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.
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.
The California Department of Water Resources (DWR) is warning
people to keep their pets away from Silverwood Lake in San
Bernardino after water officials identified toxic algae in the
water. Last week, the DWR announced that water officials have
issued a “caution algal bloom advisory” for Silverwood Lake
after blue-green algae, also known as cyanobacteria, was found
at the lake. Not all algae is toxic, but it’s impossible to
tell just by looking at it. Exposure to toxic
cyanobacteria can cause unpleasant symptoms, such as eye, nose,
mouth or throat irritation, headache, allergic skin rash, mouth
ulcers, vomiting, diarrhea, and cold- and flu-like symptoms,
according to a DWR website. Pets and children are especially
susceptible, prompting the DWR to urge people to be aware of
the conditions.
A rare late season storm dumped nearly 2 feet of snow on some
regions of Northern California over the weekend, breaking at
least one daily snowfall record. The storm, which swept in from
the Gulf of Alaska, dropped about 31 inches of snow on Lower
Lassen Peak, 26 inches at Palisades Summit and 22 inches at
Soda Springs Ski Resort and 16 inches at Kingvale, according to
the National Weather Service’s Sacramento office. The UC
Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Laboratory at Donner Summit
recorded 26.4 inches of snow in a 24-hour period on May 5,
making it the “snowiest day of the season at the lab,”
according to a social media post. The last record was 23.8
inches on March 3.
… Along the eastern edge of Imperial County, the landscape is
slowly changing. Acres of invasive saltcedar plants and other
weeds are vanishing, replaced by expanses of thorny green trees
dusted with bright yellow flowers. The shift is a result of the
Quechan Tribe’s ongoing efforts to restore the banks of the
parched Colorado River … where it winds through the Quechan
Reservation between California and Arizona.
An extraordinary water year brought much-needed relief to a
drought-stricken Golden State, but experts say California needs
several more exceptionally wet years to repair lingering damage
to precious underground water supplies. The newest Semi-Annual
Groundwater Conditions report — using the first annual data
collected from groundwater sustainability agencies across 99
basins holding more than 90% of the state’s groundwater —
indicates the state has gained 4.1 million acre-feet of water
through underground recharge, nearly the total storage capacity
of Shasta Lake. Meanwhile, underground storage improved by 8.7
million acre-feet. Thanks to the surprise string of
record-breaking storms, 2023 marked the first year since 2019
that agencies saw a jump in groundwater storage.
The judge in the Santa Barbara Channelkeeper case has ordered a
further six-month stay in the litigation so that structured
mediation can continue. … Eleven major parties involved
in the mediation process, including newcomers to the
negotiations the State Water Resources Control Board and the
California Department of Fish and Wildlife, had jointly asked
the court to continue the stay to Jan. 31, “to allow the
structured mediation a realistic period of time to reach its
conclusion.” … The case dates back to 2014, when Santa
Barbara Channelkeeper sued the city of Ventura and the State
Water Resources Control Board for taking too much water from
the Ventura River, in turn harming endangered Southern
California steelhead trout.
[Residents of the Friendly Acres mobile home park in Red Bluff]
learned in March that their well water had high levels of PFAS.
Those are chemicals used to make everything from nonstick
cookware to water-resistant clothing to cleaning products.
Officials from the California State Water Resources Control
Board held a meeting for tenants that month, warning them about
the contamination and providing bottled water. Kimberlee says
that meeting was the first time she had ever heard about PFAS.
That’s despite Friendly Acres having high levels for at least
four years, according to public data.
Primeval Energy Ltd is entering into a strategic partnership
with Global Water Farms (GWF) through which Primeval staff
members will provide geothermal assistance to GWF in their
Southern California desalination project. GWF has an ambitious
yet realistic business plan to provide vast volumes of clean
water to augment the flow of water in the Colorado River
through desalination, Primeval said in a press release. GWF
will use the salt by-product for the manufacture of salt-based
construction blocks, creating a second environmentally focused
business that lowers the demand for traditional cinder blocks.
The Salton Sea facility will require considerable energy in the
form of Combined Heat and Power, the companies said.
The Marin Municipal Water District is embarking on a yearlong
study to examine the impact of frequent, severe storms on the
utility’s seven dams. The district board authorized spending up
to $1.06 million to evaluate the capacity of the dam spillways,
and to use climate change projections to assess potential
hazards. The study is a response to a critical Marin County
Civil Grand Jury report published last summer. The watchdog
panel said dam safety plans for the Marin Municipal Water
District and the North Marin Water District are failing to
account for more regular “atmospheric river” storms brought on
by climate change. The grand jury recommended, among other
actions, that the water districts update their dam hazard
mitigation plans with the latest science on climate change
effects on storms.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation will examine the possibility of
drilling tunnels through Glen Canyon Dam to ensure water can
pass through it at low Lake Powell elevations, two
knowledgeable sources told the Arizona Daily Star. Such a
re-engineering project will be among several options the bureau
will look at due to new concerns about the ability to deliver
Colorado River water through the 61-year-old facility under
such circumstances. It could prevent a catastrophic occurrence
if lake elevations ever fall so low that no water could get
through the dam to serve farms and Lower River Basin cities,
including Tucson, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and San
Diego.
Diminished by decades of over-pumping, California’s groundwater
reserves saw a huge influx of water last year, in some places
the most in modern times, according to state data that offers
the first detailed look at how aquifers fared during
the state’s historically wet 2023. The bump was driven, in
part, by deliberate efforts to recharge aquifers — the
porous underground rock that holds water and accounts for about
40% of the state’s total water supply. The intentional water
banking, or managed recharge, resulted in at least 4.1 million
acre-feet of water pushed underground, nearly equivalent to
what California’s largest reservoir, Shasta Lake, can hold.
About 90% of that recharge occurred in the San Joaquin Valley,
the state’s agricultural heartland, where aquifers have been
heavily taxed by pumping.
UC Berkeley’s Central Sierra Snow Lab says it has a reason to
celebrate after a weekend storm brought the most snow to date,
topping off a late-season surge. After storms in late February
and throughout March, readings at the lab surged from 102% of
normal for March 1 to 110% of normal for April
1. Accordingly, lab observers seemed excited by
the prospect of precipitation that forecasters
said could bring between 9 to 18 inches of new snow
Saturday through Sunday.
Good news on the Colorado River is rare. Its reservoirs, the
two largest in the country, have shrunk to record lows. The
policymakers who will decide its future are stuck at an
impasse. Climate change has driven more than two decades of
megadrought and strained the water supply for 40 million people
across the Southwest. But a new study is delivering a potential
dose of optimism for the next 25 years of the Colorado River.
The findings, published in the Journal of Climate, forecast a
70% chance the next quarter century will be wetter than the
last.
Perhaps no environmental topic is as controversial in
California as the Delta Tunnel. … The tunnel is a key
part of the State Water Project’s new risk-informed strategic
plan. That strategic plan is known as Elevate to ‘28.
It lists five goals that it says will help to make the State
Water Project (SWP) “the most reliable, sustainable, and
resilient water provider for the people and environment of
California, now and for future generations.” To learn more
about the plan, ABC10 Meteorologist Brenden Mincheff invited
Tony Meyers, the Principal Operating Officer for the State
Water Project for a conversation. Here are some key takeaways
from that.
Bureaucratic blunders, mismanagement, partisan politics,
cross-border politics, understaffing, equipment failures. The
list of reasons for the longstanding sewage crisis at the
U.S.-Mexico border is long. At the center is the International
Boundary and Water Commission, the binational agency
responsible for preventing water pollution in the Tijuana River
and southern San Diego County shorelines. It has been severely
handicapped in its task. The result: beach closures due to
contaminated ocean water, economic losses and growing concerns
about the long-term health impacts caused by breathing,
smelling and touching sewage-tainted water. Each country is
represented by a commissioner appointed by their respective
presidents. Commissioner Maria-Elena Giner, appointed by
President Joe Biden in 2021, inherited the broken system. She’s
been trying to steer the federal agency in the right direction
ever since.
Last year, California experienced weather whiplash. After years
of severe drought, 2023 saw heavy rainfall and snowpack that
flooded the state, recharged groundwater and filled our
reservoirs. While desperately needed, we cannot pretend that
the good times are here to stay. Increasingly dry years are in
our future, and it will not be long until we find ourselves
facing drought conditions once again. The time to prepare our
water infrastructure for the future is now. Currently,
lawmakers in Sacramento are working to close a $37.9 billion
deficit. While we have made progress at the state level in
recent years — including allocating $8.6 billion in state
funding for water projects — pulling back on water
infrastructure funding now could jeopardize further federal and
local funding sources for key projects already underway. -Written by Senator Anna M. Caballero and Ric Ortega,
general manager of the Grassland Water
District.
The massive infrastructure project to extend BART through
Downtown San José and into Santa Clara is inching closer to
getting underway. … The restoration project plans
to convert 15,000 acres of former Cargill salt ponds — sold to
federal and state wildlife agencies in 2003 — back into
marshes, which provide a slew of benefits to the
region. … And while Bay restoration projects have
often made good use of dirt from other construction and
infrastructure projects previously, this is the first time the
region has seen the use of what’s known as “tunnel muck”
specifically to raise the bottoms of a former salt pond.
The Marin Municipal Water District is bolstering its strategy
on conservation with policy updates and incentive programs
designed to reduce water use by hundreds of millions of gallons
annually. The draft “2024 Water Efficiency Master Plan” is a
playbook that outlines how water is used today in the county,
and how the district can help its 191,000 customers in central
and southern Marin cut back. The plan aims to reduce water use
districtwide by more than 1,000 acre-feet a year starting in
2025, with even greater incremental reduction targets beyond
that. An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons of water. District
staffers presented the draft plan to the board at a special
meeting on Wednesday.
For all the damage that microplastics are doing to the planet,
it may be that only an impending threat to the human body will
direct the kind of attention to the issue that it has long
deserved. That moment, researchers say, is here. Several recent
studies into microplastics, the voluminous and tiny (think 5mm
or smaller) bits of material that can take hundreds of years to
degrade, suggest not only that they are everywhere, but that
they’re making their way into our bloodstreams–with potentially
hazardous results. The research isn’t nearly complete, and
the science is evolving. … The threat of microplastics to
some of our body functions is real, and it is growing. …
Plastic-based products and their detritus are everywhere on
Earth. Microplastics are in the food we eat, even
raw fruits and vegetables, and have been found
in both tap and bottled water.
The U.S. has a long record of extracting resources on Native
lands and ignoring tribal opposition, but a decision by federal
energy regulators to deny permits for seven proposed hydropower
projects suggests that tide may be turning. As the U.S. shifts
from fossil fuels to clean energy, developers are looking for
sites to generate electricity from renewable sources. But in an
unexpected move, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
denied permits on Feb. 15, 2024, for seven proposed hydropower
projects in Arizona and New Mexico. The reason: These
projects were located within the Navajo Nation and were
proposed without first consulting with the tribe. FERC said it
was “establishing a new policy that the Commission will not
issue preliminary permits for projects proposing to use Tribal
lands if the Tribe on whose lands the project is to be located
opposes the permit.”
