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.
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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.
An experimental technology now in testing holds the promise of
revolutionizing California’s depleted water supply. California
spends billions to store water, pump water and recycle water.
But even with climate change bearing down, one strategy is a
tougher sell: desalinating water and pulling it from the sea.
Just ask Tim Quinn, Ph.D., who spent four decades as one of the
state’s top water managers. “Every step in traditional
desalination is hugely fraught with controversy,” Quinn said.
There are roughly a dozen desalination plants operating in
California, including the massive Carlsbad plant at San Diego.
But approval of new plants is typically met with fierce
opposition from many environmental groups. Now, Quinn and his
colleagues, at a startup called OceanWell, believe they have a
system that’s much safer for the environment.
Thinning of forests, generally undertaken to reduce dangers
from wildfire and restore the forest to a more natural state,
also can create more mountain runoff to mitigate drought
effects in the central Sierra Nevada region that relies on
snowpack. In fact, researchers from the College of Agriculture,
Biotechnology & Natural Resources at the University of Nevada,
Reno found that the quantity of additional water produced by
thinned forests can be so significant that it might provide
further incentive for forest managers to undertake prescribed
burning or tree-removal using heavy equipment and hand crews
with chainsaws. Water yields from thinned forests can be
increased by 8% to 14% during drought years, found the study
undertaken by Adrian Harpold … and recently published in
Water Resources Research.
The overarching water myth in our part of our state is one of
massive entities — MWD, LADWP — controlled by criminally
wealthy Kings of California with unholy power straight out of a
film noir plot. Ordinary people who dare question the way that
water works need to be told, once again, “Forget it, Jake. It’s
Chinatown,” and move on to fairer fights with organizations
that aren’t so rich and gigantic that they are unassailable.
When you live in Altadena, the water with which you irrigate
your yard and brush your teeth does not come from anyone living
very large. It comes from one of three tiny,
ancient-for-California water companies that have so few
resources that when disaster strikes, there is no bucks-up
bureaucracy to bankroll a big fix. –Written by Whittier Daily News opinion columnist Larry
Wilson.
It seems there is always something happening related to Valley
Water’s Pacheco Reservoir project. In April, the Sierra Club
and others submitted comments about the draft Environmental
Impact Report (EIR) for geotechnical investigations. On May
21st, the California Water Commission will discuss progress to
date on the project to help them decide whether to allocate
additional funding. Then, on June 10th or 24th the Valley Water
Board of Directors will receive an update on the project which
will focus on how Pacheco fits into their Water Supply Master
Plan (WSMP), and on their progress on finding project
partners. Our letter on the Draft EIR for geotechnical
investigations asked for additional information about
access to the approximately 200 exploration locations, many of
which will be accessed off-road by vehicle or by
helicopter.
Tulare County Board of Supervisors made its annual trip to
Sacramento to advocate for issues important to the county. The
two days of meetings were held on April 22-23, immediately
before the 2025 California State Association of Counties
Legislative Conference. … “We talked to everybody about
kind of the same issues,” (Supervisor Larry) Micari said,
explaining that the main focus of the advocating effort was
water. “The biggest thing that we talked about is the
Airborne Snow Observatories,” he said. … “There’s talk
of them reducing funding, so we spoke to them to try to get
that funding to stay, and to actually increase it,” he
said.
