Clyde the Camel Used to Protest Water-Cutback Plan

IRVINE —  Critics of a state water plan paraded a camel outside a hearing Tuesday to protest proposed cutbacks in Southland water supplies from Northern California.

The 1,500-pound camel was kept tethered outside UC Irvine’s Beckman Center as the State Water Resources Control Board conducted a hearing into its plan to monitor more closely the amount of water flowing through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

Southern California water officials said the plan would curtail Southland water shipments from the delta by up to 15%. Members of the Southern California Water Committee, a coalition of Southland water and political leaders, said they brought the camel to the hearing to underscore their concerns that the region is approaching desert-like conditions and would only suffer more under the state plan.

“The purpose of bringing a camel is to call attention to all Southern California residents that we have water problems today,” Ventura County Supervisor John K. Flynn, chairman of the water committee, said Tuesday as he and another committee member posed for photographs with the animal.

The other committee member, Peer Swan, president of the Irvine Ranch Water District, also pointed to the camel’s water-filled humpback as an illustration of how the state needs to provide more storage facilities for Northern California mountain runoff.

Swan said that surplus water from wet years needs to be saved so that it can be used in dry years. California is locked in the fourth year of a drought.

As Swan and Flynn spoke, Clyde the Camel, on loan from a Los Angeles wildlife company for $800 a day, fidgeted uncomfortably after his long truck ride to Irvine.

Tuesday’s hearing in Irvine was the latest in a series of hearings that the state water board has been conducting throughout the state since 1987. The hearings are on the future of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, an environmentally sensitive estuary through which the majority of Northern California water is diverted to both Southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area.

The state board recently drew up a plan intended to better safeguard delta agriculture, fish and wildlife. It is that plan that the Southern California water community is opposing. A final decision on the plan is not expected for several more months.