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.
Learn more about our team in the office and on the Board of
Directors and how you can support our nonprofit mission by
donating in someone’s honor or memory, or becoming a regular
contributor or supporting specific projects.
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.
Start making arrangements now to attend our first-ever
Kern River Tour and annual Water
Summit so you don’t miss out. These popular fall
programs have limited seating and will fill up quickly!
Kern River Tour | November 4-6
Join us on this special journey as
we examine water issues along the Kern
River, from its mountain-fed headwaters in the
southern Sierra Nevada to its terminus in the Central Valley west
of Bakersfield. Among the planned stops are both upper forks of
the Kern River, Lake Isabella, lower Kern River canyon, the
Friant-Kern Canal, irrigated agriculture in the valley, the Kern
Water Bank and more. Click here for more
details.
Tom Gibson, new director of
California’s Department of Water Resources, will serve as the
keynote speaker for our 42ⁿᵈ annual Water
Summit on Oct. 29.
Guided by this year’s theme, Stewarding a New Era in
Western Water,Gibson and
other leading policymakers and experts will address emerging
topics related to the challenges and opportunities facing water
resource management in California and the West.
Gibson,
an attorney who has held several roles in the state’s Natural
Resources Agency and its various departments, was appointed by
Gov. Newsom on June 29 and sworn in on July 6 to lead DWR and its
nearly 4,000 employees.
… The Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the West’s
reservoirs and dams, has plans to pay cities from
Gilbert to Glendale to use less of the Colorado River.
In recent years, sweeping cuts to water allocations in Arizona
and some other states that use the Colorado River have been
made possible with big chunks of federal money. The Biden
administration set aside $4 billion from the Inflation
Reduction Act for Colorado River work. Beginning in
2022, hundreds of millions of dollars from that pool have been
used to pay cities, farms and tribes to temporarily use less
water. Those supplies are left behind in Lake Mead, the
nation’s largest reservoir. Propping up the reservoir, which
straddles the Arizona-Nevada border, has become a federal
priority in recent years. Its water levels are now the
lowest they’ve been since the reservoir filled about 90 years
ago.
Even on chilly January days in years past, it was possible to
see and hear more than 100 kinds of birds at the Vierra
Wetlands in the San Joaquin River National Wildlife Refuge. But
last winter, dozens of species like the snowy egret, northern
shoveler and the strikingly colorful wood duck did not
appear. The seasonal wetlands, which are part of a larger
pit stop for migratory birds on the Pacific Flyway,
were nearly bone dry — and not because of a drought.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service simply didn’t have
enough employees dedicated to opening the levees that flood the
wetlands. It’s a reality playing across many of the
national wildlife refuges in the country, including the 35 in
California. Labor shortages at the federal government’s various
land management agencies — which have intensified in President
Donald Trump’s second term — have left departments with less
capacity to manage the refuges.
The already strong El Niño conditions in the Pacific Ocean
continue to grow stronger, federal scientists said Thursday,
with a 69% chance that this year’s event will be the strongest
since modern records began in 1950. Scientists at the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in College Park,
Maryland announced there is a 90% chance of a very
strong El Niño through this fall and winter as
water temperatures along the equator off South America continue
to rise. But while El Niño increases the odds of wet winters in
California, it doesn’t mean what many people assume:
That flooding is imminent later in the year for
residents who live along rivers and creeks.
Denver Water is throwing its weight behind a proposed ballot
initiative that would ask voters to redirect a portion of state
sales tax revenue on sleeping bags, hiking boots and
skis to help fight wildfires, reduce risk of additional blazes,
and restore mountain watersheds already damaged by
fire. It’s a rare move for the state’s largest water
provider, which serves 1.5 million customers in the metro area,
and has been hard hit by major blazes, with thousands of acres
of land scorched and reservoirs filled with debris.
… For the past 20 years, as deep droughts have
periodically gripped the state, wildfires have emerged
as a major threat to the mountain watersheds that deliver fresh
water across the state, from Durango, to Aurora,
Denver and Fort Collins.
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.
