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 Vik Jolly.
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The salmon recovery effort on Putah Creek was highlighted as an
early example of a Healthy Rivers and Landscapes Program
success story at the recent California State Water
Resources Control Board hearings. The control board is updating
the Bay-Delta Water Quality Control Plan, with Solano
County agencies joining the State Water Contractors and a host
of others in favoring the Healthy Rivers and Landscapes option.
Many upset Adelanto residents demanded a clean water solution
from their elected officials in early December, detailing hair
and skin problems due to the city’s “brown, cloudy,
foul-smelling” water. Less than two months later, Adelanto City
Council has taken action to secure a qualified firm that will
provide home water filtration systems at no cost to residents.
The announcement came at the Jan. 28 Adelanto City Council
meeting, three years after the synthetic chemical
Perfluorooctane Sulfonic Acid (PFOS) was first detected in
Adelanto water.
Wetlands—including marshes, mangroves, swamps, and
floodplains—provide valuable benefits. They serve as habitat
for the fish we eat, protect coastal communities from storms,
and help filter pollution out of our water. But these important
areas are at risk of disappearing due to erosion, land
subsidence, and development. … NOAA’s Office of Habitat
Conservation works with partners to protect and restore these
habitats, so they can provide economic and ecological benefits
that fisheries and communities depend on.
Governors from six of the seven states that rely on the
dwindling Colorado River gathered in Washington on Friday to
try to resolve a two-year impasse over how to share its water.
There was no breakthrough — and whether they made progress was
unclear. Leaders in downstream Arizona and California expressed
optimism after the meeting that a consensus over a plan to
share water appeared “achievable.” But Colorado officials stood
firm in their reluctance to accept mandatory water use cuts — a
major sticking point that could remain in the way of a
compromise.
This month’s lingering dry spell has combined with warm winter
temperatures to take a toll on California’s mountain snow,
raising new questions about the durability of water supplies
this year. State water officials, who conducted the second snow
survey of the season Friday, reported that cumulative snowpack
across the Sierra Nevada, southern Cascades and Trinity
mountains measured 59% of average for the date. …
While snowfall has lagged, the good news is that rain has been
fairly robust. Despite several dry weeks recently, average
rainfall statewide is running about 120% of what it typically
is at this point in the water year.
California is weighing its first major rewrite of Bay-Delta
water rules in decades, considering changes to how much water
must remain in rivers and giving regional water agencies a more
flexible way to comply with those limits. On the second day of
a three-day State Water Resources Control Board hearing on
Thursday, stakeholders fell into three broad camps as they
continued to debate how California should manage the Bay-Delta
in the years ahead. They included state officials backing
adoption of the plan, environmental and tribal groups seeking
stronger protections, and water agencies that welcomed added
flexibility but pushed for major changes to the staff proposal.
Colorado’s expert on aquatic invasive species said Wednesday
the state has an “incredible fight ahead” as it works to
contain the spread of zebra mussels in the Colorado River. “I
wish I could tell you the story of zebra mussels has
concluded,” Robert Walters told a crowd of dozens of water
professionals at the Colorado Water Congress in Aurora.
… He said this year’s strategy includes ramping up
testing of hundreds of ponds in the Grand Junction area. “There
is vast network of canals, ditches and washes moving this
water,” he said. “Golf courses, people with ponds in their
backyards. Everyone who is receiving Colorado River water has
the potential to be harboring these highly invasive mussels.”
Residents of the Diablo Grande housing development in
Stanislaus County have four months to pony up $14 million or
the Kern County Water Agency (KCWA) will cut off their water,
according to a KCWA press release issued Wednesday. That’s how
much KCWA says it is owed in back water bills by the Western
Hills Water District, which serves the 600-home Diablo Grande
development in the foothills west of Interstate 5.
… KCWA’s press release blindsided Western Hills, which
has been in negotiations with KCWA to find a solution to the
complex, 25-year-long deal that soured after the 2008 housing
market crash.
… The [Round Valley Indian] tribal nation is confronting the
Trump administration over the [Eel] river’s future and fighting
some of its regional allies to reclaim water rights that have
been overlooked for a century. … The struggle is taking
place as the entity with a dominant stake in the river for
generations, Pacific Gas & Electric Co., seeks to give up in
Lake and Mendocino counties its network of Eel River dams and a
linked hydropower plant. The move has triggered a federal
review that has pitted the tribes, together with environmental
groups in favor of dam removal, against farming interests,
reservoir supporters and the Trump administration, which has
taken a dim view of dam demolition.
A Senate panel will convene Wednesday to hear from a
cybersecurity expert and two water utilities about threats
facing water infrastructure. The Environment and Public Works
Committee hearing will seek to identify strategies to make the
water sector more resilient against cyberattacks, which have
become more common in recent years. The meeting could be an
opportunity for bipartisan consensus, as lawmakers generally
agree on the need to protect water and wastewater
infrastructure against cyberattacks. The issue was a
priority under the Biden administration and remains so under
the Trump administration, which last year established an EPA
water office division that focuses on cyberthreats.
Last week, a district judge in San Francisco, California,
presided over a three-day trial brought by west coast fishers
and conservationists against US tyre companies. The fishers
allege that a chemical additive used in tyres is polluting
rivers and waterways, killing coho salmon and other fish. If
successful, the case could have implications far beyond the
United States. The case was initiated after the apparent
solving of a decades-old mystery: what was causing mass deaths
of endangered coho salmon in the Pacific north-west as they
returned to streams to spawn. The deaths happened after heavy
rain. Before dying, the fish would exhibit unusual behaviour,
swimming in circles, their mouths gaping, as if gasping for
air.
When the Eaton fire raged through neighborhoods in Altadena,
the flames leveled three-quarters of the homes served by the
tiny Las Flores Water Co. It also destroyed the roofs of two
covered reservoirs where the utility stored drinking water. The
company soon restored clean water to those homes left standing.
But the disaster has left it with costly repairs, and a sharp
drop in income since most of its 1,500 customers haven’t yet
rebuilt or reconnected their water. Attempting to avert
financial failure, the private water company’s board now plans
to start charging people a new “fire recovery fee” of about
$3,000 over the next five years, or about $50 a month.
Surging runoff from the high peaks of Rocky Mountain National
Park in 2025 overwhelmed the banks of Beaver Creek, a tributary
near the headwaters of the Colorado River, and flooded two and
a half football fields’ worth of surrounding
meadows. … Visible flooding in 2025 … meant the
surges in Beaver Creek were hitting artificial beaver dams and
lodges built to emulate past environmental conditions and
recreate historic wetlands. The flooding was proof that a
meticulously developed plan to restore Kawuneeche’s crucial
watershed over decades, among multiple government agencies and
nonprofits, paid for by a wide array of funders, is reporting
great progress after just a couple of years.
… Crystal Tobias is a longtime river cleanup volunteer in the
Sacramento region. She said e-scooters have become a recurring
problem during river cleanups she’s participated in. “Oh,
dozens and dozens of them,” Tobias said. “Maybe over a hundred.
It’s every waterway… Steelhead Creek, Arcade Creek, the
American River, Discovery Park. It’s just rampant.” … She
said lithium-ion batteries attached to e-scooters and other
components contribute to water pollution. She says this is
especially a concern in Sacramento’s waterways that are salmon
and steelhead habitats.
Officials on Friday said they have expanded the incident area
for a massive sewer spill in the northern part of Clearlake as
a precautionary measure. Sunday will mark three weeks since a
Lake County Sanitation District-owned force main rupture
triggered the Robin Lane sewer spill, which released nearly
three million gallons of raw sewage into streets and across
private properties. On Monday, the city of Clearlake began
managing the recovery phase of the incident in unified command
with the Lake County Sheriff’s Office of Emergency Services.
… By Friday, the unified command said that, based on
continued evaluation of groundwater conditions related to the
spill, the incident area was expanded as a precautionary
measure to ensure the protection of public health.
“In the West, water flows uphill towards money,” Marc
Reisner writes in “Cadillac Desert.” His observation rings even
truer today. Just south of Tijuana, for example, plans are
underway to build a $600 million ocean desalination plant that
will increase Tijuana’s water supply by a whopping 50%. While
Tijuana arguably needs more water to feed its growing
population and to counter cuts from the Colorado River, the
project raises an important question: Will that additional
supply of drinking water result in more sewage coming across
the border? –Written by Doug Liden, a retired engineer from the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency who spent the last two decades
working on Tijuana River issues from EPA’s San Diego Border
Office, the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana and the U.S. Embassy in
Mexico City.
… Flanked by the Wassuk Range, Walker Lake is stunning,
shrinking — and very near dead. It is fed more in theory than
reality by the Walker River, which winds from the Sierra Nevada
east through some of the state’s increasingly corporate farming
communities. Thanks to more than a century of
over-appropriation and ever-increasing demand, the damaged
river exhausts itself in what’s been described as “an ooze of
mud” as it seeps into a terminal lake whose waterline has
dropped more than 150 feet in little more than a century.
… I’m on the side of those who believe there must be a
way to balance the interests of a greater good with expanded
farming and long neglect. –Written by Nevada Independent columnist John L.
Smith.
California’s Department of Water Resources (DWR) has increased
the 2026 State Water Project (SWP) allocation to 30% of
requested supplies, up from the initial 10% announced Dec. 1,
following mid-December storms that boosted available water
supplies. … Despite the recent dry conditions,
California’s reservoirs remain well above average, at 125% of
typical storage statewide. Lake Oroville, the SWP’s largest
reservoir, is currently at 138% of average for this time of
year. DWR also pointed to increased operational flexibility
following a December amendment to the project’s Incidental Take
Permit, which allows adjustments to certain fish protection
actions during storms.
Seeking to prevent the California State Water Resources Control
Board from stepping in to regulate groundwater in critically
overdrafted subbasins, local agencies are working to correct
deficiencies in their plans to protect groundwater. With
groundwater sustainability agencies formed and groundwater
sustainability plans evaluated, the state water board has moved
to implement the 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act,
or SGMA. … Under probation, groundwater extractors in
the Tulare Lake subbasin face annual fees of $300 per well and
$20 per acre-foot pumped, plus a late reporting fee of 25%.
SGMA also requires well owners to file annual groundwater
extraction reports.
Last year’s snow deluge in California, which quickly erased a
two decade long megadrought, was essentially a
once-in-a-lifetime rescue from above, a new study found. Don’t
get used to it because with climate change the 2023 California
snow bonanza —a record for snow on the ground on April 1 — will
be less likely in the future, said the study in Monday’s
journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
… UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain, who wasn’t part
of the study but specializes in weather in the U.S. West, said,
“I would not be surprised if 2023 was the coldest, snowiest
winter for the rest of my own lifetime in California.”
