Court Protection
On August 31, 2007, Federal Judge Oliver Wanger of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California protected the delta smelt by severely curtailing human use water deliveries from the San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta from December to June. These are the pumps at the Banks Pumping Plant that send water through the California Aqueduct to Central and Southern California for agricultural and residential use.
Although there have been allegations that this protection has hurt California's agricultural sector, with the devastation of hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland and the loss of tens of thousands of jobs in the Central Valley, a 2009 United States Department of Agriculture study estimated that job losses due to smelt protection were closer to 5,000. An additional 16,000 job losses in the Central Valley were attributed to the drought California had been experiencing in recent years.
Read more about this topic: Delta Smelt
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