Gabriel Valley. The company has invested $7 million in hiring top-flight consultants to study the science behind the project and in drilling wells. Cadiz also put together a panel of experts who reviewed the project and recently deemed it safe. A comprehensive environmental report is expected to be released this month and if the project clears all required permits, the districts hope to get water within two years. And if voters approve a $11 billion water bond measure intended to rebuild California’s crumbling water system and fund new dams, water districts may apply for public funds available for new infrastructure to save up the precious resource for dry years. Schwarzenegger signed the bond bill in 2009, but it won’t become law unless voters approve it a year from now next November. John Schatz, Santa Margarita’s general manager, calls the new vision a “conservation project,” but he acknowledged potential hurdles in selling the greener pitch. “We don’t have any illusions that there may be some issues with environmental groups and what’s happened in the past,” he said. See original here: Oasis Or Mirage? Company Wants To Tap Mojave Water
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SCIENCE: ‘The Most Powerful Weapon In The Courtroom Battle’
LOS ANGELES — While the defense was on the verge of its counter attack in the trial of Michael Jackson’s doctor, the prosecution dramatically shifted the focus from personalities to science – its most powerful weapon in the courtroom battle.. Its star witness, a scientist with a reassuring witness box manner, had jurors on their feet straining for a better view of his show-and-tell demonstration. It was the closest they would come to seeing a purported re-enactment of how the King of Pop died. Dr. Conrad Murray, charged with causing Jackson’s death, watched intently as Dr. Steven Shafer closed the case against him holding a bottle of propofol, an IV bag and a tube carrying the milky white liquid downward. That was how it happened on June 25, 2009, said Shafer. He was certain. On Monday, a defense attorney will try to shake his testimony and later a fellow scientist billed as “the father of propofol,” will offer another theory. Whether Dr. Paul White can absolve Murray of blame for the singer’s death remains to be seen. But the defense is just beginning. “He will have to stand firm on the fact that reasonable minds can differ,” said Marcellus McRae, a former federal prosecutor and trial attorney who has been following the case closely. “He will have to change the landscape here and show some reasonable doubt. The question is will this be enough.” Murray, a Houston based cardiologist, has pleaded not guilty to involuntary manslaughter. McRae said calling Shafer as the final prosecution witness was a master stroke. “Brick by evidentiary brick, Shafer has built a wall of scientific reasons for the jury to conclude that Dr. Murray was criminally negligent,” he said. “It allows the prosecution to tell the jury that their case is built on science rather than shifting theories.” In addition to making the science understandable, Shafer offered some colloquial phrases that may resonate with jurors including the words “crazy” and “clueless.” He called Murray’s unorthodox use of propofol as entering “a pharmacological never-never land “and said the doctor was “clueless” when it came to helping his dying patient. And he denounced a defense theory that Jackson could have awoken from sedation and given himself the drugs that killed him during a few minutes that he was left alone by Murray. “People don’t just wake up from anesthesia hell-bent to pick up a syringe and pump it into the IV,” Shafer said, reminding the jury that the procedure was complicated. “It’s a crazy scenario.” Shafer stood in the well of the courtroom with an IV pole, a bag of saline solution and a bottle of propofol, showing how the drug could have run quickly into Jackson’s veins while his doctor was out of the bedroom. He drew a scene in which Murray, lacking the proper equipment to measure doses, left Jackson on an IV drip of the powerful anesthetic flowing quickly under the pull of gravity into the sleeping singer. It was the explanation, he said, of how Jackson died of a propofol overdose with no one present to see that he had stopped breathing. “This fits all of the data in this case and I am not aware of a single piece of data that is inconsistent with this explanation,” Shafer said. In early cross-examination, defense attorney Ed Chernoff asked Shafer if that wasn’t “a bold statement.” “It’s an honest statement,” he replied. Shafer’s mathematical calculations projected on a large screen concluded that Murray had not given his patient the minimal 25 milligrams he claimed, but had started a vastly larger infusion of a 100 milliliter bottle, containing 1,000 milligrams of the drug. No, Shafer said, Jackson had not given himself an additional infusion of propofol. “He can’t give himself an injection if he’s asleep,” he said. Shafer was the prosecution’s closer. An anesthesiology professor and researcher at Columbia University Medical School, he wrote the package insert instructing doctors how to use propofol. He listed 17 “egregious” violations of the standard of care by Murray, chief among them leaving his anesthetized patient alone and failing to call 9-1-1 when he found Jackson not breathing. . Deputy District Attorney David Walgren concluded a key day of Shafer’s examination by asking: “Would it be your opinion that Conrad Murray is directly responsible for the death of Michael Jackson for his egregious violations and abandonment of Michael Jackson?” Shafer replied, “Absolutely.” Just giving Jackson the anesthetic as a sleep aid in a home setting was unconscionable, Shafer testified. It is intended for surgery in hospitals where resuscitation equipment is available. “We are in pharmacological never-never land here, something that was done to Michael Jackson and no one else in history to my knowledge,” he told jurors. Gray haired and amiable, Shafer entranced jurors with his easy manner, speaking directly to them as he made molecules understandable and led them through complicated graphs projected on a courtroom screen. When Chernoff accused him of trying to send a message to jurors, he responded calmly, “I’m trying to make it easy for the jury. These are complex graphs and I’m trying to explain to the jury a very complex pharmacology. There is no other agenda as you’re suggesting.” McRae gave Walgren and co-prosecutor Deborah Brazil high marks. “Good trial lawyers know that you have to persuade on the law, persuade on a factual level and then persuade on a moral and common sense level,” he said. “Even though you’re not going to hear an instruction about morality, the jury has to feel they’re making the right decision on a gut level.” “I think the prosecutors here have done a very effective job of hitting the human element, the moral element and now the factual element.” he said. A parade of 32 witnesses had testified before Shafer took the stand and stole the show. They included Jackson’s household personnel, security guards, paramedics and a business associate. Jurors heard about the legendary singer’s final day on earth — singing and dancing at a rehearsal for his comeback concert, reveling in the adulation of fans who showered him with gifts. And then a night of horror, chasing the most elusive treasure he craved — sleep. Most dramatic were two recordings — one of the heavily drugged singer dreaming aloud to his doctor about future triumphs and then the doctor himself being interviewed by police two days after the death that shook the world of pop culture. All of it told a compelling story structured by prosecutors Walgren and Brazil to prove that Murray, who had been hired by Jackson for $150,000 a month as his personal physician, was responsible for his famous patient’s death. With the trial winding down, they brought on the experts, a coroner and two doctors who evaluated Murray’s conduct for the California Medical Board. Dr. Nathan Kamangar, described Murray’s conduct as “unethical, disturbing and beyond comprehension.” Dr. Alon Steinberg enumerated deviations from the standard of care, and said, “If all of these deviations didn’t happen, Michael Jackson might have been alive.” See the original post: SCIENCE: ‘The Most Powerful Weapon In The Courtroom Battle’
