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.
Subscribe to our weekday emails to have news delivered to your inbox about 9 a.m. Monday through Friday except for holidays. Or subscribe via RSS feed.
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.
Not long ago, California dairy producer Ryan Junio prayed for
rain. The ongoing water scarcity challenges that faced the
Golden State was the No. 1 concern for this Tulare County dairy
farmer. “As a dairy producer, water scarcity is an
ever-growing challenge and is my top concern,” Junio said last
summer. Junio wouldn’t have thought that nine months later he
would be dealing with a different water crisis, as massive
flooding has wreaked havoc on California’s largest dairy hub,
Tulare County, home to 330,000-plus dairy cows. Recently
Junio’s farm, Four J Jerseys, which consists of two dairies
located in Pixley and home to 4,200 cows, had to evacuate one
dairy that sits south of the Tule River.
Troy Waters is a fifth-generation farmer in Grand Valley,
Colorado. With a new water conservation program funded by the
Biden administration, he fears his way of life will turn to
dust and blow away in the wind like dried-out topsoil. That’s
because the federal government wants to conserve water in the
drought-ravaged Colorado River by giving farmers and ranchers
cash to let their fields lie fallow, but the interstate agency
running the program isn’t offering these producers enough money
to quit farming voluntarily, Waters said. … Water
conservation is a major political issue in the American
West. Climate change has made the Colorado River the
driest it’s been in more than a thousand years. Chronic
overuse has depleted the reservoirs that sprawling cities
like Los Angeles and Las Vegas depend on.
California has experienced an exceptionally wet winter with 11
atmospheric rivers battering the state since late December. A
twelfth such storm is due to land on Tuesday, threatening to
cause even more flooding, landslides and road closures.
Atmospheric rivers are vast airborne currents of dense moisture
carried aloft for hundreds of miles from the Pacific and
funneled over land to fall as bouts of heavy rain and snow.
Here’s what such storms mean for the near and long
term. California has received 147% of average
rainfall so far this season, according to the state
Department of Water Resources.
The medieval church of Sant Romà disappeared from view in the
1960s, when the town of Vilanova de Sau, an hour north of
Barcelona, was flooded to create a reservoir. In the past three
decades, its spectral belltower has broken the surface several
times, serving as a punctual reminder of Spain’s fragile water
resources. But today the church’s tower, its nave and the
building’s foundations are all exposed. The bare, steep ridges
of the Sau reservoir show how far its levels have receded, and
the cracked earth around the remaining pool of water is trodden
by tourists attracted by the ghost village’s reappearance.
Drought in Spain’s northeast reached “exceptional” levels last
month, menacing access to drinking water for 6 million people
in the Barcelona metropolitan area.
Plastic pollution is everywhere, from the tip of Mount Everest
to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Wherever it goes, plastic
has unexpected effects: it transports pathogens, strangles
wildlife, and, sometimes, becomes habitat. But on the bottom of
the Philippine Trench, 10,000 meters deep, plastic is reshaping
life on the seafloor. In 2021, Alan Jamieson, a marine
biologist at the University of Western Australia, Deo Florence
L. Onda, a microbial oceanographer at the University of the
Philippines Marine Science Institute, and their crew descended
into the third-deepest trench in the world. The place was
swarming with plastic bags. As the scientists watched, the
deep-sea current was dragging plastic bags along the seafloor,
scraping it with parallel lines like tire tracks.
Images of starving polar bears staggering across the snow
earned the species the dubious honor of being the “poster
child” of climate change. But now another human-caused
environmental danger threatens these apex predators: pollution
from a class of 12,000 chemicals known as per- and
polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). And they’re not the only
ones. The nonprofit Environmental Working Group analyzed
hundreds of recent peer-reviewed scientific studies and found
more than 120 different PFAS compounds in wildlife. Some 330
species were affected, spanning nearly every continent — and
that’s just some of what scientists have identified so far.
In 2014, Proposition 1 set aside $2.7 billion to fund the
“public benefit” portions of water storage projects through the
Water Storage Investment Program. Water storage for the
environment played a crucial role in determining how much
funding the projects would receive. One of these projects,
Sites Reservoir, offers a novel approach to storing water to
benefit freshwater ecosystems when they need it most. We talked
to Jerry Brown, executive director of the Sites Project
Authority, to learn more about plans for the reservoir and its
ecosystem water budget.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday hailed the state’s rapid
transformation to renewables from a unique spot: a lithium
processing project in impoverished Imperial County, at the
state’s sunbaked southern end that he and others say is part of
a “transformational” industry that will bring good new jobs
here while also preserving the environment for young people and
aiding public health. … He brushed off concerns about global
economic volatility and fears of massive renewables slicing
through rural communities to power far-off cities, saying in an
interview with The Desert Sun/USA Today that what is being done
here is a template for vital, sustainable economic projects.
Most U.S. residents don’t need to worry about the safety of
their tap water, but millions of Americans are still exposed to
contaminants every year. It can take a water crisis to
highlight where drinking water infrastructure is failing. One
of the most devastating water crises in recent memory was the
lead contamination in Flint, Michigan’s drinking water in 2014.
As of January 2023, nine years after the initial contamination,
residents are still dealing with the effects. And last year, a
water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi left many of the city’s
150,000 residents without potable water, a problem that
persists today. Here, drinking water experts from the
EPA, academia, and advocacy groups weigh in on what you need to
know about your tap.
Earthquakes, snow, wildfires, flooding, smog, fog, heat,
drought — these are just some of extreme natural disasters and
climate conditions experienced in the Golden State in any given
year. California is notoriously the “land of extremes,”
Kristina Dahl, senior climate scientist at the Union of
Concerned Scientists, told ABC News. Snowpack from the winter
could quickly melt into flooding come spring. Heat waves in the
summer pave the way for wildfires in the fall. Now, intense
moisture from atmospheric rivers is walloping the West Coast
with an inundation of precipitation — oftentimes too much at
once. A pervasive megadrought has been plaguing the region for
decades and to top it off, tectonic shifts could cause an
earthquake at almost any given moment.
Could too much rain cause more pollutant problems? It’s
definitely something to keep an eye on as Southern California
prepares for yet another storm. The wet conditions have caused
sinkholes and toppled tress, but all the rain is also sending
more pollutants into the ocean. … One way Los Angeles
County has prevented more trash from flowing into the ocean is
with the latest device called “The Interceptor,” which sits at
the mouth of the Ballona Creek near Marina del Rey. It has
collected trash since October 2022. According to the
county, since then, it captured nearly 122,000 pounds of trash.
Of that load, 40,000 pounds of trash was captured from February
to today.
Near downtown Tucson, Arizona, is Dunbar Spring, a neighborhood
unlike any other in the city. The unpaved sidewalks are lined
with native, food-bearing trees and shrubs fed by rainwater
diverted from city streets. One single block has over 100 plant
species, including native goji berries, desert ironwood with
edamame-like seeds and chuparosa bushes with cucumber-flavored
flowers. This urban food forest – which began almost 30 years
ago – provides food for residents and roughage for livestock,
and the tree canopy also provides relief to residents in the
third-fastest warming city in the nation. … The
plan, headed up by Lancaster, was to plant multi-use
drought-tolerant shade trees in street-side basins that could
capture rainwater and create “a more liveable community” …
Still reeling from an onslaught of powerful storms and
destructive floods, California is bracing for a 12th
atmospheric river that’s expected to bring a new round of heavy
snow and rain to the state. The latest in the parade of storms
ushered moisture into California Sunday, lashing the state with
high winds and dumping more rain and snow over the region
before it was expected to spread inland Monday. Thousands
were under evacuation orders Sunday in two small central
California towns – Alpaugh and Allensworth – as officials
worried roads could become impassable and isolate residents,
according to the Tulare County Sheriff’s Office. …The
next atmospheric river, mainly taking aim at southern
California, is expected to be colder than the last and arrive
Tuesday with high winds, heavy rain, mountain snow and the
threat of more floods.
Tiny pieces of plastic waste shed from food wrappers, grocery
bags, clothing, cigarette butts, tires and paint are invading
the environment and every facet of daily life. Researchers know
the plastic particles have even made it into municipal water
supplies, but very little data exists about the scope of
microplastic contamination in drinking water. After years
of planning, California this year is embarking on a
first-of-its-kind data-gathering mission to illuminate how
prevalent microplastics are in the state’s largest drinking
water sources and help regulators determine whether they are a
public health threat.
Earth is likely to cross a critical threshold for global
warming within the next decade, and nations will need to make
an immediate and drastic shift away from fossil fuels to
prevent the planet from overheating dangerously beyond that
level, according to a major new report released on Monday. The
report, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a
body of experts convened by the United Nations, offers the most
comprehensive understanding to date of ways in which the planet
is changing. It says that global average temperatures are
estimated to rise 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit)
above preindustrial levels sometime around “the first half of
the 2030s,” as humans continue to burn coal, oil and natural
gas.
The Supreme Court will hear a major water rights dispute from
Arizona on Monday to decide whether the federal government has
broken its promises to the Navajo Nation for more than 150
years. Nearly a third of the Navajo households do not have
running water and must rely on water that is trucked in. The
Navajo Nation blames the U.S. government for having breached
its duty of trust that came with an 1868 treaty that
established their reservation in what is now northeast Arizona
and smaller portions of southeastern Utah and northeastern New
Mexico. That treaty “promised both land and water sufficient
for the Navajos to return to a permanent home in their
ancestral territory,” attorneys for the Navajo Nation told the
court. “Broken promises. The Nation is still waiting for the
water it needs.”
The drama was high on the Tulare Lake bed Saturday as flood
waters pushed some landowners to resort to heavy handed and, in
one instance, illegal tactics, to try and keep their farm
ground dry — even at the expense of other farmers and some
small communities. Someone illegally cut the banks of Deer
Creek in the middle of the night causing water to rush toward
the tiny town of Allensworth. The levee protecting Corcoran had
its own protection as an armed guard patrolled the structure to
keep it safe. At the south end of the old lake bed, the
J.G. Boswell Company had workers drag a piece of heavy
equipment onto the banks of its Homeland Canal to prevent any
cuts that would drain Poso Creek water onto Boswell land.
La Niña is finally over after three years, according to the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This winter
has not acted like a typical La Niña winter with
California getting drenched, especially in Southern California
where La Niña typically signals a drier than average
winter…. Climate models are nearly certain El Niño will
develop later this summer or fall. California is typically
wetter during El Niño conditions, although the signal becomes
murkier from Sacramento northward.
Too much thing, rain, is sinking farmers’ bottom lines across
California’s Central Coast. The area some call “America’s salad
bowl” more resembles a soup bowl as round after round of
atmospheric river-fueled storms overwhelmed farmland. We all
may start to notice a difference in the grocery store as some
staples become harder to find. FOX Weather brought you to
Pajaro, California when the levee failed recently. The farming
community in the Pajaro River Valley disappeared under feet of
water. Similar scenes played out across the Salinas River
Valley, another iconic farm area in Monterey County which is
the fourth top agricultural producer in the state, according to
the California Department of Food and Agriculture.
Governor Gavin Newsom will join local leaders on Monday for a
visit to Imperial Valley. He will get an update on progress
being made toward lithium production. Lithium is the material
essential to battery production. Imperial Valley contains some
of the largest lithium deposits in the world, specifically
underground near the Salton Sea, a region also known as Lithium
Valley. The Salton Sea was once a top tourist destination,
attracting some of old Hollywood’s biggest names, but over the
past few decades, it’s become an ecological disaster.
Evaporation and agricultural runoff have exposed toxins in the
lakebed and created a perfect environment for dangerous algae
blooms and bacteria to thrive.
