San Jose's Guadalupe River to disappear due to California drought

A river no longer runs through downtown San Jose. The Mercury News has reported that the Guadalupe River does not exist anymore. Fish and wildlife are also missing or dead there.

This is so heartbreaking, said Leslee Hamilton, executive director of the Guadalupe River Park Conservancy, a nonprofit that runs educational and community programs along the bank of the river. The timing is really bad as a great surge was seen in the number of birds and wildlife in the area, added Hamilton.

Gordon Becker, a fisheries scientist with the Center for Ecosystem Management and Restoration, says that dryness is continuously increasing in every stream. Guadalupe River in San Jose stretches 14 miles long, but California drought has caused eight miles of the once flowing river to go bone-dry.

The riverbed located in downtown San Jose is now littered with trash and dead fish. Many animals like ducks, beavers and other wildlife were residing in the Guadalupe River just two years ago.

Colleen Valles of the water district told CBS San Francisco, “It's very difficult. We want to maintain habitat and we want to maintain our groundwater and there's really not enough water to do both well”.

This year’s drought is the fourth in the row and even if a lot of water is released into the river, it wouldn’t be enough as the soil would soak it up, the district told CBS San Francisco. This means that the fate of the river is highly unlikely to be reversed and it would disappear within a month.