Watch our series of short videos on the importance of the
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, how it works as a water hub for
California and the challenges it is facing.
When a person opens a spigot to draw a glass of water, he or she
may be tapping a source close to home or hundreds of miles away.
Water gets to taps via a complex web of aqueducts, canals and
groundwater.
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Unlike California’s majestic rivers and massive dams and
conveyance systems, groundwater is out of sight and underground,
though no less plentiful. The state’s enormous cache of
underground water is a great natural resource and has contributed
to the state becoming the nation’s top agricultural producer and
leader in high-tech industries.
A new era of groundwater management began in 2014 in California
with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. The landmark law
turned 10 in 2024, with many challenges still ahead.
For the past 20 years, the Colorado
River has been operated under a set of guidelines negotiated
between the seven states that depend on the river. Those
guidelines expire this year, and after five years of grinding
negotiations over a new agreement, the upstream states of
Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico remain deadlocked against
the downstream states of California, Arizona and Nevada.
Some 40 million people and 5.5 million acres of farmland depend
on the river’s water. But after the states failed to meet two
federal deadlines in three months, the river is in a moment of
unprecedented crisis. A dire snowpack has left flows just 15
percent of normal, many farms without water and several cities
scrambling to secure water supplies as they gird themselves for
shortages.
… At low water levels, more air from the reservoir’s [Lake
Powell] surface can be mixed into the water, ideal conditions
for bubbles to implode with destructive force as the water
travels through tubes and turbines. And this year, the
[Colorado River] reservoir’s water level is extremely low.
Federal reports show that the dam might have to stop
hydropower generation before the end of the year to avoid
catastrophic damage caused, in part, by the
small-but-mighty bubbles. The Bureau of
Reclamation has spent millions of dollars adding protective
layers to some of the dam’s water release valves. State and
federal officials are debating how to manage around the dam’s
limitations as part of high-stakes negotiations this
year.
A state lawmaker on Wednesday paused her bill extending the
state Department of Water Resources’ water rights permit after
it got caught up in a controversy over a proposed
tunnel diverting water from Northern California to
Southern California. Assemblymember Lisa Calderon withdrew her
bill, AB 2215, from its scheduled hearing in the Senate Natural
Resources and Water Committee, according to her chief of staff
Mike Dayton. He said the committee’s proposed changes to the
bill “weren’t consistent with our intentions.” Calderon’s bill
would have given the Department of Water Resources
until 2046 to build more infrastructure to use more of its
State Water Project water rights. The State Water
Project is the massive system of pumps and aqueducts that
transports water around the state to 27 million people.
Phoenix-area cities say they want answers about plans for a
pool of water that’s stored underground as a backup during dry
times on the Colorado River. City leaders say the Arizona Water
Banking Authority is keeping them in the dark about how they
might share that water, making it hard for cities to plan for a
dryer future. The Water Bank is holding a special meeting
Tuesday morning to address some of those questions. The Water
Bank was created in 1996 to store excess Colorado River water
underground. … Now, the Colorado River is dry enough to cause
shortages, and cities say the Water Bank isn’t telling them how
much water they can expect to get back.
California is investing $7.5 million to slow the spread of
invasive golden mussels, including $6 million in one-time
funding and $1.5 million in ongoing annual support to
protect the state’s waterways and water
infrastructure. … Its tendency to rapidly
reproduce, forming dense colonies on underwater surfaces, can
clog pipes, pumps and critical water infrastructure while
disrupting local ecosystems. Its spread has raised
resulting alarm across California: over the past two months,
the Sacramento, Kern and San Joaquin counties have declared
local emergencies in response to the invasive species threat.
The money will establish five Delta-based
decontamination sites to inspect boats and equipment for
invasive mussels and remove them before they spread to
other waterways.
Operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the
Bay Model is a giant hydraulic replica of San Francisco
Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin
Delta. It is housed in a converted World II-era
warehouse in Sausalito near San Francisco.
Hundreds of gallons of water are pumped through the
three-dimensional, 1.5-acre model to simulate a tidal ebb
and flow lasting 14 minutes.
As part of the historic Colorado
River Delta, the Salton Sea regularly filled and dried for
thousands of years due to its elevation of 237 feet below
sea level.
The most recent version of the Salton Sea was formed in 1905 when
the Colorado River broke
through a series of dikes and flooded the seabed for two years,
creating California’s largest inland body of water. The
Salton Sea, which is saltier than the Pacific Ocean, includes 130
miles of shoreline and is larger than Lake Tahoe.
Drought — an extended period of
limited or no precipitation — is a fact of life in California and
the West, with water resources following boom-and-bust patterns.
No portion of the West has been immune to drought during the last
century and it occurs with much greater frequency in the West
than in any other region of the country.
