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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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.
Recently elected San Diego County Supervisor Paloma Aguirre
took office in July promising to wield the full powers of her
new job against the sewage crisis in the Tijuana
River. … Aguirre plans to ask the county to begin work
immediately on two region-wide studies approved by the Board in
June. … She also will ask the Board to spend roughly $100,000
to hire a new lobbyist to educate federal lawmakers about the
extent of sewage pollution in South County and build support
for a comprehensive bi-national cleanup effort.
… Collinsville is in the news because the California Forever
or Flannery investor billionaires are working their uncommon
influence to persuade the California Legislature to funnel
federal funds for shipbuilding for a facility a little east of
the Town of Collinsville. … The Army Corps of Engineers
with over seventy technical studies determined that deepening
the Sacramento ship channel likely needed for the Collinsville
area proposed ship building would introduce additional salt
water into the Delta. Such introduction would compromise water
quality for 23 million municipal and agricultural users and
water conveyance for the State Water Project. –Written by Elizabeth Patterson, vice-chair of the Delta
Heritage Area Advisory Commission.
… Californians are exposed to PFAS through products like
nonstick cookware, waterproof clothing and cosmetics, and
cleaning products. When PFAS treated products are washed, the
chemicals can go down the drain and possibly end up in our
groundwater. Experts estimate that more than half of
Californians are exposed to PFAS in our water. … That’s
why CALPIRG is working to pass laws that would phase out PFAS
from consumer products and require water departments to filter
PFAS out of our water supply. … And last week we went to
the Capitol and delivered that support from the public.
… Species that are built to survive being baked and broiled
are being cooked by climate change, which is worsening faster
than their evolutionary traits can keep up with. Thanks to
climate change, heatwaves are lasting longer. Also, wildfires
are more unpredictable, and rainfall is all but nonexistent in
some parts of the desert. … The Sonoran pronghorn, a
magical-looking deer-like animal endemic to Arizona, has become
reliant on the man-made water stations that Arizona officials
now refill year-round because actual natural water sources are
in short supply.
President Claudia Sheinbaum announced today the advances made
in the regularization of water concession titles nationwide,
describing the process as a “deprivatization” of the resource.
The initiative has allowed the federal government to recover
over 4 billion m³ of water, equivalent to three to four times
the annual consumption of Mexico City. … Authorities
highlighted cases where agricultural concessions, exempt from
fees, were misused for housing or commercial projects. In other
situations, companies voluntarily returned unused excess
volumes.
The points and counterpoints are in: Colorado’s water
heavyweights have laid out their arguments about the future of
a powerful Colorado River water right ahead of a state hearing
in mid-September. A Western Slope coalition led by the
Colorado River District and Front Range groups — Aurora Water,
Colorado Springs Utilities, Denver Water and Northern Water —
are debating a potential change to water rights tied to the
Shoshone Power Plant in Glenwood Canyon. The influential water
rights, owned by an Xcel Energy subsidiary, impact how water
flows across the state.
For more than two decades, satellites have tracked the total
amounts of water held in glaciers, ice sheets, lakes, rivers,
soil and the world’s vast natural reservoirs underground —
aquifers. An extensive global analysis of that data now reveals
fresh water is rapidly disappearing beneath much of humanity’s
feet. … Scientists are seeing “mega-drying”
regions that are immense and expanding — one stretching from
the western United States through Mexico to
Central America. … There are two primary causes of the
desiccation: rising temperatures unleashed by using oil and
gas, and widespread overpumping of water that took millennia to
accumulate underground.
The state is poised to spend a little more than $7 million to
get the fish hatchery near Kernville back up and running in
order to protect the endemic Kern River rainbow trout. The plan
is to find pure Kern River rainbow DNA to start a broodstock at
the hatchery and stock only those fish in the upper reaches of
the north fork of the river. Somewhere above Fairview Dam,
about 16 miles upriver from Kernville. … The hatchery has
been deemed vital to the maintenance of the species, already
listed as “of concern” by CDFW and the U.S. Forest Service.
… The leafy greens and other produce grown in the Salinas
Valley need lots of fertilizer, but that demand plus the fact
that most of these crops have shallow roots, means it’s easy
for extra nitrogen to get into the groundwater here. It
dissolves in water and sinks below the roots, eventually
reaching the aquifer. And once it’s there, nitrate—which is the
form of nitrogen most fertilizers take—is hard to remove.
… That’s part of the challenge for the Central Coast,
where over 14,000 people rely on water with dangerous levels of
nitrates that can elevate risks of cancers, thyroid problems
and blue baby syndrome.
The California State Senate today voted unanimously to confirm
new terms for current State Water Resources Control Board Chair
E. Joaquin Esquivel and Board Member Nichole Morgan. Gov. Gavin
Newsom on Jan. 6, 2025, re-appointed Esquivel and Morgan to
serve on the State Water Board for another four years. The
five-member board is responsible for protecting all water
quality and water supplies in California, including drinking
water.
Last week the Department of Agriculture advanced plans to
rollback the roadless area conservation rule. … The rule was
intended to mitigate negative impacts from road construction
and usage on forests and watersheds. Now
environmental groups across the nation, including here in
Humboldt County, are rallying to stop the rule from being
rescinded. … “[A]bout 354 municipal water districts that get
their water from national forest systems … and new road
construction would contribute more sedimentation and
decreased water quality within those 354 municipal
water districts,” said Josefina Barrantes, the 30X30
Coordinator for EPIC. The rollback would affect 4 million acres
of national forests in California.
The Bureau of Reclamation announced plans to prepare an
environmental impact statement for proposed “North-to-South
Water Transfers” in California. The intent is to evaluate the
potential effects of annual water transfers starting as soon as
2028. These transfers would move water from Northern California
sellers to buyers in the south and the San Francisco Bay Area.
According to Reclamation, the transfers aim to meet existing
water demands without creating new ones.
… The Imperial Irrigation District, which delivers water to
farmers in southeastern California, adopted a resolution
endorsing the proposed Delta Conveyance Project on Tuesday,
despite not anticipating getting any of the project’s water
because of its sole reliance on the Colorado River. Instead,
the resolution says the district will benefit indirectly from
the project because it could relieve pressure on the Colorado
River from other California water agencies that can tap more
into Northern California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta
instead.
… [S]everal wildlife agencies have emphasized late-summer
programs that pay farmers to convert fallow and
recently-harvested farmland into shallow-water habitat for the
dwindling shorebird species that migrate along the Pacific
Flyway through the Central Valley in July, August and
September. Through a farmland program run through BirdReturns —
a partnership among the Nature Conservancy, Audubon California
and Point Blue Conservation Science — stakeholders have
emphasized the late-summer time frame and shorebirds, which
migrate as early as July, months before other species and the
majority of birds trek to their winter homes.
The Imperial Irrigation District (IID) officially declared a
local emergency at its regular meeting on Sept. 2, in response
to the catastrophic August 2025 Monsoon Storms that battered
its service territory in Imperial and Riverside counties. The
IID Board of Directors ratified the emergency proclamation
initially issued by Power Manager Matthew Smelser on Aug. 24,
acknowledging the extreme peril to public safety and property.
… Water Manager Mike Pacheco reported damage to the
Highline Canal, saying most of the destruction was in the
northwestern part of the valley along the Trifolium Canal to
the Elmore Desert Ranch.
As the US wrestles with how to deal with widespread PFAS
pollution in drinking water supplies, most utilities are
lacking advanced filtration systems that could protect public
health from not just PFAS but an array of harmful contaminants,
according to a new study. Small, rural communities are the
least likely to have the advanced systems in place, the study
notes. Among the contaminants that the advanced systems can
reduce are the water disinfectant byproducts trihalomethanes
and haloacetic acid, according to the study from the
Environmental Working Group (EWG), which was published Thursday
in the journal ACS ES&T Water. Both byproducts are
considered potential carcinogens.
More than one in four U.S. homes—amounting to $12.7 trillion in
real estate—faces at least one type of “severe or extreme
climate risk,” like floods, hurricanes, and wildfires,
according to a Realtor.com Climate Risk Report. The report
by economist Jiayi Xu details how these mounting climate
threats are reshaping housing markets, creating major financial
burdens for homeowners, and driving up the cost and complexity
of insurance nationwide.
The public is invited to comment on new state subsidence
guidelines at three workshops next week. The Department of
Water Resources is holding meetings on Sept. 9 in Clovis, Sept.
10 in Delano and Sept. 11 in Willows. The workshops are focused
solely on collecting feedback on a recently released draft
document that supports one of the goals of the Sustainable
Groundwater Management Act — avoiding or minimizing subsidence,
land sinking. The document outlines fundamental concepts
of subsidence and explains what practices local groundwater
agencies should use in their groundwater sustainability plans
to halt or minimize subsidence.
Over the holiday weekend, many people looking to cool off from
the summer heat were disappointed as some beaches were closed
or authorities advised against swimming because of unsafe
levels of bacteria. The advisories and closures popped up
across the East Coast, from Florida to Maine, along inland
streams and rivers, and throughout the California coast. The
culprit: fecal contamination detected in the water that
presents a risk of illness. … Experts told USA TODAY
that stormwater runoff and sewage overflows were among the most
likely causes, both of which are exacerbated by heavy rains,
flooding and warming temperatures.
Dozens of the world’s leading climate researchers on Tuesday
publicly rebuked a hastily assembled report from the Trump
administration that questions the severity of global warming —
marking one of the strongest repudiations yet of the
president’s efforts to downplay climate change. In a withering
459-page document, more than 85 scientists denounced the
Department of Energy‘s July report as biased, error-ridden and
unfit for guiding policy.
