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.
Subscribe to our weekday emails to have news delivered to your inbox at about 9 a.m. Monday through Friday except for holidays.
Some of the sites we link to may limit the number of stories you can access without subscribing.
We occasionally bold words in the text to ensure the water connection is clear.
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 Colorado River, which provides water across the Southwest,
has lost about 20% of its flow in the last quarter-century, and
its depleted reservoirs continue to decline. But negotiations
aimed at addressing the water shortage are at an impasse. …
[Great Basin Water Network Executive Director Kyle] Roerink and
leaders of five other environmental groups criticized the lack
of information about the stalled negotiations, as well as the
Trump administration’s handling of the situation during a news
conference Wednesday as they released a report with
recommendations for solving the river’s problems.
California salmon are as central to our historic identity as
the symbol on our state flag, the California grizzly. It is a
sad and ironic tragedy that the grizzly has been extinct for
generations. What does it say about us if salmon may soon
follow? … Losing salmon would be an ecological disaster
for our freshwater ecosystems, forests, riverbanks and other
native species if their links to the salmon were severed.
Healthy salmon runs mean jobs for Californians, but the
industry generating $1 billion is at risk, and is a historic
piece of California’s culture. –Written by Sacramento Bee columnist Tom Philp.
Bigger, hotter, and more severe wildfires are changing
Colorado’s fire seasons. They change the way watersheds work,
and can hurt drinking water resources across the state. Denver
Water, the state’s largest utility, provides water to more than
1.5 million people in the metro area. It attempts to address
some of these concerns in its From Forests to Faucets program.
… Madelene McDonald, a watershed scientist for the utility
oversees the program, and spoke with Rocky Mountain Community
Radio’s Caroline Llanes to share more.
Gavin Newsom, the California governor, is facing intense
pressure from industry, and even some celebrity chefs, as he
weighs whether or not to sign a bill that bans the sale of
cookware made with Pfas or “forever chemicals”. … The
industry pressure is part of a broader attack that aims to
derail similar bans on Pfas in cookware in other states, public
health advocates say. … [Clean Water Action Legislative
Director Andria] Ventura noted the California water and sewer
utility trade group endorses the ban because utilities are left
with the cost of trying to remove PFAS pollution from
drinking water.
… The city [Palo Alto] broke ground in September on Bay
Area’s first horizontal levee, a gently sloped expanse next to
the Regional Water Quality Control Plant that officials hope to
finish by next spring. Once completed, landscaped levee will
incline from the tide toward Embarcadero Road. The area will be
filled with marsh plants that will be treated with treated
wastewater from the wastewater plant through an underground
pipe. The levee will serve as yet another filtering system for
the effluent as it goes from the treatment plant to the Bay.
Snow levels could drop to 7,500-8,000 feet by Friday morning,
which might bring some snow to the higher peaks of the Sierra
Nevada. “Two-day … totals have a majority of the Sierra between
a Trace to 1-inch, with localized amounts of up to 2-4 inches
in Mono County (Tioga Pass, Sonora Pass), and 1-2 inches for
Mount Rose,” said National Weather Service Reno Meteorologist
Colin McKellar. “It’s not a big snow event by any means, but
the first decent snowfall this fall.”
… [T]here’s only about 3,000 sea otters in California. The
playful predators’ voracious appetite for destructive species
like green crabs and purple urchins has transformed
Elkhorn Slough, the state’s second-largest
estuary, into an aquatic Serengeti and makes the
central coast’s carbon-sequestering kelp forests more resistant
to climate change. … The US government determined in
2022 that reintroducing sea otters on California’s North Coast
and Oregon would be a boon to biodiversity and climate
resilience. … But as the Trump administration moves to slash
funding for wildlife programs, a nonprofit co-founded by a
Silicon Valley entrepreneur is stepping in.
… The Salton Sea is California’s largest lake—and, many
say, its greatest environmental blunder. Born of periodic
floods from the Colorado River, it is not a lake that is meant
to last. For millions of years, the river would breach its
banks, fill the Salton Sink, then change its mind and meander
back into the Gulf of California. Left without inflows and
outflows, the water that remained would evaporate. That was the
rhythm of this place: flood, shrink, repeat. Eventually, humans
broke the pattern. Farmers arrived in the early 1900s, when the
lake basin was dry. They claimed the fertile floodplain and
tried to tame the river. They put bottles in the banks to mark
their water claims. They dug canals and levees. Then came the
biblical flood.
… The County of Mendocino is updating the 2020 Hazard
Mitigation Plan, in collaboration with local municipalities,
districts, and other community organizations. … In
March, the county was awarded funding to improve flood
emergency response capabilities throughout Mendocino County by
the Department of Water Resources (DWR), Safe Drinking Water,
Water Quality and Supply, Flood Control, River and Coastal Bond
Act of 2006. The county is in the process of locating a vendor,
with the goal of creating a Flood Response Plan, identifying
communications needs, purchasing communications equipment and
placing flood response supplies in strategic areas countywide.
… Valley fever is endemic to southern Washington, Oregon,
California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Texas, and parts of
Central and South America, but nowhere are cases of the disease
more common than in Arizona. … [R]esearchers across the West
who study the fungus think another factor may be driving the
trend: supersoaker winter monsoons followed by
scorching summer heat and drought, a cycle
made more intense by climate change.
… “The main driver for us is certainly this very clear
association for coccidioides between heavy precipitation cycles
followed by drought,” said George Thompson, a professor of
medicine at the University of California, Davis, School of
Medicine who specializes in fungal diseases.
San Diego County will consider options to co-manage El Capitan
Reservoir with the city of San Diego after getting the green
light from the Board of Supervisors this week. On Wednesday,
supervisors unanimously voted to spend up to $600,000 annually
– as part of a four-year pilot program, beginning in the
2026-27 fiscal year – for the county Department of Parks and
Recreation to operate and maintain recreation at the reservoir.
The total amount of $2.4 million will also cover expanding
hours and staffing costs, along with possible facility
upgrades, according to information on the county agenda.
… The California Department of Housing and Community
Development sent a Sept. 22 letter to [Patterson] city leaders
after the council voted in April to reject the Keystone Ranch
project, a 95-acre development within the Zacharias Master Plan
area. … The letter said Patterson failed to make the
required findings under the state Housing Accountability Act
before denying the project. The city, however, argues its
decision stemmed from new restrictions imposed by state water
regulators. The Department of Water Resources ordered Patterson
to cut groundwater pumping by 10% after
rejecting the city’s sustainability plan, triggering new
environmental review requirements under the California
Environmental Quality Act.
A new study from the University of Arizona reveals how
historical tree-ring data can help predict extreme summer
weather events. Researchers, led by Ellie Broadman, analyzed
tree rings to understand locked jet stream wave patterns, often
preceded by La Niña winters, which can result in severe weather
impacting agriculture and public health. … The study,
published in AGU Advances, presents the first-ever
reconstruction of historical jet stream patterns over the last
1,000 years. … The findings suggest that La Niña winters
often lead to locked wave patterns in summer, offering a
valuable tool for forecasting extreme weather.
Baja California Governor Marina del Pilar Ávila has announced
her full support for a new national water bill introduced by
President Claudia Sheinbaum, endorsing an initiative aimed at
overhauling water management and reaffirming public ownership
of this vital resource. The endorsement came during Governor
Ávila’s morning press conference on Wednesday, following
President Sheinbaum’s presentation of the proposed General
Water Law earlier in the day. The governor emphasized that the
state will back the legislation because it is essential to
uphold the principle that water belongs to the nation and its
citizens, not to private interests.
… [T]he data center boom – driven by the proliferation of
artificial intelligence and cloud computing – comes at a high
cost. In our latest report, Data Center Impacts In the West:
Policy Solutions for Energy and Water Use, we found that annual
energy demands of Arizona’s three largest utilities – Arizona
Public Service (APS), Salt River Project (SRP), and Tucson
Electric Power (TEP) – will increase at a pace never before
seen in the state’s history. … [W]e give policy
recommendations designed to inform decision makers, advance the
transition to clean energy, conserve scarce water resources,
and protect electricity customers as we adapt to the sweeping
change of AI.
Iran is a warning to every society that treats water as
infinite. Over the summer, Iran’s water crisis turned into an
emergency. Wells collapsed and some reservoirs ran dry. Taps
went dry for half a day in Tehran, and state media warned that
the city of about 10 million people could hit “Day Zero,” the
point at which water resources can no longer meet demand,
within weeks. Temperatures rose above 100 degrees Fahrenheit,
air conditioners droned, and power cuts followed. Millions of
Iranians baked in the punishing heat. In a rare admission of
failure, Masoud Pezeshkian, the Iranian president offered 100
billion tomans (about a million dollars) to anyone who could
solve the crisis.
For as long as there have been people in what is now
California, the granite peaks of the Sierra Nevada have held
masses of ice, according to new research that shows the
glaciers have probably existed since the last Ice Age more than
11,000 years ago. The remnants of these glaciers, which have
already shrunk dramatically since the late 1800s, are
retreating year after year, and are projected to melt
completely this century as global temperatures continue to
rise. … This water from glaciers serves as a
“stabilizing force” that can sustain mountain streams through
droughts. … [T]his water
eventually will go away as the glaciers continue to retreat.
Tulare County will hold two sets of meetings – one set
for landowners and one for community members – to share their
input about the future of agricultural land in the region as
groundwater restrictions tighten under the Sustainable
Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). … Tulare
County landed a $500,000 Sustainable Agricultural Lands
Conservation (SALC) grant from the Department of Conservation
and needs input specifically from the agricultural community on
crafting a land use plan that will directly impact where
productive land is preserved. The goal is to protect land
at risk of being converted to non-ag uses while maximizing
limited water resources.
Other SGMA and agricultural water management news:
A La Niña pattern for the first few months of this water year
(Oct. 1 to Sept. 30) means there is potential for extreme
weather events, both flooding and drought, depending on where
you are located in California. Despite Sacramento receiving 76%
of its normal rainfall for this past water year, Lake Oroville,
the State Water Project’s largest reservoir,
is currently sitting at 109% of average. … California is
also starting out this new water year with more groundwater
data than ever before, helping communities monitor conditions
and protect drinking water supplies.
A new report from a coalition of environmental nonprofits is
calling for changes to Colorado River management and urging
policymakers to act more quickly in their response to shrinking
water supplies. The report’s authors stress a need for urgent
action to manage a river system that they say is “on the cusp
of failure.” … A crash, they said, could mean water
levels so low in the nation’s largest reservoirs that major
dams are rendered inoperable, leaving some cities and farms
with less water than they are legally owed. To stave off that
crash, the report includes nine recommendations, including
calls for major cutbacks to water demand.
