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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Directors and how you can support our nonprofit mission by
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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.
Mark your calendars! Registration will be opening soon for two
exciting Water Education Foundation events this fall.
Water Summit | Oct. 29
Join us for our premier event of
the year, bringing together leading policymakers and experts from
all sectors to discuss the most pressing water issues facing
California and the West.
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.
… Recently, a data center under construction in Cheyenne,
Wyoming, was found to have contaminated the sewer system with a
rare bacterium. The water utility took swift action. The
Cheyenne Board of Public Utilities fined the project developer,
revoked its wastewater permit and announced that it would not
accept certain types of wastewater from data centers
citywide. The developer of the project — which is backed
by Meta — is appealing the $10,000 fine and disputes the
utility’s conclusion tracing the bacterium to its project. But
the incident highlights what engineers view as an
emerging challenge for the data center industry that is already
under scrutiny over its environmental footprint.
Aurora Water’s single largest water customer is refusing to
reduce its usage, despite a mandatory 20% cutback ordered under
the city’s drought restrictions, according to the water
utility. The customer is Niagara Bottling, a California-based
company that has operated a bottling plant in Aurora since
2012. The plant draws directly from the city’s tap
water supply, purifies it and sells it, often under
store brand labels. Costco’s Kirkland Signature water, for
example, is often bottled by Niagara, which has plants across
the country. Aurora Water says last year, Niagara used
more than 200 million gallons of water. The
company is allocated 178 million gallons. … But Aurora
is currently under Stage 1 drought restrictions.
Sites Reservoir is still facing opposition from conservation
groups, but in most corners of Colusa County – where
mom-and-pop businesses are trying to survive long enough to
hold the community’s identity intact – the project’s
massive seven-year build-out is increasingly being viewed as a
badly needed stimulus opportunity. At least, for those who
think it will actually happen. Water contractors have
talked about building a project like Sites in Colusa for
decades. That means some longtime residents equate discussing a
financial windfall from it today as something like daydreaming.
But things change. Now, with strong support from California’s
Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom and the Mid-Valley’s Republican
Congressman James Gallagher, the managers at Sites Project
Authority say they could be breaking ground on the
reservoir as early as next summer.
The severe snow drought that gripped the western United States
in this past winter was made four times more likely by
human-caused climate change, according to a new study
led by researchers at Colorado School of Mines and published
today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
(PNAS). In the Upper Colorado River Basin, a critical source of
water for millions of people across the southwestern U.S., the
study found that the snow drought was approximately 14 times
more likely because of climate change. The study is among the
first to apply modern climate attribution techniques to a
large-scale snow drought event, quantifying the extent to which
warming temperatures have increased the likelihood of
dramatically reduced snowpack across the American West.
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.
