A collection of top water news from around California and the West compiled each weekday. Send any comments or article submissions to Foundation News & Publications Director Doug Beeman.
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One of the best places to see how dramatically big storms this
winter have changed California’s water picture is three hours
north of the Bay Area, in the foothills east of Sacramento
Valley. There, Lake Oroville, the second-largest reservoir in
California and a key component of the state’s water system, has
undergone a breathtaking transformation. Sixteen months ago,
the reservoir was so parched from severe drought that it was
just 22% full. For the first time since it opened in 1967, its
power plant had shut down because there wasn’t enough water to
spin the turbines and generate electricity. Now Oroville
reservoir is 65% full. Since its lowest point on Sept. 30,
2021, the massive lake’s level has risen 182 feet, boosted by
nine atmospheric river storms in January.
It’s a crisis nearly 100 years in the making: Seven states —
all reliant on a single mighty river as a vital source of water
— failed to reach an agreement this week on how best
to reduce their use of supplies from the rapidly shrinking
Colorado River. At the heart of the feud is the “Law of
the River,” a body of agreements, court decisions, contracts
and decrees that govern the river’s use and date back to 1922,
when the Colorado River Compact first divided river
flows among the states. But as California argues most
strongly for strict adherence to this system of water
apportionment, the other states say it makes little sense when
the river’s largest reservoir, Lake Mead, continues to decline
toward “dead pool” level, which would effectively cut off the
Southwest from its water lifeline. The Law of the River, they
say, is getting in the way of a solution.
Fifteen Native American tribes will get a total of $580 million
in federal money this year for water rights settlements, the
Biden administration announced Thursday. The money will help
carry out the agreements that define the tribes’
rights to water from rivers and other sources and pay for
pipelines, pumping stations, and canals that deliver it to
reservations. “Water rights are crucial to ensuring the health,
safety and empowerment of Tribal communities,” U.S. Interior
Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement Thursday that
acknowledged the decades many tribes have waited for the
funding. Access to reliable, clean water and basic sanitation
facilities on tribal lands remains a challenge across many
Native American reservations.
Twenty-two early to mid-career water professionals from
across California have been chosen for the 2023 William R.
Gianelli Water Leaders Class, the Water Education Foundation’s
highly competitive and respected career development program.
This Water Leaders cohort includes engineers, lawyers, resource
specialists, scientists and others from a range of public and
private entities and nongovernmental organizations from
throughout the state. The roster for the 2023
class can be found
here. The Water Leaders program, led by
Foundation Executive Director Jennifer
Bowles, deepens knowledge on water, enhances
individual leadership skills and prepares participants to take
an active, cooperative approach to decision-making about water
resource issues. Leading experts and top policymakers
serve as mentors to class members.
The State Water Resources Control Board will spend $34 million
for six projects to improve the water quality of the New River
and the Tijuana River along the U.S.-Mexico border. The New
River starts south of the city of Mexicali, and runs through
Calexico on the U.S. side of the border and through Imperial
County to the Salton Sea. The Tijuana River runs from Baja
California into San Diego. Both rivers are heavily polluted by
sewage, trash, industrial and agricultural waste, and other
sediment and pollutants.
Moldering houses, sodden with rainwater. Muddy back roads
awaiting bulldozers to clear away debris. Families without
flood insurance wondering how they will afford to repair their
wrecked homes and replace belongings. This is the reality for
many low-income and working-class residents in Santa Cruz and
Monterey counties, the bull’s-eye of a series of historic
atmospheric river storms that began on Dec. 26 and lasted
through Jan. 18. The storms dumped as much as 3 feet of water
in parts of the Santa Cruz Mountains, flooding homes, blocking
critical access roads and trapping communities. Across the
state, at least 21 people died in the deluges. The floodwaters
have receded, but one month later, residents are still
struggling to move forward with scant resources while
navigating bureaucratic labyrinths to procure promised federal
aid.
Happy World Wetlands Day from the driest big city in the world.
OK, that’s not true. We may think of our city as arid, but Los
Angeles harbors its very own rich wetlands (plus, Yuma beats us
on aridity any year). The Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve,
between Playa del Rey to the south and Marina del Rey and
Venice Beach to the north, represents the past, present and
future of our city. These ancestral waterways once harbored a
fertile ecosystem with which the Tongva coexisted, but the area
was recklessly defaced by Marina del Rey construction and
continues to struggle with fires and trash from local
encampments.
The US Environmental Protection Agency has put restrictions on
four pesticides to save endangered Pacific salmon and steelhead
species from extinction. The new mitigation measures, announced
Feb. 1, aim to protect 28 salmon species in Washington, Oregon,
and California from pesticide runoff and spray drift. The four
targeted pesticides are three herbicides—bromoxynil, prometryn,
and metolachlor—and the soil fumigant 1,3-dichloropropene. The
EPA put the measures in place after the National Marine
Fisheries Service found in 2021 that such restrictions are
needed to protect endangered and threatened salmon species. The
measures require no-spray vegetative buffers between waters
where salmon live and agricultural fields. They also require
retention ponds and vegetated drainage ditches. All of these
measures are intended to capture pesticides that otherwise
could seep into the water.
The Department of Water Resources (DWR) today announced grant
awards to nine projects in six counties through the Urban
Community Drought Relief Grant program. The $46 million in
financial assistance will provide critical support to implement
drought relief projects that build long-term drought and
climate resilience in communities across the State, and help
advance efforts outlined in Governor Newsom’s strategy to adapt
California’s water supply for a hotter and drier future. While
recent storms have improved conditions and helped fill many of
the state’s reservoirs to average or above average levels,
California may see a return to dry conditions in the months
ahead, and much of the state continues to experience drought
impacts following the three driest years on record.
The Rio Verde Foothills look like any other slice of desert
suburbia, a smattering of roughly 2,000 stucco homes in a
cactus-studded neighborhood just outside of Scottsdale,
Arizona, one of Phoenix’s booming satellite cities. An affluent
community with a median home price of $825,000, it offered
homebuyers cheap land, good schools and mountain views — but
not, as many residents recently discovered, a stable water
supply. No municipal water pipes reach the Rio Verde
Foothills, so about 25% to 35% of the residents rely on a
longstanding arrangement in which private water trucks deliver
water supplied by Scottsdale. When the city began
threatening to cut off the community’s access to Scottsdale
water in 2015, saying it had to conserve for its own residents,
many Rio Verde Foothills residents did not believe it would
actually happen.
Trekking along the shoreline of the Great Salt Lake — the
largest remaining saltwater lake in the western hemisphere —
can feel eerie and lonely. … [Carly Biedul, a biologist with
the Great Salt Lake Institute], is bundled up in an orange
puffy jacket, gloves and hat. Most important she’s wearing,
thick, sturdy, rubber boots. The mud with a frozen, slick layer
of ice on top gets treacherous. One thing that’s hard to
prepare for though, is the stench: A pungent odor like sulfur
and dead fish. But it’s actually a good thing, a sign of a
biologically healthy saline lake. “People have been saying that
they miss the lake stink because it just makes them feel like
home,” Biedul says. “It’s just not here [much] anymore, so
you’re lucky that it gets to smell so bad.” Lucky? Maybe one
small bright spot in an otherwise grim story of a looming
ecological disaster. The lake doesn’t really stink anymore
because it’s drying … and dying.
Looking out at a vast, dusty valley, Alan O’Neill nods at a
long concrete ramp that hasn’t seen a motorized boat launch in
nearly 20 years. … Approaching one edge of Las Vegas Bay
Marina Overlook — now more than 1.5 miles from the water’s edge
— O’Neill points out the picnic tables shaded by green metal
gazebos near the abandoned boat ramp, a nearby campsite that
still draws visitors, and the dry ground that once used to be
part of Lake Mead. … The plummeting water levels at Lake
Mead receive national attention because of the reservoir’s key
role in supplying water to municipal and agricultural users in
Arizona, Nevada and California, forcing state and federal
officials to make difficult decisions about how to keep the
water flowing after more than two decades of drought.
A program that installed green infrastructure in Los Angeles
alleyways got its first real test last month as massive storms
pummeled the region, bringing rain that overwhelmed much of
Southern California’s stormwater infrastructure. As Alissa
Walker writes in Curbed, thanks to the “green alleys” installed
as part of a 2015 project in South Los Angeles, “the resulting
stormwater had more opportunities to sink back into the earth:
filtering through a row of permeable pavers, directing to
pocket planters where creeping fig vines twirl up garage walls,
or vanishing into grates labeled ‘drains to groundwater.’”
A Super Bowl party mainstay that nearly every fan can get
behind is poised to take advantage of California’s decreasing
drought despite early predictions that crop output may come in
below the previous season’s totals. The California Avocado
Commission recently announced it’s expecting a crop harvest of
257 million pounds of avocados during the 2022-23 fiscal year,
which is a drop of around 7% from the 2021-2022 season. Central
and Southern California are home to nearly 3,000 farms, with
many experiencing years of drought and strict water
restrictions. A decrease in the severity of the drought
triggered by atmospheric river events that dropped some 32
trillion gallons of water over the state has some hopeful that
initial estimates may not capture the full success of farmers.
An estimated 32 trillion gallons of water — in the form of rain
and snow — came down on California in a series of nine
back-to-back atmospheric rivers between late December and
mid-January. To put this in perspective, that amount is
just shy of the quantity of water held within Lake Tahoe, one
of the deepest lakes in North America. The lake has, on
average, about 37 trillion gallons of water. These storms
were destructive and deadly, claiming the lives of at least 20
people, and the estimated cost is likely to end up being in the
billions. And new research is revealing these storms will
likely become larger and drop even more rain than what we have
experienced so far this winter. Dr. Ruby Leung, an
atmospheric scientist at the Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory in Washington state, joined CapRadio’s Vicki
Gonzalez to discuss what this means for California’s future.
Anton Sorokin was hiking in the hills near his home in Berkeley
when he came across a pond that was packed full of newts. For a
couple of delightful hours, he watched the amphibians swim to
the surface for a breath and then plunge underwater again. With
a background in herpetology and wildlife photography, Sorokin
took some pictures without any particular project in mind. He
thought to himself, “Oh, what a great find!” … Like many
animals, California’s newts are facing new challenges because
of climate change, according to growing evidence. Although the
animals evolved to deal with drought by delaying reproduction
when conditions were extreme, the region has become drier for
longer than in the past.
The historic rainfall hitting California in recent months could
bring a particularly vibrant superbloom in the Spring—the first
one to occur in the state since 2019. “Superblooms” in
California happen when conditions are just right—when the
state, which is in the grips of an ongoing drought, receives a
rare influx of rainfall, paired with the right amount of
sunshine. When this happens, native wildflowers, that lay
dormant in the soil, all bloom at once. This creates a
phenomenon where carpets of brightly colored flowers spread
across the state, often in the deserts.
California’s mandated first flush of the Sacramento-San Joaquin
Delta in January resulted in the vast majority of incoming
Delta water being sent out into the San Francisco Bay.
Data from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation for the month of
January revealed that more than 90 percent of all water that
entered the Sacramento Delta was pumped out to the Bay and into
the Pacific Ocean. The backstory: In early January,
following weeks of heavy rainfall throughout the Golden State,
up to 95 percent of all incoming water to the Delta was being
purposefully pumped into the ocean at points. -Written by SJV Sun reporter Daniel Gligich.
The snowpack in California’s mountains weighed in Wednesday as
the biggest it has been at the start of February in nearly
three decades, a product of the recent storms that have flipped
the script on drought by lessening water shortages across the
state. State water officials conducting their monthly snow
survey logged snowpack in the Sierra Nevada and southern
Cascades at 205% of the average for the date. At Phillips
Station, one of the state’s oldest and most central monitoring
sites, where surveyors convened in front of TV cameras for
measurements Wednesday morning, the snowpack was 193% of
average.
With the recent expiration of a federal deadline, California
now finds itself sharply at odds with six other states over how
to take less water from the shrinking Colorado River. After
rejecting a plan offered by the rest of the region, California
has entered a political tug-of-war with high stakes. So why has
the state that uses the most Colorado River water decided to go
it alone? California appears to be banking on its high-priority
senior water rights, while the other states are presenting a
united front to show the federal government they support a plan
that would have California give up more water. … The
parties are at an impasse as the federal government begins to
weigh alternatives for rapidly reducing water use and
preventing the river’s reservoirs from reaching dangerously low
levels.
