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.
Subscribe to our weekday emails to have news delivered to your inbox at about 9 a.m. Monday through Friday except for holidays. Or subscribe via RSS
Please Note: Some of the sites we link to may limit the number of stories you can access without subscribing. Also, the headlines below are the original headlines used in the publication cited at the time they are posted here and do not reflect the stance of the Water Education Foundation, an impartial nonprofit that remains neutral.
If left unattended, quagga mussels can cause extensive harm to
a facility and the fight against this invasive species is
seemingly never-ending. Further efforts are being put into
place to uphold systemic stability at Glen Canyon Dam with the
installation of new and improved strainer baskets. Quagga
mussels create plenty of challenges when they are alive and
intact and need to be removed. However, as they die and are
removed, their shell debris collects in the system which can
clog pipes if left unattended. These specific strainer baskets
are being used to filter the cooling water that is piped from
the penstocks to the generating unit’s air housing and baring
coolers. Strainer baskets have been used at Glen Canyon Dam for
many years to aid in the collection of shell debris, but as the
mussel infestation has persisted, so has the need for
improvements to the baskets and strainer system. In the past it
was necessary to stop the flow of cooling water to be able to
clean the baskets.
During California’s March 5 primary election, voters in
Woodland will decide whether to approve a flood control
project. Measure M would allow the City of Woodland to accept
at least $300 million in state and federal funding to protect
the city against flooding. It would authorize the construction
of the Lower Cache Creek Flood Risk Management Project, which
would channel floodwaters away from Woodland to a bypass in the
east, away from homes and businesses. … While Woodland
has never flooded, Woodland mayor Tania Garcia-Cadena said it
is important to be prepared.
The environmental impact report prepared by the city of
Tehachapi for the proposed Sage Ranch residential development
made the case that the project would not result in any
significant, unmitigated impacts — and included a water supply
assessment suggesting sufficient water exists for the project
over the required 20-year horizon. The city of Tehachapi and
Sage Ranch developer Greenbriar filed documents they believe
support that position in Sacramento County Superior Court on
Monday, Feb. 26 to defend the EIR approved by the Tehachapi
City Council in September 2021. At the same time, the council
approved a masterplan for the project that would
transform 138 acres near Tehachapi High School by adding 995
residential units over seven years.
With warmer temperatures on the horizon, the city of Sacramento
is switching to a new watering schedule. The spring and summer
watering schedule, which governs how residents irrigate their
lawns and landscaping during the hotter months, goes into
effect on March 1 and runs through Oct. 31. Here’s what you
need to know about the change. From Nov. 1 to Feb 28,
watering guidelines in Sacramento allow residents to turn on
their sprinklers one day per week, on either Saturday or
Sunday. On March 1, Sacramento will add an additional day to
its weekly watering schedule — allowing residents to use
sprinklers two days a week instead of one. On those days
automatic sprinklers can be used for irrigation before 10 a.m.
or after 7 p.m.
Pacific Coast Highway closing during high tides or heavy
rainstorms near the Bolsa Chica wetlands is a common problem
for drivers in the area, and Caltrans officials say they are
looking to address the flooding problems in the future. When
asked if Caltrans had plans to address the flooding concerns
along that stretch of road at a recent Huntington Beach City
Council meeting, Caltrans District 12 Asset Manager Bassem
Barsoum said officials are working on a plan. Storms earlier
this month forced a 93 hour closure of the road in town to
traffic.
… The more information we have about the movements of
shorebirds and their numbers, the better equipped we are to
manage the critical ecosystems they depend on and protect their
populations for generations to come. When it comes to
shorebirds though, acquiring such a level of robust information
is not an easy task. Many shorebirds will utilize the entire
hemisphere every year. In the winter they’re spread across the
tremendously vast landscapes of North, Central and South
America, and throughout the breeding season, they’re dispersed
across the Arctic and other extremely remote locations. It’s
nearly impossible to get a comprehensive picture of shorebird
populations during these times, leaving birders and biologists
one opportunity—migration.
In Northern California, before European settlement it’s been
said that clouds of birds would block out the sun and one could
cross a river by walking across the backs of fish. According to
historic accounts, the Laguna de Santa Rosa was once such a
place. That’s the 22-mile-long network of wetlands that drains
the Santa Rosa plain. After a century of degradation,
restoration is underway. Once a thriving wetland, history
hasn’t been kind to the Laguna de Santa Rosa. Historic dumping
of untreated sewage, industrial and agricultural waste and
cities growing up around it have all taken a toll. State health
officials still recommend limitations on eating certain fish
caught there, due to mercury and PCB contamination.
Federal tax deadlines have been extended until June 17 for San
Diego County residents affected by last month’s rainstorms, the
Internal Revenue Service announced Tuesday. The amended
deadlines will offer relief “for individuals and businesses in
parts of California affected by severe storms and flooding that
began on Jan. 21,” according to the IRS. The relief extends to
any areas designated by the Federal Emergency Management
Agency, which includes San Diego County.
The controversial Delta Conveyance Project may have bigger
problems than legal action over its recently approved
environmental impact report. Who’s going to pay the
estimated $16 billion price tag? The concept, a tunnel to take
Sacramento River water beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta
to thirsty towns and farms further south, relies on the end
users footing the bill. But over the decades that the project
has languished in various iterations, those end users have
become less enthusiastic to open their wallets. In fact,
the single largest recipient of delta water via the State Water
Project – and the single largest payer – the Metropolitan Water
District of Southern California, has committed only $160
million for project planning this time around.
With its Mediterranean climate, California receives most of its
annual precipitation in just a few months, with the bulk of it
falling from December to February. That means that by the time
March 1 comes around, we usually have a good sense of how much
water we’re going to have for the rest of the year. The state
keeps track based on a “water year” that runs from Oct. 1 to
Sept. 30, so the whole winter rainy season will fall in the
same year’s statistics. As of Sunday, California had received
slightly more rain than usual this winter — 105 percent of the
average, according to state data. In some parts of the state,
though, it’s been much rainier than normal. Los Angeles, which
just endured one of its wettest storm systems on record, had
received 159 percent of its annual average rainfall as of
Sunday. San Diego was at 133 percent, and Paso Robles at 160.
One of Colorado’s leading urban water conservation strategies —
turf replacement — could require up to $2.5 billion to save
20,000 acre-feet of water, according to a recent report
commissioned by the state’s top water policy agency. Colorado
communities are facing a drier future with water shortages and
searching for ways to cut down water use. … This
turf-focused strategy has gained new momentum since 2020 and
2021, when the water crisis in the Colorado River Basin became
shockingly apparent (to more than just water experts)
as two enormous reservoirs, lakes Mead and Powell, fell to
historic lows.
Scientists are sounding the alarm that a crucial component of
the planet’s climate system is in gradual decline and could one
day reach a tipping point that would radically alter global
weather patterns. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning
Circulation, or AMOC, is a system of ocean currents that
circulate water in the Atlantic Ocean like a conveyor belt,
helping to redistribute heat and regulate global and regional
climates. New research, however, warns that the AMOC is
weakening under a warming climate, and could potentially suffer
a dangerous and abrupt collapse with worldwide consequences.
… Considering the AMOC is the workhorse of the Atlantic,
the consequences of such a collapse would result in “hugely
chaotic changes in global weather patterns” that extend far
beyond the Atlantic, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist
with UCLA who was not involved in the study.
The legacies of California’s 1849 Gold Rush and the relentless
search for gold that continued decades later are well known:
the rise of San Francisco; statehood; Wells Fargo; Levi’s
jeans; a Bay Area football team named after the fortune-seeking
miners. But along the shores of Clear Lake, just north of Napa
Valley’s famed wineries, is another gold-rush legacy: toxic
pollution. From the 1860s until it closed in 1957, the Sulphur
Bank Mine was one of the largest mercury mines in the United
States. Gold miners in the Sierra Nevada used the mercury dug
from its deep tunnels and craggy cavities to separate gold from
the ore that held it. … Now a major effort has begun to
clean up the historic mess and reduce health threats to people
who have called the area home for thousands of years.
Microplastics have been found in every human placenta tested in
a study, leaving the researchers worried about the potential
health impacts on developing foetuses. … [T]he most common
plastic detected was polyethylene, which is used to make
plastic bags and bottles. A second study revealed microplastics
in all 17 human arteries tested and suggested the particles may
be linked to clogging of the blood vessels. Microplastics have
also recently been discovered in human blood and breast milk,
indicating widespread contamination of people’s bodies. The
impact on health is as yet unknown but microplastics have been
shown to cause damage to human cells in the laboratory.
On a late autumn day, a team of forestry workers spreads out
among the burned trunks of giant sequoia trees. The
1,000-year-old trees in the grove are dead but still standing,
killed in an extreme wildfire that raced through Sequoia and
Kings Canyon National Parks. In the shadow of one of the trees,
the crew gets to work, pulling tiny, 4-inch seedlings out of
bags clipped to their belts and tucking them into the dirt.
… Over only two years, about one-fifth of all giant
sequoias have been killed in extreme wildfires in California.
The numbers shocked ecologists, since the enormous trees can
live more than 2,000 years and have evolved to live with
frequent, low-intensity fires in the Sierra Nevada. Recent
fires have burned bigger and more intensely than sequoias are
accustomed to, a result of the way humans have changed the
forest.
To conserve water as California heads into the drier spring and
summer months, the city of Sacramento announced new
watering regulations set to go into effect March 1. According
to the city’s watering schedule ordinance, residents and
businesses in the city of Sacramento are required
to follow a seasonal schedule when watering landscapes
using sprinklers. Here is the
seasonal watering schedule from the
ordinance: Spring and summer From March 1 to October
31: Customers with even-numbered addresses can water
Wednesday and Sunday. Customers with odd-numbered addresses can
water Tuesday and Saturday. Watering must be done before 10
a.m. and/or after 7 p.m. Watering is not allowed 48 hours
after one-eighths inch of rain.
In October, CSU Monterey Bay received a $1.13 million grant
from the U.S. Geological Survey to support their ongoing role
in a project called OpenET. The tool uses satellites to
calculate how much water is lost to the air after being applied
to farmland. “There are still gaps in the information and
understanding between how much water we need and how much we
are actually using,” said Dr. AJ Purdy, a senior research
scientist at CSUMB working on the project. “This project fills
a big gap.” OpenET uses satellites from NASA, USGS, and others
to measure evapotranspiration, or the amount of water that
evaporates from soil combined with the water that transpires
through plants — traveling from the roots and evaporating off
the leaves. The satellites measure reflectance — energy from
the sun that bounces off the Earth, which hits the satellites
in different wavelengths that correspond to color. OpenET
measures plant coverage, so it looks for green.
Scott Artis, the Golden State Salmon Association’s executive
director, responded to the latest California salmon return
numbers reported in the Pacific Fishery Management Council
report released on February 16, 2024: “Under Governor Newsom,
the upper Sacramento River, formerly the most important salmon
producing river south of the Columbia, has been killed off.
… Salmon eggs faced overheated water because of the
failure of the State Water Resources Control Board to
adequately control temperature pollution from Shasta Dam.
… In 2023, the upper Sacramento River escapement (the
spawning population) of fall-run Chinook salmon was 6,160
adults. Between 1995-2005, the average escapement was 175,496,
which represents a loss of 96% of the upper Sacramento River’s
spawning adults.”
It has been far too dry for far too long in Mexico as a
combination of drying reservoirs and increasing population has
caused concerns of a water crisis. According to data from
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, most
of Mexico, including areas around and to the north of Mexico
City, are in a long-term drought. … Local media
reports that reservoirs could completely be out of water
by late August if conditions don’t improve. … Elizabeth
Carter, an assistant professor of civil engineering and earth
sciences at Syracuse University … notes … that the U.S
engineering projects in rivers that feed many of Mexico’s
northern freshwater sources run dry before reaching Mexico. She
cites the Hoover Dam, Glen Canyon Dam, and the Central Arizona
Project (Colorado River) as examples.
On the north edge of the Salton Sea, a movement is gaining
steam to create a new national monument that would protect
swaths of recreational land used by the valley’s communities of
color. A coalition of environmental groups and tribes,
including the Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe, Audubon
California, Consejo de Federaciones Mexicanas and the Center
for Biological Diversity are urging the federal government to
designate large sections of land there with similar protections
to national parks. National monuments are typically shielded
from mining and drilling and can also open the door for tribes
and federal agencies to work together to manage the land.