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.
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Gov. Gavin Newsom said his administration is “moving forward
aggressively” to continue laying the groundwork for a giant
tunnel beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to
replumb the state’s water system. “We got to move faster. Move
faster,” Newsom said … during a speech Thursday at a
conference held by the Assn. of California Water Agencies.
… Newsom cast the tunnel as a “climate adaptation
project,” noting that climate change is projected to shrink the
amount of water the state can deliver with its current
infrastructure. … The project is particularly
acrimonious, drawing out geographical battles between north and
south and thorny fights between officials who want to build the
tunnel and environmentalists and Delta residents seeking to
protect the local ecosystem and their way of life.
The Trump administration will soon propose softening Biden-era
limits on “forever chemicals” in drinking
water, delaying but keeping tough standards for two common
types and rescinding limits on some rarer forms of the
substance, according to an EPA official. The proposal will
start the formal process of rolling back parts of the
first-ever limits on PFAS in drinking water finalized during
former President Joe Biden’s administration. … Jessica
Kramer, head of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of
Water, said at a conference in Washington, D.C., on Thursday
the agency intended to rescind and revisit certain limits she
said were improperly issued by the Biden administration.
Federal forecasters are predicting an increasingly dire summer
across the Colorado River basin, with the latest
projections showing the waterway on track for record-low
flows. The Colorado Basin River Forecast Center’s May
projections for the West’s most important river show
just 13 percent of average flowsinto the
river’s biggest headwaters reservoir, Lake Powell, amounting to
just 800,000 acre-feet. “The record hot and dry winter is the
main story,” Cody Moser, a hydrologist with the center, said on
a webinar Thursday. “Just really no good news this winter.”
Monitoring stations across the region’s mountainous headwaters
registered record-low snowpack at many locations, he said.
The heinously polluted Tijuana River, which has sickened
residents and even researchers with its hydrogen sulfide fumes,
is gaining attention, and now a coalition of politicians,
activists, physicians and economists are pushing California
Gov. Gavin Newsom to declare the fetid and toxic river valley a
public health emergency. They’ve also put together a plan to
clean it up and are pleading with state lawmakers to fund it,
even as the state faces a multibillion-dollar deficit.
… Among the elements in the package announced Thursday:
state Senate Bill 58, which would establish air quality
standards for hydrogen sulfide, a toxic pollutant emitted from
the river, and Senate Bill 1046, which would set standards and
guidelines for workers employed near the river.
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.
During California’s 2012–2016 drought, much of the state
experienced severe drought conditions: significantly less
precipitation and snowpack, reduced streamflow and higher
temperatures. Those same conditions reappeared early in 2021
prompting Gov. Gavin Newsom in May to declare drought emergencies
in watersheds across 41 counties in California.
