At the edge of California’s Sacramento River, across from the town of Princeton, there’s a trailer full of equipment and a cacophony of generators and pumps. This is clearly a worksite, but the real work is happening out of view. The only clues are some bubbles on the water’s surface, and something that sounds like walkie talkies.
A team of four workers from Big Valley Divers is doing seasonal work at a pump station that’s about to supply irrigation canals across the Sacramento Valley with water.
I never knew this work existed, but I’ve learned that commercial divers are everywhere. Picture contractors and construction workers, just under water. Anywhere there are lakes and rivers, anywhere we’ve manipulated water, like dams and canals, commercial divers work on the infrastructure – cleaning, maintaining, building, repairing.
Big Valley Divers, for example, work on drinking tanks for potable water. You can find them in marinas, installing structures and repairing moorings. Sometimes they’ll be tasked with repairing dams. They also work on salvage, recovering boats and cars and semis, or whatever else ends up in a waterway. Most of their work, though, is in irrigation, and maintaining the complex network of canals that feed farms.
This story was produced in collaboration with the Food and Environment Reporting Network.