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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In celebration of the largest dam removal project in U.S.
history, a group of native youths will embark today on a
kayaking descent of the Klamath River from its headwaters in
Southern Oregon 250 miles to its mouth in Northern California —
the first source-to-sea journey on the newly undammed river.
Decommissioning and razing four of the six dams along the
Klamath, which stood for more than a century and generated
hydroelectric power, took decades of advocacy from
environmentalists, fishing groups and in particular the
region’s indigenous tribes, who regard the mighty waterway,
with its historic salmon runs, as the pillar of life. Two
remaining dams on the river, both in Oregon, are being left
alone due to their importance managing flood water and
supporting agriculture. … Now, to commemorate the
milestone, about 30 young people belonging to tribal
communities across the Klamath River Basin are launching on a
monthlong expedition to see the powerful, freeflowing river in
its entirety.
The plight of a tiny community in eastern Colorado will soon be
the subject of a congressional hearing. Colorado U.S.
Congresswoman Lauren Boebert is coming to the aid of a small
water district in Morgan County, where toxic black sludge
passes for drinking water. The Prairie View Ranch Water
District is 50 miles northeast of the Denver metro area, and it
has been a colossal disaster 20 years in the making. Residents
say without drinkable water, their homes are
worthless. Boebert — who represents the residents in
Washington D.C. — is asking the House Appropriations Committee
for a $5 million grant to help overhaul the water
system. … Morgan County Board of County
Commissioners approved the water district as a private
for-profit company despite special districts being tax-exempt
public entities, allowing developers to run the district for 16
years while residents were in the dark.
… Having reported on water on the Monterey Peninsula for the
better part of the last decade, it’s remarkable to reflect on
what has transpired in that time: A political movement for
public water, a political movement to stop Cal Am’s
desal project in Marina, an innovative
recycled water project and its expansion, and
a conditional approval for Cal Am’s desal project, which is
still being litigated on multiple fronts. … How much
supply there is, and how much demand there will be by 2050, are
among the things still being debated regarding Cal Am’s desal
project (per a condition of approval from the California
Coastal Commission). It was finally scheduled to be voted upon
by the California Public Utilities Commission at a meeting in
Sacramento tomorrow, June 12. Late yesterday, Commissioner
Darcie Houck, who’s presiding over the proceeding, pulled it
from tomorrow’s meeting and rescheduled it for June
26. … The whole purpose behind these efforts has
been to lift the state’s cease-and-desist order that prohibits
Cal Am from setting new water meters. But it’s the State Water
Control Board that decides that. –Written by Monterey County Now columnist David
Schmalz.
Lake Tahoe is famous for its clear blue waters — but new
research suggests that clarity may come with a catch. A study
from the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center,
published in the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and
Oceanography, shows that ultraviolet radiation in Lake Tahoe
can vary by up to 100 times between wet and dry years. The
findings are based on 18 years of underwater data through 2023
and highlight how climate-driven weather swings — especially
between drought and heavy precipitation — are changing the
light that reaches beneath the surface, according to a release
from the University of California, Davis. The data shows
that during dry years, clearer water allows ultraviolet rays to
reach far deeper into the lake. … That shift has big
implications: UV radiation influences the lake’s carbon cycle,
affects aquatic organisms like zooplankton and fish and can
suppress photosynthesis, the foundation of the lake’s food web.
… Mesic meadows are often overlooked, especially when the
background consists of Colorado’s Alpine vistas, but these
seasonally wet areas serve as nature’s sponges throughout
habitats dominated by sagebrush. By holding water in the soil
and slowly releasing it throughout the growing season, they
help sustain the land long after the snow has melted and runoff
has subsided. … In a region increasingly affected by drought,
wildfires and climate uncertainty, these wet meadow systems are
more important than ever. … Unfortunately, many mesic
and riparian areas have suffered from decades of land use
practices that have left them scarred with erosion, incised
gullies and dropping water tables. The result? Drying meadows,
reduced wildlife habitat, and diminished forage for livestock.
Fortunately, local restoration initiatives aim to preserve
these mesic meadows and riparian zones in a pocket of the
greater Castle Peak area called Bohr Flats. –Written by Peder Franson, the watershed restoration
manager for the Eagle River Coalition.
The City of Rio Dell, in partnership with Caltrans and the
Clean California program has connected multiple communities
with a new trail path along the bank of the Eel River. A
ribbon-cutting ceremony hosted today at the Edwards trailhead
celebrated the natural beauty of the waterway and unveiled a
transformed portion of the riverfront. This $2.3 million Clean
California grant project installed a new quarter-mile paved
nonmotorized path that runs along the west bank of the Eel
River, linking previously unconnected city streets and
providing the first designated public access point to the
river. Interpretive monuments placed along the trail highlight
the river’s ecological and cultural importance, offering an
educational experience for residents and visitors. The City of
Rio Dell was also awarded nearly $198,000 in Clean California
grant funding for landscaping and recreation upgrades along
Wildwood Avenue.
Industries that need ultra-pure water — including
semiconductor, battery, pharmaceutical, food and beverage
companies — are expanding in Arizona. One of the most
overlooked challenges for these businesses is what gets left
behind in the pursuit of clean water: brine, the salty
byproduct of processes like reverse osmosis. For Shahnawaz
Sinha, an associate research professor in civil and
environmental engineering at Arizona State University, brine
isn’t just waste, it’s an opportunity. Through a partnership
with Nestlé and supported by ASU’s Arizona Water
Innovation Initiative and the Global Center for Water
Technology, Sinha is developing a mobile, closed-loop water
recovery demonstration facility that could change how
industries in the metro Phoenix area deal with brine. By
recovering another 50%–90% of previously unusable water from
industrial brine and reducing the remainder to solid salt, the
project aims to minimize waste and extract freshwater to
support Arizona’s economy and water resilience.
Last year, after the historic removal of four dams on the
Klamath River, thousands of salmon rushed
upstream into the long-blocked waters along the
California-Oregon border, seeking out the cold, plentiful flows
considered crucial to the fish’s future. The return of salmon
to their ancestral home was a fundamental goal of dam removal
and a measure of the project’s success. However, a problem
emerged. The returning salmon only got so far. Eight miles
upriver from the former dam sites lies a still-existing dam,
the 41-foot-tall Keno Dam in southern Oregon. The dam has a
fish ladder that’s supposed to help with fish passage, but it
didn’t prove to work. While many proponents of dam removal
say they’re thrilled with just how far the salmon got, most of
the 420 miles of waterways that salmon couldn’t reach before
the dam demolition still appear largely unreachable.
New subsidence guidelines from the Department of Water
Resources are expected to drop on San Joaquin Valley water
managers any day, a prospect that has them both hopeful and
worried. The intent of the guidelines is to provide clarity
within the Sustainable Groundwater Management
Act (SGMA), which requires overdrafted regions to
enact plans to bring aquifers into balance by 2040. One of
SGMA’s primary goals is to halt subsidence, land
sinking. Excessive groundwater pumping has caused huge
swaths of the San Joaquin Valley to sink, damaging canals,
roads and increasing flood risks. Some areas have collapsed on
such a large scale, the phenomenon can be seen from space,
earning the nickname “the Corcoran
bowl.” Subsidence, though, has been a tricky devil to
manage.
Denver Water will appeal a federal judge’s order barring the
utility from filling Gross Reservoir once the construction on
the new, higher dam is complete. The utility on Tuesday filed a
notice to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals stating it will
challenge U.S. District Judge Christine Arguello’s recent order
that prohibits the filling of the reservoir to take advantage
of the higher capacity until federal permitting processes are
redone. … The expanded reservoir would be triple the size of
the current body of water outside Nederland and add enough
water to serve about 156,000 more households.
… Environmental groups opposed the reservoir expansion
because it requires the clear-cutting of a half-million trees
and will cause the utility to draw more water from the
already-strained Colorado River system.
A major US government website supporting public education on
climate science looks likely to be shuttered after almost all
of its staff were fired, the Guardian has learned. Climate.gov,
the gateway website for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (Noaa)’s Climate Program Office, will imminently
no longer publish new content, according to multiple former
staff responsible for the site’s content whose contracts were
recently terminated. … The contractor said they worry
that what may have begun as a heavy-handed attempt by
administration officials to limit public knowledge of
human-caused climate change will have broader impacts on public
education on the cyclical drivers of weather – as well as the
results of publicly funded research conducted by Noaa
scientists.
Lawyers for President Donald Trump’s administration say he has
the authority to abolish national monuments meant to protect
historical and archaeological sites across broad landscapes,
including two in California created by his
predecessor at the request of Native American tribes. …
Trump in his first term reduced the size of Bears Ears and
Grand Staircase Escalante National Monuments in Utah, calling
them a “massive land grab.” … Trump’s moves to shrink
the Utah monuments in his first term were challenged by
environmental groups that said protections for the sites
safeguard water supplies and wildlife while
preserving cultural sites.
The Trump administration will move Wednesday to repeal federal
limits on power plant climate pollution, attacking the Biden
era’s most ambitious attempt to use regulations to rein in
heat-trapping gases from the electric grid, according to six
people familiar with the situation. Environmental Protection
Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin will announce the repeal of the
power plant carbon dioxide rule along with a separate
regulation to curb hazardous air pollution such as mercury
during an event at agency headquarters, the people said.
… Scrapping the Biden-era power plant rule would
effectively shelve regulations for the nation’s second-biggest
producer of climate pollution — the electricity sector — which
accounts for one-quarter of U.S. greenhouse gases.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) is
working to crack down on illegal caviar trafficking during
fisheries closures, announcing recently that it seized more
than 150 pounds of packaged salmon roe. The amount suggests
about 75 salmon were illegally taken. Officers with the CDFW’s
special operations unit and Delta Bay enhanced enforcement
program were monitoring for illegal fishing activity along
Sacramento Bay when a Dungeness crab trafficking investigation
led to the discovery that the suspect was also involved in
salmon poaching, according to the state agency. “Evidence
revealed a conspiracy to illegally harvest and process salmon
roe for black market distribution,” CDFW said in a press
release. Meanwhile, another investigation into sturgeon
poaching led to two individuals being arrested and formally
charged with taking an endangered or threatened species.
U.S. Colorado Senator Michael Bennet, alongside Senator Jim
Justice of West Virginia, has introduced a new bill to reduce
exposure to lead in old water pipes. According to senators, the
FLOW Act will help cities and public water utilities issue
tax-exempt bonds to help pay for removing and replacing both
public and private lead service lines. … A 2024
statewide study by Water Education Colorado showed that 23
Colorado cities have roughly 20,000 aging lead water delivery
pipes that could taint drinking water. Bennet and Justice say
that privately owned pipes serving residences have been slower
to remove and replace lines than public utility lines due to
the cost of replacing lead service lines. Bennet explains
that the legislation is based on the experience of Denver
Water, a public water utility that finances the removal of all
public and private lead service lines within its service area
by issuing tax-exempt bonds at no cost to its customers.
However, issuing tax-exempt bonds for this purpose can be both
costly and time-consuming for water utility companies.
Rich Kreps, pistachio grower and chairman of the American
Pistachio Growers Board, is calling attention to California’s
mismanagement of water resources, especially on the west side
of Fresno. Speaking with AgNetWest, Kreps criticized decades of
unfulfilled promises and failed infrastructure projects meant
to bolster water storage. “It’s awful,” Kreps said. “We keep
paying for water storage—like we did back in 2018—but the money
keeps getting diverted to projects that never materialize.”
Kreps highlighted the state’s push to tunnel under the
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta as a misguided effort, arguing
that without actual water storage, such a project is
meaningless. He also pointed to environmental mismanagement,
including issues with Delta smelt and sewage flushing, as signs
of a deeply flawed narrative around California’s water
crisis.
A small panel managed to extract a glassful of clean water from
the bone-dry air of Death Valley in California, which suggests
that the device could provide the vital resource to arid
regions. The atmosphere over extremely dry land can hold large
volumes of water, but extracting this in significant quantities
without power is difficult. In the past, researchers have come
up with innovative ways to tap into this reservoir, such as
fog-catching nets made from simple mesh fabrics or spider
silk-like artificial fibres, but they have struggled to make
them work effectively in real-world conditions. Now,
Xuanhe Zhao at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
his colleagues have developed a power-free water-collecting
device that is about 0.5 metres tall and 0.1 m across. It is
comprised of a glass panel that contains an absorbent hydrogel,
a jelly-like substance made from long-chain polymers, and
lithium salts that can store water molecules.
The Biden Administration took a firm approach when it came to
regulating per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). The
administration set Maximum Contaminant Levels (MCLs) for
certain PFAS chemicals in drinking water, designated PFOA and
PFOS as hazardous substances under the Comprehensive
Environment Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA),
and proposed listing PFAS as hazardous constituents under the
Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). The U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced plans to
rescind and reconsider some of the MCLs, but the two strictest,
PFOA and PFOS, are expected to remain. The compliance deadline
for drinking water systems to meet these MCLs has been extended
by two years, from 2029 to 2031. This extension is still an
announcement and not a final rule. … Potential funding
sources for PFAS treatment include federal grants, settlements
from class actions against PFAS manufacturers, and separate
litigation under CERCLA against polluters.
Latin America is at a pivotal moment in its water
infrastructure development. Historically hindered by limited
public funding and rigid policies, investment in sanitation,
wastewater treatment, and desalination is now gaining momentum
due to population growth, climate pressures, and rising
industrial demand. Chile, Peru, Brazil, and Mexico are at the
forefront of this shift, each driven by unique socio-economic
needs. … Mexico faces severe water
scarcity due to droughts, air pollution, and structural
challenges, particularly in northern states like Chihuahua,
Sonora, Sinaloa, and Baja California. Financial constraints
have further hampered efforts to address the crisis. … In
April 2025, the government also announced a US$1.5 billion
investment for 37 water infrastructure projects, focusing on
irrigation, hydro agriculture, and potable water improvements.
Key projects include a desalination plant in
Rosarito, Baja California, and aqueducts in Colima and
Veracruz.
… A Cal Fire plan to clear thousands of acres of native
habitat each year in order to reduce wildfire risk is now
facing a setback. On May 30, the California Appellate Court
ruled in favor of environmental groups who argued that the plan
could lead to an even more flammable landscape. … This
particular lawsuit began in 2020, when the Endangered Habitats
League and Chaparral Institute unsuccessfully sued Cal Fire and
the State Board of Forestry and Fire Protection over its
vegetation treatment program, which had been approved the year
before. Previous fuel reduction methods had been limited to
prescribed burning, trimming, and using equipment to cut and
uproot plants on an average of around 33,000 acres per year.
… As California’s heat and drought
conditions worsened, and as firefighters struggled to keep up
with the increasing risk posed by the the crispy landscape, the
government’s arsenal of tools for vegetation removal was
expanded — and so was its target acreage.
