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.
Some of the sites we link to may limit the number of stories you can access without subscribing.
We occasionally bold words in the text to ensure the water connection is clear.
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.
California’s biggest irrigation district is throwing its
support behind a controversial water diversion project that
aims to help relieve the Golden State’s historic battle with
drought but also faces widespread local opposition. The
Imperial Irrigation District — the biggest district not only in
California, but also the nation — declared on Tuesday that it
was issuing “a significant and unusual endorsement” for the
state’s proposed Delta Conveyance Project.
… Although Imperial County is the only county in
Southern California that does not receive State Water Project
water, as it draws exclusively from the Colorado River, the
district adopted a resolution this week stressing the
importance of the proposed plans.
In late July, PG&E officially submitted its plans to tear
down the Potter Valley Project, a century-old piece of
water infrastructure built to siphon flows from the Eel River
into the Russian River. The utility’s pending abandonment
of the project has led to fierce debates over agriculture,
tourism and healthy river ecosystems. … Yet as California
enters the height of its now never-ending fire season, one more
consequence of letting the Eel River run free looms: the
seasonal drying of the Russian River and the dissolution of
Lake Pillsbury, two water sources that fire chiefs in the
region have argued are crucial for wildfire-fighting efforts.
Lawyers for the Eastern Tule Groundwater Sustainability Agency
(GSA) recently fired a fusillade of legal arguments against
Friant Water Authority’s contention that the GSA shorted its
obligation to help pay for repairs to the sinking
Friant-Kern Canal. … Friant says Eastern Tule was
supposed to charge its landowners enough in pumping fees to
both pay Friant a minimum of $200 million and
disincentivize excessive pumping, which is what sank the canal
in the first place. But after four years, Friant collected only
$23 million because of what it says were Eastern Tule’s lenient
use of groundwater credits.
When most Californians think about where their water comes
from, they likely think of the state’s dams and reservoirs—and
they’re largely correct. … But another natural reservoir is
also essential to the state: snowpack. At the start of spring,
California’s snowpack has historically contained about 70% as
much water, on average, as all the state’s reservoirs combined.
… But warmer temperatures will result in more
precipitation falling as rain instead of snow, and snowpack
will melt earlier.
A new study on water usage inside U.S. homes found toilets led
the way for the highest water use, followed closely by showers,
while dishwashers used the least. The new research also comes
with some surprises, including the strong association of
humidifiers to high water usage, while other findings may be
less surprising, such as that heavily regulated cities in
California having the lowest water usage in the study. …
This study was published in Earth’s Future, AGU’s journal for
interdisciplinary research on the past, present and future of
our planet and its inhabitants.
Mum’s the word on the new leader of the country’s biggest water
distributor, the Metropolitan Water District of
Southern California. Last week, Metropolitan’s
governing board came out of a closed session to discuss their
next leader with no decision to share. Its former leader, Adel
Hagekhalil, was brought down by accusations of workplace
discrimination. San Diego needs Metropolitan’s new leader to
sign off on any deals to sell the region’s abundance of water
out of state. … But Adan Ortega, board chair of Metropolitan,
told the Orange County Register that the decision on the
general manager might not be made until “late September.”
… Arizona, California, and Nevada have put forth a Post 2026
operational proposal that requires mandatory, certain and
verifiable water-use reductions of additional billions of
gallons of water by the three Lower Basin states. To the
contrary, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico have not
agreed, nor have they proposed, any mandatory, certain and
verifiable reductions in their water use. Not. One. Single.
Gallon. Instead, they propose that water-use reductions needed
to save the Colorado River come solely from Arizona, California
and Nevada. –Written by Tom Buschatzke, the director of the Arizona
Department of Water Resources and chief Colorado River
negotiator for Arizona.
… It is a bit uncanny the extent to which the plot of The
Lorax mirrors the experience of California fishes. As mentioned
often on this blog, at least 83% of our fishes face extinction
if present trends continue (Moyle et al. 2011). These numbers
are sadly increasing further, especially since the 1970s, a
time frame over which the human population of the state
effectively doubled (Fig. 3). … I believe Peter [Moyle]
and I share a realistic view concerning possible solutions to
these problems. … Broadly, this kind of work represents an
arm of environmental science known as ‘reconciliation ecology’.
… In Monterey County, 41% of the wells they sample have
nitrate levels above the limit set by the state and the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency. That poses a health risk.
Nitrates occur naturally in small amounts in water, plants and
our bodies. But in excess, they can prevent red blood cells
from carrying oxygen to tissues. In infants, this can cause
potentially lethal blue baby syndrome. Nitrates have also been
linked with birth defects, cancers and thyroid
problems. The Central Coast Regional Water Board estimates
that over 14,000 people within its boundaries rely on
nitrate-polluted water.
A surge of monsoonal moisture, not uncommon during summer
months, moved into the state from the southwest desert region
early Tuesday, bringing lightning across much of California.
Monsoon thunderstorms can trigger dust storms,
lightning-sparked wildfires and downpours that result in
flooding. … In Southern California, the heaviest storms
will be focused over the Antelope Valley and the San Gabriel
Mountains through Wednesday evening, bringing a 30% to 50%
chance of flooding to the area that includes the Bridge fire
burn scar.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S.
International Boundary and Water Commission (USIBWC) announced
the completion of a 10 million-gallon-per-day expansion at the
South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant (SBIWTP) in
San Diego. The project boosts the facility’s capacity from 25
to 35 mgd, a 40% increase aimed at reducing cross-border sewage
flows from Tijuana into the Tijuana River Valley. Originally
planned as a two-year project, the expansion was completed in
just 100 days.
The Bureau of Reclamation is looking to artificial intelligence
to better answer one of the most pressing questions in the
West: How much water is available? Upstream Tech recently
signed a $680,000 contract with the Interior Department to
improve what are known as “short-term probabilistic forecasts,”
or estimates for how much water will flow from streams and
rivers into reservoirs over a 10-day period. The company will
use a machine-learning model, a subset of AI, to boost the
accuracy and scope of water models.
California’s variable hydroclimate is projected to become
increasingly volatile in the 21st century. Yet, there is
widespread recognition that extreme events, such as
record-breaking heatwaves and catastrophic wildfires, are
already becoming the new normal. The 2025 edition of the State
of Bay–Delta Science (SBDS) presents the current state of the
science on climate change and extreme events affecting the
Delta and its watershed, and in doing so, generates new
insights on knowledge gaps and promising directions for future
research.
The California Natural Resources Agency announced a positive
development at the Salton Sea, with several bird species,
including brown and white pelicans, returning to the newly
filled ponds of the Species Conservation Habitat (SCH) project.
… The project, which aims to restore and create deep and
shallow water habitats, is designed to support local and
migratory bird populations. So far, about 2,000 acres of the
9,000-acre SCH footprint have been filled with a combination of
New River and Salton Sea water.
… With colleagues at the University of San Francisco, the
Community Alliance with Family Farmers, and I have combed
through thousands of parcel records to answer a simple
question: Who controls California’s farmland? … Today,
ownership of the land that feeds us is increasingly hidden
behind layers of shell companies and trusts, making it nearly
impossible to know who controls these resources. –Written by Meredith Song, a master’s student at UC
Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy and a student fellow
with the Human Rights Center at Berkeley Law, and Adam Calo, an
assistant professor of environmental governance and politics at
Radboud University in the Netherlands.
For millennia, humans have sought to make seawater
drinkable. Ancient mariners tried distillation by boiling the
oceans in which they sailed, and in more recent times,
engineers have experimented with filters and chemicals. As
the climate warms, populations surge and droughts intensify,
there is a growing need to make the sea drinkable. … But
creating drinking water from the sea is not without
environmental impacts. These depend on how plants process
seawater, whether they run on fossil fuels or renewable energy
and where they are built.
A California Democrat’s proposal to enshrine Biden-era water
quality rules in state law to backstop potential rollbacks
under the Trump administration will not move forward this year
amid continued opposition from farmers and water agencies.
Assembly Appropriations Chair Buffy Wicks announced on Friday
that Sen. Ben Allen’s SB 601 will be a two-year bill, meaning
it won’t be voted on this year and has until next fall to win
passage. Sean Bothwell, executive director of the California
Coastkeeper Alliance, which is sponsoring the bill, said its
backers decided they needed extra time to finalize the language
amid continued opposition. “It’s a big bill and we didn’t want
to rush it,” he said.
Colorado River is dimming as time runs out for the negotiators
tasked with dividing up the shrinking river relied upon by 40
million people. “The path to success seems tenuous at this
point,” Arizona’s negotiator, Tom Buschatzke, said in an
interview this week with The Denver Post. “The discussions
continue to revolve around the main issue that we’ve been
struggling with for some time since these discussions started.”
… Colorado’s negotiator, Becky Mitchell, said in a
statement this week in response to Buschatzke’s comments that
time is of the essence in the negotiations. The states have no
option but to live within the means of the river, she said.
While the developer of Project Blue has made it clear it still
wants to buy energy from Tucson Electric Power despite defeat
at the hands of the Tucson City Council, its path to finding
water for its planned data-center complexes is much more hazy.
Project Blue developer Beale Infrastructure has declined to
answer questions from reporters or public officials about where
it intends to get water for its first data-center complex.
… Here is a look at four possible methods the company
could use to run its data centers, including one that would
require little water use.
The North American Development Bank (NADBank) on Friday
announced a $400 million Water Resiliency Fund designed to
boost water conservation and alternative sources of water for
the U.S./Mexico border region. … [T]he Water
Resiliency Fund (WRF) will provide up to $400 million in
financing for priority infrastructure projects aimed at
conserving and diversifying water supply sources in the
U.S.-Mexico border region. This includes desalination plans,
technology for municipalities and water districts to re-use
storm water runoff, and projects with irrigation districts to
reduce water loss.
