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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With private investors poised to profit from water scarcity in
the west, US senator Elizabeth Warren and representative Ro
Khanna are pursuing a bill to prohibit the trading of water as
a commodity. The lawmakers will introduce the bill on Thursday
afternoon, the Guardian has learned. “Water is not a commodity
for the rich and powerful to profit off of,” said Warren, the
progressive Democrat from Massachusetts. … Water-futures
trading allows investors – including hedge funds, farmers and
municipalities – to trade water and water rights as a
commodity, similar to oil or gold. The practice is currently
limited to California, where the world’s first water futures
market was launched. So far, the market hasn’t taken off,
dampened by the reality that the physical trade of water in the
state has been limited. After a couple of wet years in
California, the price of water futures has also plummeted.
… Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
(Berkeley Lab) recently conducted a study … finding that more
intense atmospheric rivers are more likely to occur in
succession within a short period of time. … California’s
winter climate is largely defined by these atmospheric rivers –
long, narrow regions in the atmosphere that transfer water
vapor from the tropics, most commonly associated with the West
Coast coming from the Pacific Ocean. When they make landfall,
they can release massive amounts of rain and snow.
The California State Water Resources Control Board will hold a
multiday public workshop to discuss voluntary agreements (VAs)
proposed by water users and state and federal agencies. The VAs
proposed are to update the Sacramento River and Delta
components of the Water Quality Control Plan for the San
Francisco Bay/Sacamento-San Joaquin Delta Estuary (Bay-Delta
Plan). The purpose for the planned workshop is for the VA
parties to provide a detailed overview of the VA proposal. It
is also planned to receive input and answer questions from
board members and receive input from the public. The workshop
will take place from April 24 through April 26, 2024. The
schedule for the workshop can be found here.
There is no need to wait to show your love for the Water
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just a few things your donation will help us accomplish in
2024: Expand Project
WET teacher training workshops to benefit
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our Layperson’s
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the West’s most critical natural resource.
Rosana Monge clutched her husband’s death certificate and an
envelope of his medical records as she approached the
microphone and faced members of the water utility board on a
recent Monday in this city in southeast New Mexico. “I
have proof here of arsenic tests — positive on him, that were
done by the Veterans Administration,” she testified about
her husband, whose 2023 records show he had been diagnosed with
“exposure to arsenic” before his death in February at age 79.
“What I’m asking is for a health assessment of the community.”
… Naturally occurring in the soil in New Mexico, arsenic
seeps into the groundwater used for drinking. In water, arsenic
has no taste, odor or color — but can be removed with
treatment. Over time, it can cause a variety of health
problems, including cancer, diabetes and heart disease,
endangering the lives of people in this low-income and
overwhelmingly Latino community.
… The main reason is the decline of the salmon population in
the Sacramento River to such an unsustainable level that
there’s reason to fear that it may not recover for years, if
ever — unless government policies are radically reconsidered.
… The crisis underscores the utter failure of the state’s
political leaders to balance the needs of stakeholders in its
water supply. In this case, the conflict is between large-scale
farms on one side and environmental and fishery interests on
the other. For decades, agribusiness has had the upper
hand in this conflict. -Written by Michael Hiltzik, LA Times columnist.
The mainstream media continues its obsession with the amount of
water that goes to producing alfalfa and other important forage
crops in the West. The Colorado River right now is
understandably a favorite topic of environmental journalists,
as state, federal and tribal decision-makers are scrambling to
negotiate a long-term river operating agreement to replace the
current one that expires in 2026. Those arguments were teed up
again last month when the Los Angeles Times broadcast a recent
study showing that agriculture is the “dominant” user of
Colorado River water, “about three times the combined usage of
all the cities that depend on the river”. Unfortunately, not a
single Colorado River farmer or water manager was mentioned in
that story. -Written by Dan Keppen, executive director of the Family
Farm Alliance.
Since the founding of Sacramento, residents have treasured the
beauty of the American River while living in fear of its
destructive power. Were the American to defy its man-made banks
in a series of historic storms, hundreds of thousands of
residents would face a flood disaster modern-day Sacramento has
never seen. The more we try to tame the river — as when the
Folsom Dam was constructed in 1955 to deny the river its
floodplain — the more we disfigure it. This ugly trade-off has
marked the passage of time in Sacramento and is as central to
the essence of this community as the state Capitol or the Tower
Bridge. A proposal to shore up some erosion spots along the
lower American River is the most recent flashpoint in the
trade-off between public safety and nature. -Written by Tom Philip, Sacramento Bee columnist.
The land had been sinking so fast for so long that the canal
was failing, so they built an entire new canal, but now that’s
sinking as well. It’s a dramatic reminder that after two good
years, California’s water challenges still run deep. The
Friant-Kern Canal, which runs along the east side of the San
Joaquin Valley, and it is the lifeline for many farmers and
communities in that region. The system starts at Millerton
Lake, and from there, it runs 152 miles to the south, powered
entirely by gravity. But gravity means going downhill and that
has gotten complicated. Decades of groundwater pumping have
caused the valley floor to sink, and the canal with it. KPIX
first toured the site back in August of 2022. The fix is a
duplicate canal built right along side the old one, only
higher, so the water can still flow downhill.
Palo Alto’s bioreactor towers are aging out, like a lot of the
clean water infrastructure constructed around the Bay Area in
the 1950s-1970s. Recent wind gusts, swirling around the edges
of February’s atmospheric river storms, have not been friendly
to the towers either. On a March visit to the Palo Alto
Regional Water Quality Control Plant, which treats 18 million
gallons of wastewater every day, I could see a big chunk
missing from the wall of one rusty cauldron and tumbleweeds
caught in the metalwork. Elsewhere on the 25-acre site,
the plant’s facilities are visibly undergoing a $193 million
overhaul. The overhaul will help the plant meet increasing
regulatory limits on the amount of nitrogen that dischargers
can pipe into the shallows of San Francisco Bay.
A federal judge denied summary judgment to a California
nonprofit that accuses a solid waste facility in Butte County
of allowing contaminants to seep out of its facility and into a
wetland preserve that leads to a Sacramento River tributary
during a major rainstorm. Nonprofit California Open Lands
maintains a wetland preserve in Butte County that sits near the
Neal Road Recycling and Waste Facility, operated by the Butte
County Department of Public Works.
Plumas County recently commissioned an independent review of
vested mining rights for the Engels-Superior Mines, situated in
the county. Best Best & Krieger LLP (BBK), a prominent law
firm, undertook this investigation, posting its findings in a
detailed memorandum on April 15, 2024. The memorandum addresses
a request by California-Engels Mining Company (owner) and US
Copper Corp (applicant). This request pertains to the Engels
Mine and Superior Mine located in Indian Valley on the Feather
River watershed. The memorandum, accessible on the Plumas
County Zoning Administrator website, illuminates the historical
context and legal intricacies surrounding the mining
operations. It discusses five determinations sought by the
applicant, including the mining history, vesting date, extent
of mining, continuity of mining rights, and intent to continue
mining.
Last year, U.S. hydropower electricity generation fell to
its lowest since 2001. This year, we expect hydropower to
increase 6% and account for 250 billion kilowatthours of
electricity generation in the power sector, based on forecasts
in our Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO). We expect
hydropower to increase in nearly every part of the country,
with notable increases in the Southeast and in the Northwest
and Rockies. We expect other regions with significant
hydropower generation to either increase slightly, such as in
New York, or remain about the same, such as in California.
California’s changing climate brings new challenges each year
for water managers as they navigate extreme shifts from drought
to flood while working to ensure safe, reliable water supplies
for California’s 39 million residents. Water managers address
these challenges in their local watersheds, which are often at
the forefront of the impacts of climate change.
California WaterBlog is a long-running outreach project from
the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, a research center
dedicated to interdisciplinary study of water challenges,
particularly in California. We focus on environmentally and
economically sustainable solutions for managing rivers, lakes,
groundwater, and estuaries. This week, for UC Davis Give Day
(April 19-20) we’re sharing a little about the Center and the
work we do. I’m Karrigan Bork, the Center’s Interim Director,
helping out while Director Andrew Rypel is on sabbatical, and
I’ll be your guide for this brief tour through the “Shed”. If
you would like to donate to help the Center continue important
work, I’ve shared our giving link below.
Just south of the intersection of North Horne and East
McKellips Road in Mesa sits the Park of the Canals. It’s one of
just a few places where you can still see remnants of canals
dug by the ancestral Sonoran Desert people who occupied the
Salt River Valley before the time of Christ. Those ancient
farmers have been referred to as the “Hohokam” but it’s not the
name of a tribe or a people, and their O’Odham, Hopi, and Zuni
descendants do not call them that. Early archaeologists believe
the culture developed in Mexico and moved into what is now
Arizona. In order to flourish, they built an extensive canal
system to bring water to villages and irrigate thousands of
acres of agricultural fields.
In an effort to protect more than 5 million Californians from a
cancer-causing contaminant, state regulators today set a new
standard that is expected to increase the cost of water for
many people throughout the state. The State Water Resources
Control Board unanimously approved the nation’s first drinking
water standard for hexavalent chromium, which is found
naturally in some California groundwater as well as water
contaminated by industries. Now water suppliers will be forced
to install costly treatment to limit the chemical in water to
no more than 10 parts per billion — equivalent to about 10
drops in an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
Lake Powell could reach a four-year high this spring and summer
as snowmelt supplements the reservoir’s water levels. Lake Mead
in Nevada and Arizona and Lake Powell in Utah and Arizona have
suffered from a regional drought for years, and excessive water
usage is slowly depleting the Colorado River faster than
natural weather patterns can fill it. An above-average snowfall
and excessive precipitation last spring and this winter have
bolstered the water levels at Lake Powell and Lake Mead, and
new data from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation revealed that the
nation’s second-largest reservoir could rise by up to 50 feet
by mid-summer.
The conversation surrounding California’s water continues. The
Sites Reservoir project northwest of Sacramento has a price tag
of $4 billion and is funded by local, state and federal
dollars. The 1.5 million-acre project would divert water from
the Sacramento River into a valley near Maxwell, California,
and use it for storage. California water rights are a bit
tricky – and strict – and that’s the phase the Sites Project
Authority is in. They say things are ramping up, however. A
hearing officer has put forth a schedule for the hearings
surrounding water rights to conclude by the end of this year
and a decision could be made in early 2025. … There’s been
pushback [on the project] from environmental groups.
In much of the United States, groundwater extraction is
unregulated and unlimited. There are few rules governing who
can pump water from underground aquifers or how much they can
take. This lack of regulation has allowed farmers nationwide to
empty aquifers of trillions of gallons of water for irrigation
and livestock. Droughts fueled by climate change have
exacerbated this trend by depleting rivers and reservoirs,
increasing reliance on this dwindling groundwater. In many
places, such as California’s Central Valley, the results
have been devastating. As aquifers decline, residential wells
start to yield contaminated water or else dry up
altogether, forcing families to rely on emergency deliveries of
bottled water.
