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.
The Water Education Foundation’s
2025 Annual
Reportis now available in an interactive,
digital format and recaps how we accomplished a lot of
“firsts” last year.
A standout moment was our first-ever Klamath River
Tour, where we brought 45 participants into the heart of
the watershed that underwent the nation’s largest dam removal
project.
… Water managers in states that use the Colorado River say
they have plans to make water systems more efficient as
supplies shrink due to drought and climate change. A new
list of potential water infrastructure projects shows the ways
Arizona and its neighbors might adapt to a drier future, and
the massive spending it will take to make them possible. The
list appears to follow an April meeting between Interior
Secretary Doug Burgum and governors from the seven states that
use water from the Colorado River. The secretary requested a
sort of wishlist from those states, and they returned a
wide-ranging collection of more than 80 projects with
ballpark cost estimates that totaled in the tens of billions of
dollars. The list, which was obtained by KJZZ,
outlines more than $25 billion of potential spending in Arizona
alone.
Some property owners above Napa Valley’s 72-square-mile
groundwater subbasin will see a new fee on their property tax
bills in December. As part of the Napa Valley Subbasin
Groundwater Sustainability Plan, Napa County mailed
informational postcards this past week to subbasin property
owners and groundwater users, encouraging them to review
information about the groundwater fee that will range
anywhere from $38 to $129 per acre per year.
… Under California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management
Act — a state law requiring local agencies to sustainably
manage groundwater — the fee will fund water monitoring,
reporting, planning and compliance, but not the actual use of
the groundwater.
Jeff Martin couldn’t sleep the night Gross Dam was scheduled
for completion. … Martin, the program manager for the dam
project, had worked for 12 years on the $600 million effort to
replace the old Gross Dam with one that is 131 feet taller,
tripling the reservoir’s storage. Crews still have some
finishing work remaining, he said, but the major work to raise
the dam is now complete. … But it remains unclear
whether Denver Water will ever be able to fill the reservoir to
its new full capacity as a yearslong court battle
lumbers on between the utility and environmentalists. …
Environmental groups argued in court, and in their filings,
that regulators failed to evaluate how siphoning more water
from the drought-stricken Colorado River would
impact the basin as a whole. And the groups charged that they
failed to weigh other project options that wouldn’t require the
clear-cutting of a half-million trees or risk damage to
wetlands.
In California, a long-abused river has been reborn. For
decades, humans disrupted its course and restricted its flows
to the detriment of its ecosystem, only to lately reverse
direction and restore it to a facsimile of its natural state.
And salmon, the bellwethers of aquatic health, have responded,
returning much faster and in greater abundance than anyone
anticipated. This description applies not to the Klamath River
— or not only to the Klamath, recently liberated from
its four lower dams — but rather to the far less-celebrated
Putah Creek. … Along its 85-mile course, it is imprisoned
behind dams, siphoned off by ditches, squeezed between
artificially straightened and hardened banks. Although
it lacked salmon for decades, in 2025 more than 2,000
chinook returned to spawn — an improbable triumph
that reflects both human-led restoration and the resilience of
the fish themselves.
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.
