Oral Presentation Australian Society for Fish Biology Conference 2024

Review of the fish screen design for a large river abstraction (111053)

Matthew van den Bosch 1
  1. Dama Manufacturing Ltd, Whangarei, New Zealand

The Delta Conveyance Project is planned to use tunneled infrastructure to transfer water from the Sacramento River south under the Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta direct to the California Aquaduct.  The total design flow to be abstracted from the river is 6,000cfs (170m³/s, ca. 15,000ML/day) which makes the project the one of the largest, if not the largest fish screening installation worldwide. The intakes for the project are required to comply with criteria and guidelines issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) for salmonids, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (DFW), and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), with particular reference to the protection requirements of slow-swimming delta smelt.  There is extensive project information available on the Delta Conveyance Authority website (dcdca.org), and this presentation condenses the fish screen relevant parts of that information to provide a review of the planned intakes and how the approved design uses ‘state of the art’, wall-mounted, cylindrical tee screens to meet the fish screening guidelines.