The Contra Costa Times, 4/13/09, reports
Delta farmers have sued to block plans to build an aqueduct that would divert Sacramento River water around the Delta.
It is the latest in a flurry of about a dozen active lawsuits over California's most important and fought over source of water, but it appears to be the first to directly take on new plans to build a peripheral canal like the one voters defeated in 1982.
"This is a life-and-death struggle for us, and we're not giving up," said John Herrick, a lawyer for the South Delta Water Agency, one of two water districts that filed the lawsuit last week in federal court in Sacramento.