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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A Las Vegas attorney said he plans to add hundreds of
plaintiffs to his lawsuit agains the Southern Nevada Water
Authority, and he asked a judge on Thursday to consider
protecting their identities. … At issue in the case is
the water authority’s enforcement of a 2021 law that
will make it illegal at the beginning of next year to use water
from the Colorado River to irrigate “useless grass,” or grass
that an expert committee has deemed nonfunctional. It was
another packed courtroom Thursday, when District Judge Anna
Albertson called attorneys back to discuss the terms of a
limited restraining order that normally can last up to two
weeks.
A bill that would allow the Southern Nevada Water Authority to
install a massive water service line under a conservation area
cleared the U.S. Senate on Thursday. … The Horizon
Lateral pipeline, which will be wide enough to drive a Ford
F-150 truck through, could cost the agency up to $2 billion.
Officials say the new project is necessary to ensure that
service isn’t disrupted if and when the South Valley Lateral
pipeline, built in 1996, goes down for repairs. The South
Valley Lateral pipeline transports about 40 percent of the Las
Vegas Valley’s water.
Rep. Dave Min’s request for $1 million dollars for the San
Gabriel River Trash initiative was recently approved by the
EPA. Seal Beach District One Council Member Joe Kalmick
announced the funding at last week’s City Council meeting.
… The River Trash Initiative is a working group made up
of Seal Beach, Long Beach, Orange County, Los Angeles County,
the Surfrider Foundation (North Orange County and Long Beach
chapters) and the offices of Assembly members Diane Dixon and
Josh Lowenthal. … The website sgrcleanup.com, the
website for the River Trash Initiative, put the volume of river
trash at more than 300 tons in the years 2021, 2022, and 2023.
The U.S. National Flood Insurance Program is going broke.
Increased flood strikes in more places, combined with outdated
ways of predicting flood risk, are putting property owners at
risk and the program itself in over $20 billion of debt.
Arizona State University researcher Upmanu Lall was part of a
team that recently published a pair of papers to understand
what is happening and what needs to be done. … Based on
their findings, Lall and his colleagues argue for creating
regional catastrophe bonds or secondary insurance to
specifically handle hyperclustered events. They also suggest
updating how we assess flood risk by including climate trends,
population growth in floodplains and infrastructure decay into
insurance models.
In a corner of his house in Salqin, a city in Syria’s
northwestern Idlib province, agricultural engineer Abdullatif
Boubki stacks metal tins filled with olive oil: his land’s
harvest from last season. … Olive oil is a strategic
commodity that does not lose its value, but worry never leaves
Boubki. Water—not olives or oil—is his daily concern. He spends
hours browsing local Facebook pages and Telegram channels,
searching for updates on water availability through the public
network in his neighborhood. … Boubki’s story is a microcosm
of the broader situation in Syria, which has topped the Global
Conflict Risk Index since 2022 as the most drought-prone
country in the Mediterranean. But even as the country suffers
an acute water crisis, thousands of cubic meters of groundwater
are flowing into the global market in the form of olive oil, an
export that represents both national pride and a silent
depletion of resources.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration launched a planning effort
Wednesday to identify enough new water to fill up two Shasta
Reservoirs, or 9 million acre-feet, by 2040 to offset expected
losses to climate change. The 2028 Water Plan, a result of last
year’s SB 72, will lay out a blueprint for new reservoirs,
groundwater recharge and conservation projects. “Climate
change is reshaping life in California through historic
droughts and record storms that threaten the farms that feed
the nation, communities that depend on reliable water, and the
environment we all share,” Newsom said in a statement.
Despite a strong start to California’s wet season, snowpack
conditions remain below average. A deficient snowpack
could mean less water available for summer irrigation,
threatening to cut surface water deliveries to farmers. …
State officials reported the snowpack was at 59% of
average by the end of last month. San Joaquin
Valley farmer Aaron Barcellos said he’s concerned about what
water supplies he will be able to get from this winter’s
snowpack, especially since about two-thirds of his farm’s water
comes from snowpack storage. The uncertainty has already
begun to impact his planning—particularly with cotton, which he
has grown since 1988.
Other snowpack and water supply news around the West:
The latest news about the Colorado River is dire. Since 2000,
the river’s flow has shrunk about 20%. An extremely warm winter
has brought very little snow in the Rocky Mountains. Reservoirs
are declining to critically low levels. And the leaders of
seven states are still at loggerheads over the water cutbacks
each should accept to prevent reservoirs from falling further.
… Officials are talking about what they will do if no
deal is reached. Representatives of Arizona, Nevada and
California already offered cuts of 27%, 17% and 10%,
respectively. But that hasn’t been enough for negotiators
representing Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and Utah.
An unlikely coalition of farmers and water managers, who in the
past would be at loggerheads over the Sacramento-San
Joaquin River Delta, are banding together in an effort
to move the needle on how to better manage this unique
resource. … The Great Valley Farm Water Partnership,
formed two years ago, includes members from the delta and San
Joaquin Valley, regions that have historically advocated for
delta operations from their own silos. By seeking unity and
practical outcomes for both farmers and the environment, the
partnership is gaining traction.
California’s water managers have long looked for ways to adapt
to a hotter, drier future where the impacts of climate change
leave less water to meet the state’s needs. At our annual
Water
101 Workshopon March 26 in
Sacramento, participants will hear from
Joel Metzger, deputy director for statewide water
resources planning, on efforts underway by the
California Department of Water Resources to achieve a target of
identifying 9 million acre-feet of additional water
supply by 2040, roughly equal to the capacity of two
Shasta Reservoirs. Seating is limited and filling up quickly,
so don’t miss out!
The Mendocino County Inland Water and Power Commission,
local organizations, engineers, politicians, and community
members have been exploring long-term water supply options
ahead of PG&E’s plan to decommission the Potter Valley
Project. The commission’s most recent
meeting this month looked at proposals such as
raising Coyote Valley Dam at Lake Mendocino. … Raising
the dam could increase water availability, storage, and allow
water to be pumped to Potter Valley and other areas that would
be most impacted by the decommissioning. However, raising the
dam would also require altering nearby structures at Lake
Mendocino.
In an effort to prod stragglers, a Kings County groundwater
agency approved charging penalties to Lemore-area well owners
who don’t register with the agency by April 30. … The
board agreed and approved a $100 per well late fee for
landowners who aren’t registered by the deadline. So far, the
GSA has received well registrations from about 67% of
landowners. The registration and penalty policies apply to
wells that pump more than two acre feet per acre of land.
Owners of domestic or abandoned wells won’t be subject to the
penalty for registering late.
A groundbreaking partnership between farmers and fishermen aims
to save salmon in the Sacramento River. More than 500,000
juvenile fall-run salmon are now part of an imprinting project
in Red Bluff to help improve their survival. The project, known
as the “Bridge Group Project,” introduces juvenile salmon from
the Coleman National Fish Hatchery into large,
predator-protected net pens within the Tehama-Colusa Canal
Forebay in Red Bluff. During a three to four-week period,
the fish are exposed to the chemical and olfactory cues of
Sacramento River water, allowing them to imprint on these
signals.
The rapid expansion of data centers in Arizona has set off a
chorus of residents and lawmakers focused on the question of
water use in a drought-prone state. But one environmental
analyst argues the concern over water is misplaced, and that
electricity demand poses the more significant long-term risk.
Andy Masley is a former high school science teacher turned
environmental blogger whose fact-checking of a bestselling book
about AI’s environmental footprint earned him a polite
correction from the author and an interview with the New York
Times. … His conclusion on water use is blunt: critics are
relying on outdated or incorrect numbers that don’t tell the
full story.
A mammoth solar farm is moving forward in the heart of
California. If built, which seems increasingly likely, it would
cover 200 square miles of land and generate 21,000 megawatts of
electricity, enough to power entire cities. Huge batteries will
store some of that power until it’s needed most. Farmers are
among the project’s backers. … These farmers are now
facing a new water crisis. The canal has been delivering less
water in recent years because of droughts and competing claims
on that water. Until recently, the farmers had a backup water
supply: They could pump water from aquifers a thousand feet
underground. Now, though, a new state law is coming into force
that bans overpumping from the aquifer.
Nearly 6.5 million people in Somalia are facing severe hunger
as worsening drought, conflict and global aid cuts intensify
the country’s humanitarian crisis, the federal government and
U.N. agencies said Tuesday. … Officials said that the
food security situation is deteriorating because of water
shortages, insecurity, conflict and historically low levels of
humanitarian assistance linked to global funding cuts. The
intensified drought, linked to lower-than-average rainfall, has
triggered widespread food insecurity, crop failures, livestock
losses, food price increases and displacement.
A warm, dry winter is beginning to create concerns for Aurora’s
water supply. Snowpack across Colorado continues to lag and
reservoir levels sit below what the city typically
expects at this time of year. Aurora Water says it now has
more frequent internal meetings and closer monitoring of
storage levels, runoff projections and short term weather
patterns. … Denver Water is also closely watching its
supply after a season that began weak and has stayed that way.
Other winter storm and water supply news around the West:
More than half a million young Chinook salmon are part of a new
imprinting project aimed at getting the fish back to the
Sacramento River as parts of the Northstate salmon fishery
remain closed for a third year. The Bridge Group is working to
speed up the return of salmon by placing 500,000 young Chinook
salmon into protective net pens instead of trucking them away.
The effort is a multiyear experiment designed to increase
survival and ultimately boost the number of salmon that return
to the Sacramento River. … Half of the fish will be
released into the Sacramento River, while the other half will
be trucked into San Francisco Bay.
Fears are growing in the Colorado River basin about the
prospect of painful water cuts, prolonged court battles and
other dire impacts after negotiators from seven states missed a
second key deadline Saturday to reach a conservation deal.
… Conservation groups want the states in the basin to
start using tools like conservation pools, which would offer
new incentives to voluntarily cut back and save water, and a
climate response indicator to help determine how much water
should be released from Lake Powell. Releases would be
curtailed in response to drought conditions. But those ideas
aimed at protecting the river’s health could be stalled if
states don’t come up with an agreement to implement before the
current operating guidelines at Lake Powell and Lake Mead
expire this fall.
Meghan Hertel was officially sworn in to lead the California
Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW), bringing a background
in biodiversity conservation, habitat restoration, and
science-based resource management to the role. As director,
Hertel will oversee management of California’s fish and
wildlife populations, habitat restoration efforts, and
sustainable hunting and fishing, while working with Tribes,
rural communities, landowners, and outdoor stakeholders across
the state. Hertel most recently served as deputy secretary
of biodiversity and habitat at the California Natural Resources
Agency. (Hertel is a graduate of the Water Education
Foundation’s California Water Leaders
program).
