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 Vik Jolly.
Subscribe to our weekday emails to have news delivered to your inbox at about 9 a.m. Monday through Friday except for holidays.
Please Note: Some of the sites we link to may limit the number of stories you can access without subscribing. Also, the headlines below are the original headlines used in the publication cited at the time they are posted here and do not reflect the stance of the Water Education Foundation, an impartial nonprofit that remains neutral.
A large swath of southern San Luis Obispo County was ordered to
boil its drinking water last week after bacteria was discovered
in Lopez Lake’s water distribution pipeline. Residents of
Arroyo Grande, Grover Beach, Pismo Beach, Oceano, Avila Beach
and other unincorporated areas of the South County had to to
boil drinking water for up to four days depending on where they
lived. … The county discovered the bacteria at five
routine testing sites in the Lopez water distribution system on
April 29. After a second round of tests, the county issued a
boil water notice on April 30 — which lifted for some residents
on May 2 and others on May 3. … On Thursday, the county
shared additional details of what led to the unprecedented boil
water notice for Five Cities residents. Here’s what happened.
House Republicans added a provision to their sweeping tax cut
package authorizing sales of hundreds of thousands of acres of
public lands in Nevada and Utah, prompting outrage from
Democrats and environmentalists who called it a betrayal that
could lead to drilling, mining and logging in sensitive areas.
Republicans on the House Natural Resources Committee adopted
the land sales proposal early Wednesday morning. The initial
draft had not included it amid bipartisan opposition. The land
sale provision was put forward by Republican Reps. Mark Amodei
of Nevada and Celeste Maloy of Utah. The parcels could be used
for economic development, mining and infrastructure projects
such as the expansion of an airport and a
reservoir in Utah, according to local
officials and plans for the areas.
EPA’s political leaders have hedged on reorganization plans for
its stand-alone research office, but the office’s managers are
already warning staff of halting lab research and reassigning
key duties. In an email sent Thursday morning to all staff in
the Center for Public Health and Environmental Assessment, one
of the Office of Research and Development’s four research
centers, center Director Wayne Cascio and deputy Kay Holt
wrote, “Lab research will wind down over the next few weeks as
we will no longer have the capability to acquire supplies and
materials.” … CPHEA oversees multiple research
divisions, from climate science to pollutant assessments. One
of its divisions is the embattled Integrated Risk Information
System, or IRIS, which conducts chemical risk assessments that
industry lobbyists have for years challenged for overstating
the dangers of certain substances.
A Long Beach oil field will soon be restored to roughly 156
acres of public wetlands. City leaders and oil operators came
together Thursday at the groundbreaking ceremony on the Synergy
Oil Field, where privately owned oil operations have been
ongoing for over 60 years. “We are shutting down an oil field
that’s been here since the late 20’s and we are doing a
complete wetlands restoration project, to about 156 acres,”
John McKeown, CEO, Synergy Oil & Gas said … with
publicly accessible wetlands, walking trails, habitat
restoration, and a nature center focused on environmental
education. … It’s part of a broader effort to restore
the Los Cerritos Wetlands. Another 103 acres are set to be
restored through the Southern Los Cerritos Wetlands Restoration
Project in Seal Beach—led by the Los Cerritos Wetlands
Authority.
Residents who live in the Remen Tract neighborhood — an
unincorporated plot of land located within Pleasanton — have
depended on temporary fire hoses connected to fire hydrants for
months as their main source of water for their homes. These
temporary connections, according to neighbors and a city
spokesperson, were installed as a remedy for a main waterline
that broke in August 2024. After previously notifying the
residents, the city removed its fire hose connections last
Wednesday — mainly due to safety concerns regarding the rest of
the city’s water supply — leaving those six homes and residents
without water. … And what was more surprising to
… residents who live in that neighborhood was the city
informing them it will not be fixing their waterline, leaving
many scrambling to figure out how or if they should pay for
those repairs.
After a four-year downward trend, U.S. farm bankruptcies are on
the rise again, and with uncertainties about the impacts of
U.S. tariffs on export trade, there’s growing concern that the
financial health of farms across the country will continue to
falter. A total of 216 U.S. farms filed for Chapter 12
bankruptcy last year, up 55% from 2023. With 17 filings,
California led the nation. … Arshdeep Singh, a Fresno
County citrus grower and director of the Punjabi American
Growers Group, said there is no support for California farmers
in the San Joaquin Valley who have been financially pummeled by
impacts of the state’s Sustainable Groundwater
Management Act. Some have filed for bankruptcy or are
on the verge of it as their land value has plummeted and their
equity has evaporated, with banks calling on their loans.
The Klamath River Renewal Corporation (KRRC) finished the
removal of the four lower Klamath hydroelectric dams in Fall
2024 and the dam removal portion of the Klamath River Renewal
Project is now complete. … As the reservoirs drained in
January 2024, native seed mix was applied to the reservoir
footprints. This initial round of seeding was intended to
stabilize sediments and improve soil composition. Following
reservoir drawdown, the newly exposed lands were planted with
more than 66,000 pounds of native seed, 77,000 bareroot, plug,
and container plants, and more than 25,000 acorns. … The
winter rain we received this year has provided ideal conditions
to flush additional sediments down river as well as promoting
the growth of native vegetation. Restoration crews are in the
field performing another round of seeding, planting and weeding
this spring.
… Municipal water systems in cities and towns are carefully
engineered to meet the daily needs of homes, businesses and
public services, as well as emergency demands. In urban areas,
fires are typically localized, such as a house fire, affecting
only a small part of the community. … When the urban fire is
extinguished, the system pressure returns to normal and
hydrants are available for the next incident. However,
wildfires are far larger in scale and are driven by natural
factors like lightning or by human activities, such as
campfires, discarded cigarettes or arson. … Urban water
systems are not designed to combat catastrophic wildfires,
especially those that recently impacted Southern California,
where fire hydrants alone are insufficient. In such cases,
alternative water sources—such as tanker trucks and aerial
firefighting resources—become critical. –Written by David McNair, general manager of Scotts Valley
Water District.
Above the shimmering waters of Salt River Project’s Granite
Reef Diversion Dam, a scenic view of Red Mountain is on full
display, but below the surface, a dirty problem grows. As the
key piece of infrastructure diverts water from the Verde and
Salt Rivers into the region’s canal system, sand and sediment
continually build up until they spill into the canals. SRP now
has a new tool for cleaning the dam: a state-of-the-art dredge
to suck up the piles of sand. The dredge acts like a pool
cleaner, stirring up the underwater sediment before vacuuming
it to the surface. By removing the sediment, the dredge ensures
that water can be delivered cleanly and efficiently into SRP’s
canals, which provide water to about 2.5 million Phoenix-area
residents. Without removal, the sediment can spill into the
canals, increasing water treatment costs and leading to canal
closures.
As saguaros across the Sonoran Desert suffer from the combined
stresses of extreme heat and drought, researchers say these
climate changes threaten the large saguaro forests we see
across Southern Arizona and Northern Sonora. A new study finds
that severely hot and dry weather dramatically increased
saguaro mortality at two ends of the Sonoran Desert in 2020 and
2021 and that generally, the health of saguaros and other
desert vegetation has declined significantly. The continued
warming and drying threatens to irretrievably reduce the scale
of and, in some cases, possibly eliminate the large saguaro
forests, the researchers say.
The U.S. Department of Interior said Wednesday it extended more
than a dozen contracts with water-rights holders in California
and Arizona that aim to boost water funding and conservation
efforts in the Colorado River system for its seven western
states. Interior officials say it marked “major progress” with
the Bureau of Reclamation in securing a continuation of 18
short-term agreements with tribal, municipal and agricultural
water users in the lower Colorado River basin that will, they
said, “result in additional water savings” through 2026 and,
likewise, secure its short-term health as the region looks to
its post-2026 water-use guidelines for Lake Powell and Lake
Mead. … Scott Cameron, a senior adviser to U.S. Interior
Secretary Doug Burgum, said the Trump administration
was focused on strengthening the Colorado River system’s
drought response and “safeguarding the interests of western
communities” for more than 40 million citizens and hydropower
fuel resources in its seven states.
The company that sells Arrowhead brand bottled water has won a
court ruling overturning a decision by California water
regulators, who in 2023 ordered it to stop piping millions of
gallons of water from the San Bernardino National Forest.
Fresno County Superior Court Judge Robert Whalen Jr. said in
his ruling that the State Water Resources Control Board’s order
went “beyond the limits of its delegated authority.” The board
had ordered the company BlueTriton Brands to stop taking much
of the water it has been piping from water tunnels and
boreholes in the mountains near San Bernardino. … The judge
… said the legal question was “not about water rights,” and
he cited a provision stating the board does not have the
authority to regulate groundwater.
Each time you ask an AI chatbot to summarize a lengthy legal
document or conjure up a cartoon squirrel wearing glasses, it
sends a request to a data center and strains an increasingly
scarce resource: water. The data centers that power artificial
intelligence consume immense amounts of water to cool hot
servers and, indirectly, from the electricity needed to run
these facilities. … More than 160 new AI data
centers have sprung up across the US in the past three years in
places with high competition for scarce water resources,
according to a Bloomberg News analysis of data from World
Resources Institute, a nonprofit research organization, and
market intelligence firm DC Byte. That’s a 70% increase from
the prior three-year period.
A week before boating is set to return, state officials
announced they had intercepted a vessel carrying invasive
golden mussels at Folsom Lake this week, the first such
discovery since inspections began last month under a new
emergency program aimed at protecting the reservoir’s water
infrastructure. California State Parks staff found a live
infestation of golden mussels clinging to a boat Tuesday during
a screening at Beals Point. The vessel, which had recently been
in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, was
quarantined immediately to prevent the highly invasive species
from contaminating the lake, state officials said Wednesday.
… The lake has been closed to trailered and motorized
boats since April 14 under a joint closure by State Parks and
the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which operates Folsom Dam.
… Through a public records request, Eyewitness News obtained
an email from January 9 sent by Erik Scott, the public
information officer for the Los Angeles Fire
Department. The email was sent to top officials in the
department, writing in part, “We are experiencing challenges
with water pressure while battling the Pacific Palisades Fire.”
But in multiple interviews with the Los Angeles Department of
Water and Power, officials maintain they never ran out of
water. They said the problem was that demand reached four times
the normal use. … According to LADWP, Los Angeles has a
single water system, meaning the water supplied to your home is
the same water that feeds fire hydrants. … The system is
designed to put out house fires, not multiple neighborhoods on
fire at the same time.
A prolonged spell of relatively warm and dry conditions across
California is rapidly melting the state’s snowpack into creeks,
streams and rivers. Hot weather this week will accelerate
the melt. Several rivers fed by snowmelt, mainly in central and
southern Sierra Nevada, are expected to hit their spring peak
flows in the coming days. The Merced River at Pohono Bridge and
the Tuolumne River at Hetch Hetchy, both in Yosemite National
Park, are forecast to reach maximum flow on Sunday. It’s
not just above-average temperatures driving the melt, but that
in tandem with direct, strong sunlight warms up the snowpack
said David Rizzardo, hydrology section manager at the
California Department of Water Resources. … Snowpack is
critical for water resources because it remains frozen away
until the dry late spring and summer months.
“Dear EPA Grant Recipient,” read the official government email.
“Attached is your Termination of Award from the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency.” That’s how hundreds of
organizations found out they had officially lost EPA grant
funding as part of the many cutbacks to environmental programs
demanded by the Trump administration. Among them was the
Community Water Center, a nonprofit that works
to provide safe, clean drinking water to rural communities in
California. Their $20-million award had been earmarked for a
major project to consolidate water systems in the low-income
Central Coast communities of Pajaro, Sunny Mesa and
Springfield, which have long been reliant on domestic wells and
small water systems that are riddled with contaminants above
legal limits.
Last year, we watched as the last of four dams were removed
from the Klamath River in a historic endeavor. Karuk and Yurok
citizens sighed in relief, grateful that decades of tribal-led
activism, scientific research and litigation had succeeded in
reopening 400 stream miles of spawning habitat for salmon and
other species. The tears of joy came just a few weeks
later, when research cameras showed the first of more than
6,000 fish traveling past the first dam site. Spawning salmon
were crossing into Oregon’s Spencer Creek, a tributary of the
Klamath, for the first time in 112 years. The salmon had
remembered the way, for it is embedded into their DNA just as
it is in our ancestors’ – a testament of shared memory and
spiritual connection between our people and the river. –Written by Russell “Buster” Attebery, chairman of the
Karuk Tribe, and Joseph L. James, chairman of the Yurok
Tribe.
A pilot project from a team of oil industry veterans could save
one of California’s key clean energy resources from terminal
decline. On Thursday, the Oklahoma City-based GreenFire Energy
announced that they had restored new life to a defunct well in
The Geysers, the world’s largest geothermal power station — and
one that has been in a state of slow, decades-long collapse.
… The reason for the decline: the ferocious pace at
which conventional forms of geothermal energy can use up water.
… GreenFire’s next-gen system, which sits atop a well
that had also been largely abandoned for lack of pressure,
takes an approach that produces power without losing water.
At Tuesday’s board of supervisors meeting, Public Works
director, John Diodati said the contaminated water event was
rare and unusual. “For over the last 50 years, we’ve treated
Lopez water for the five cities and this is the first boil
notice,” said Diodati. … On April 30th, a boil water notice
was issued because water samples from the Lopez Lake water
distribution system showed a presence of E. coli. A second
round of tests displayed higher levels of coliform bacteria,
not E. coli. The notice was lifted after the drinking water
supply was tested and confirmed safe. Testing to find the cause
of the contaminated water is expected to take 30 days to
complete. Starting on May 7, the Five Cities water supply will
be treated with free chlorine — a stronger water disinfectant
— until May 28.
