A collection of top water news from around California and the West compiled each weekday. Send any comments or article submissions to Foundation News & Publications Director Chris Bowman.
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When heavy rain overwhelms wastewater treatment plants in San
Francisco, causing stormwater to overflow onto streets and
into the bay, sewage is an unfortunate part of the mix.
After heavy rain, the largest recipient of the potent brew of
stormwater and sewage in the city is Mission Creek — a
channel to the bay that is home to houseboats, walking trails
and a kayak launch. At Mission Creek, Islais Creek, another
channel at India Basin, and a few locations in between, the
city discharges 1.2 billion gallons of “combined sewer
discharges” in a typical year, according to the environmental
group S.F. Baykeeper, which has notified the city it intends to
sue over how such discharges impact the environment. A large
portion of the combined sewer overflows — which SFPUC said
are composed of 94% treated stormwater and 6% treated
wastewater — is making its way without basic treatment
into the bay during storms, according to S.F. Baykeeper.
After nearly 60 years of being submerged in the clear waters of
the American River, chunks of concrete and steel will be
removed from the river in the Auburn State Recreation Area, but
how did they get there? Before the current State Route 49
bridge straddled the American River, a similarly placed bridge
provided the vital connection between Auburn and the
communities of northwest El Dorado County. That bridge,
named the Georgetown Bridge, was built in 1948 and ended its
time of providing safe passage for motorists on Dec. 23,
1964. According to the Association of State Dam Safety
Officials (ASDSO), Hell Hole Dam breached, releasing
30,000 acre-feet of water down the Rubicon River, into the
Middle Fork of the American River and down to the confluence
with the North Fork of the American River near Auburn.
The Biden administration will be allocating more than $120
million to tribal governments to fight the impacts of climate
change, the Department of the Interior announced Thursday. The
funding is designed to help tribal nations adapt to climate
threats, including relocating infrastructure. Indigenous
peoples in the U.S. are among the communities most affected by
severe climate-related environmental threats, which have
already negatively impacted water resources, ecosystems and
traditional food sources in Native communities in every corner
of the U.S. “As these communities face the increasing
threat of rising seas, coastal erosion, storm surges, raging
wildfires and devastation from other extreme weather events,
our focus must be on bolstering climate resilience …”
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of
Laguna, said in a Wednesday press briefing.
Hastings, Minnesota, is staring down a $69 million price tag
for three new treatment plants to remove PFAS chemicals from
its water supply, ahead of new US federal regulations limiting
the amount of so-called forever chemicals in public drinking
water — which could come as early as this month. … [T]he
project amounts to a “budget buster,” says city administrator
Dan Wietecha. Operation and maintenance costs for the new
plants could add as much as $1 million to the tab each year
… Cities across the US are bracing for costly upgrades
to their water systems as the Environmental Protection Agency
moves to finalize the first-ever enforceable national drinking
water standards for PFAS — or per- and polyfluoroalkyl
substances — a large group of man-made chemicals used for
decades in manufacturing and in consumer products.
Gavin Newsom’s stealthy divide and conquer tactics are pushing
marginalized communities against each other in a war over
water. Newsom, his administration and State Water Contractors
are appropriating environmental justice language to sway public
opinion in Southern California about the Delta Conveyance
Project – also referred to as the Delta tunnel. They argue that
the Delta tunnel is essential for Southern California’s
disadvantaged communities, yet misrepresent the harm the
project continues to have on the tribal communities along
California’s major rivers and on communities in the Delta
watershed. Pitting disadvantaged communities from different
regions of the state against each other is a cynical strategy,
and is all the more egregious when considering it’s done in the
interest of serving only one sector of California’s economy
that these players have deemed all-important – special
interests in Southern California and portions of Silicon
Valley. -Written by Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, executive director
of Restore the Delta.
What if the looming calamities of climate change, plastic
pollution, the energy crisis and our whole environmental
doom-scroll are symptoms of just one malady and it’s something
we actually can fix? That’s right, the planet is fighting a
single archvillain: Waste. Americans live in the most wasteful
civilization in history. … Waste is so deeply embedded in our
economy, products and daily lives that it’s hard to see
clearly, or to see at all. … How is it “normal”
that 40% of what our industrial farm and food system
produces ends up as garbage? … The average American
throws out three times more trash today than in 1960. Pin much
of that garbage growth on plastic waste, so pervasive now that
tiny bits of it are in food, water, beer and even human hearts,
lungs and newborn babies’ poop. -Written by Edward Humes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist. His latest book, “Total Garbage: How We Can Fix Our
Waste and Heal Our World,” will be published in April.
Following a lawsuit filed by hundreds of Pajaro Valley
residents and business owners, farmers and agricultural
landowners and tenants have filed two lawsuits against local,
regional and state agencies they claim are liable for damages
connected to the 2023 Pajaro levee breach and subsequent
flooding. One suit is filed by about a dozen business entities
(and roughly 50 people who are trustees); another by Willoughby
Farms. Each case, filed on March 4 in Monterey County Superior
Court, names a long list of defendants: the counties of
Monterey and Santa Cruz; the Monterey County Water Resources
Agency; Santa Cruz County Flood Control and Water Conservation
District; Pajaro Regional Flood Management Agency; State of
California; and Caltrans. (The Willoughby Farms suit also names
the City of Watsonville and others.)
A dog-killing parasite that was believed to only exist in Texas
and other Gulf Coast states has been discovered as far west as
California for the first time, scientists have warned. Experts
at the University of California Riverside found the
Heterobilharzia americana parasite, a flatworm commonly known
as a liver fluke, in spots along the Colorado River where it
runs through Southern California. According to the university,
the flatworm has never before been seen outside of Texas and
surrounding areas, and other studies have found most infections
occur in Texas and Louisiana, though some have occurred in
North Carolina, Texas, and Kansas.
Climate change is driving up the thirst of crops
significantly in California’s San Joaquin Valley, new research
shows, adding to the critical water challenges faced by one of
the world’s leading agricultural regions. The total water
demand of orchards, vineyards and row crops in the area is up
4.4% over the past decade compared with the prior 30 years
because of hotter, drier conditions, and it’s likely to
continue growing, according to a federally funded study
published this week. In 2021, the water demand of crops was up
an astonishing 12.3%, the study shows. While the warming
atmosphere has long been known to dry out plants and soil, the
new research identifies the impact specific to the
San Joaquin Valley.
A new recommendation from the California State Water Quality
Control Board in its Bay-Delta Water Quality Control Plan
(Bay-Delta Plan) for the San Francisco Bay/Sacramento-San
Joaquin Delta Estuary could see Solano County forced to adapt
to a fraction of the water it is currently allocated from Lake
Berryessa. The implications for Solano County cities could be
enormous, leaving Solano County with about 25 percent of its
current allocation. Spanning hundreds of miles from north of
Lake Shasta to Fresno, the tributaries of the Sacramento and
Sac Joaquin rivers that feed into the San Francisco Bay reach
well into the Sierra Nevadas and Central Valley. The State
Water Quality Control Board has noted that diminished river
flows in these areas are harming fish habitats and are
detrimental to the water system as a whole ecologically.
The Gila River Indian Community says it does not support a
three-state proposal for managing the Colorado River’s
shrinking supply in the future. The community, which is located
in Arizona, is instead working with the federal government to
develop its own proposal for water sharing. The tribe is among
the most prominent of the 30 federally-recognized tribes that
use the Colorado River. In recent years, it has signed
high-profile deals with the federal government to receive big
payments in exchange for water conservation. Those deals were
celebrated by Arizona’s top water officials. But now, it is
diverging from states in the river’s Lower Basin — Arizona,
California and Nevada. Stephen Roe Lewis, The Gila River Indian
Community’s Governor, announced his tribe’s disapproval of the
Lower Basin proposal at a water conference in Tucson, Ariz.,
while speaking to a room of policy experts and water
scientists.
Allensworth is one of the testing grounds for a hydropanel that
creates drinking water out of thin air. But two years into the
program, community members say the hydropanel company has left
them high and dry while many of the hydropanels have broken
down. Allensworth has struggled with arsenic-laced
groundwater for decades. In 2021, Source Global, the company
behind the hydropanels, installed two in Allensworth to test
out the technology. Each panel generates about a gallon of
drinking water per day by condensing water vapor in the air
into liquid form. In 2022, a philanthropic organization
bought 1,000 hydropanels to be installed throughout the Central
Valley. Allensworth now has about 42 panels, according to
Source Global.
The rain and snow that have drenched California and much of the
American West over the last few months — at least relative to
some of the hellishly dry years we’ve gotten recently — are a
blessing not just for water supplies, but for energy. Or maybe
they’re a curse (for energy, not for water). It depends on whom
you ask. Much of the electricity powering our lights and
refrigerators and cellphones comes from rivers, their once
free-flowing waters backing up behind dams and trickling
through hydropower turbines.
A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge confirmed that the
Cuyama Valley Groundwater Basin is one connected basin—not
separate subbasins—allowing for the groundwater adjudication to
move forward following a year and a half of delays and
litigation. … The Cuyama Valley Groundwater Basin is one of
California’s 21 critically overdrafted basins that was required
under the 2014 California Sustainable Groundwater Management
Act (SGMA) to create a groundwater sustainability agency (GSA)
and corresponding groundwater sustainability plan.
Sacramento and cities across California caught a break from the
state’s water regulator this week after the agency faced
criticism that its water conservation rules were too
complicated and costly to meet. Regulators at the State Water
Resources Control Board proposed new conservation rules Tuesday
that would ease water savings requirements for urban water
suppliers and will ultimately lead to less long-term water
savings than initially planned. Under the new rules, the city
of Sacramento would have to cut its overall water use by 9% by
2035 and 14% by 2040, far less than an initial proposal that
would have required it to cut back water use by 13% by 2030 and
18% by 2035.
Congress has given the green light for a significant boost to
the Sites Reservoir Project, based on a recommendation from the
Bureau of Reclamation. A total of $205.6 million in federal
funds is being allocated. The money comes from the Water
Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation (WIIN) Act, which
helps enhance water systems across the country. It marks the
largest single award in the history of the WIIN Act for a
storage project. … The Sites Reservoir aims to bolster
water supplies across California while also supporting native
wildlife during droughts. This project will add 1.5 million
acre-feet of storage, significantly enhancing the state’s water
flexibility and reliability during dry years. Last summer, the
project received $30 million from the Infrastructure Investment
and Jobs Act, making the total federal contribution to date
$439.3 million.
… For millennia seasonal wetlands dotted California’s Central
Valley … But as farms and towns have taken over the
landscape, nearly all those shallow, ephemeral water bodies
have disappeared, leaving avian migrants with scant options for
pit stops. With shorebirds rapidly declining along the Pacific
Flyway, conservationists and landowners have joined forces to
help turn the tide. Launched in
2014, BirdReturns runs via reverse auctions … Since
its inception, the program—jointly run by Audubon California,
The Nature Conservancy, and Point Blue Conservation Science—has
paid more than 100 farmers a total of $2 million to flood
60,000 acres throughout the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys.
Buoyed by a recent $15 million grant from the state, the
program is poised to greatly expand its reach.
School-age children affected by the water crisis in Flint,
Mich., nearly a decade ago suffered significant and lasting
academic setbacks, according to a new study released Wednesday,
showing the disaster’s profound impact on a generation of
children. The study, published in Science Advances, found
that after the crisis, students faced a substantial decline in
math scores, losing the equivalent of five months of learning
progress that hadn’t recovered by 2019, according to Brian
Jacob, one of the study’s authors. The learning gap was
especially prevalent among younger students in third through
fifth grades and those of lower socioeconomic status. There was
also an 8 percent increase in the number of students with
special needs, especially among school-age boys.
Can Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado agree to a new
apportionment of the Rio Grande’s waters without the U.S.
government’s approval? The Supreme Court of the United States
is set to hear a case next week that may affect access to water
for millions of Americans — and set a precedent that could
impact millions more, as increased usage and climate change
further strain supply of the precious resource. On March 20,
the Court will consider Texas v. New Mexico and Colorado, a
tangled case involving water rights to the Rio Grande, a
1,896-mile river that begins at the base of the San Juan
Mountains and runs into the Gulf of Mexico. The case, which has
been in litigation for more than a decade, centers around a
1939 compact between the three states over how to apportion the
river’s waters.
The European Commission said on Wednesday it was taking Greece
to the EU’s top court for failing to revise its flood risk
management plans, a key tool for EU countries to prepare
themselves against floods. The action comes five months
after the worst rains in Greece flooded its fertile
Thessaly plain, devastating crops and livestock and raising
questions about the Mediterranean country’s ability to deal
with an increasingly erratic climate. Under EU rules,
countries need to update once in six years their flood
management plans, a set of measures aimed to help them mitigate
the risks of floods on human lives, the environment and
economic activities. Greece was formally notified by the
Commission last year that it should finalise its management
plans but the country has so far failed to review, adopt or
report its flood risk management plans, the Commission said in
a statement.