Mostly right on.

This is a pretty good article about zanjeros. I liked the slideshow a lot as well. I'm a trifle surprised I didn't know the word 'zanjero'. I've always heard them called ditchriders or ditchtenders. Guess that's what you get for never visiting districts south of the Tehachapis.

On ditchriders:
Oh man. Ditchriders are the men who make water districts work. Like the men profiled in the article, they drive their canals every shift, controlling water levels in the canal and opening or closing turnouts to growers. Being a ditchrider is a career. They do it for decades and they know their terrain. They are the people responsible getting water to every grower in time for their irrigation event while keeping a several miles long canal from emptying or overtopping as turnouts open and close. It takes years to get good at running a canal; a retiring ditchrider has to train the incoming kid for months or more. I was surprised that zanjero Curiel said that his dreams of flooding out a field went away after a year. The ditchriders I've talked to say they still get them after doing it for twenty years.

I asked my professor if he knew of any woman ditchriders. He said he'd never met one, although there are a few woman water district general managers. I applied to be a ditchrider at Arvn-Ed*son Water District, but they didn't think I was going to stick around for three decades. I would have taken that job too, so I don't think it was very nice of my father to refer to Arvn, Weed Patch and Pumpkin Center as the "tri-city area" and inquire how I was going to choose between them.

Safety and canal design:

Oooh. This picture from the article makes me hurt. No hand rail? No guard? Who designed that? Was he trying to kill the operators? They lean out over those check structures, pulling heavy flashboards out of the water, cranking gates, clearing trash. I have lots of faith in their strength and balance but I would sure like the engineers to give them some advantages.

I was also surprised to read that they collect so many drowned people from their canals. We were taught to put hand rails on both sides of our canals every couple panels. The very good slide show shows mostly unlined clay canals, so I guess there isn't anything to fix hand rails to.

On automation:

Today, the zanjero is an endangered species, his craft too imprecise, his tools too crude to look after water in a region ravaged by drought.

I wouldn't go so far as "endangered species". In California, I'd say that automation is far more rare than manually-run canals. They are right that water districts are moving toward automation. In an ideal, elegant system, you build your canals with weirs that hold water level very steady and you use undershot gates, and your system is inherently stable. This requires less tending by a person and less automation. But you'll still need ways to control gates throughout the system, and a lot of districts will put in some automation.

So they put in SCADA systems (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), which I think were developed to control assembly lines in factories. You put water level sensors along your canal, which talk to your computer in the district office (or call you at night, if the levels change too fast) or tell gates to open or close. Talking to people about their SCADA systems usually ends up being a long conversation about which media they use for telemetry. You'd think they'd want to talk about exciting things like their displays and data manipulation, or their fancy new concrete, but I have listened to hours of comparing phone lines, lines of sight for radio, and getting in on some satellite time. I don't have an opinion about these, so I sorta let the jargon wash over me and watch the crops grow.

My irrigation professor is not one to reflexively promote automation. His main complaint about developing countries is that their water projects are overautomated. He says the canals never work like they were modeled, but operators are given very precise instructions about how to move the gates for every flow rate they measure. He thinks it should be way simpler. 'Paint a white line on the side of the canal.' he says. 'Tell your operator to keep the water level within the width of that white line by opening or shutting the gate as needed.' He says he's never met an operator who couldn't do that. If labor is cheap, put a person at every major structure and they can run that sucker tight as anything.