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.
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One apparently is hiding under the driveway of a million-dollar
home in Placentia. Another lurks beneath a parking lot at
Ontario International Airport. And another is under a
commercial building in Culver City — much to the surprise of
the upscale window company doing business there. Thanks to its
once expansive, 150-year-old oil and gas industry, Southern
California has one of the nation’s highest concentrations of
so-called “orphan wells,” or wells that companies abandoned
without first plugging them up for safety. The state has
documented nearly 2,000 orphan wells in Los Angeles, Orange,
San Bernardino and Riverside counties alone, while estimating
that thousands more could be paved over, unrecorded, and
waiting to be rediscovered.
Rebekah Rohde, 40, and Steven Sorensen, 61, are two of at least
14 people killed by the recent storms — and both were unhoused.
The Sacramento County Coroner reported Monday that both were
found with trees collapsed onto their tents. It’s a tragic —
and telling — convergence of two California crises: extreme
weather and worsening homelessness. The current series of
storms (“parade of cyclones” is the latest National Weather
Service warning) pummeled communities with as much as 8 inches
of rain and wind gusts of nearly 70 mph, causing power outages,
school shutdowns and flood risks, especially in coastal regions
and areas burned by wildfires. They include the coastal enclave
of Montecito in Santa Barbara County, where evacuations were
ordered on Monday, five years to the day that mudslides killed
23 people and destroyed 130 homes.
A team of scientists that pioneered methods to observe changes
in global groundwater stores over the past two decades using a
specialized NASA satellite mission has made a surprising
discovery about the aquifers that supply California’s Central
Valley region. Despite the Sustainable Groundwater Management
Act adopted in 2014 to prevent overpumping and stabilize the
aquifers, the groundwater depletion rate has accelerated to a
point where groundwater could disappear over the next several
decades. The act gives the state’s local groundwater management
districts until 2042 to reach sustainability
goals. Renowned water scientist Jay Famiglietti is the
lead researcher of a scientific team that published a
paper in Nature Communications in December 2022 that
details their analysis.
The Imperial Irrigation District is pleased to announce
director Gina Dockstader’s appointment to the California Farm
Water Coalition (CFWC). According to a press release from the
IID, Director Dockstader was selected by her fellow IID board
members to serve as a liaison between IID and the California
Farm Water Coalition. The CFWC is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit
directed by a volunteer board of directors, representing
agriculture across the state. Its mission is to increase public
awareness of agriculture’s use of water and provide a common,
unifying voice for agricultural water users by serving as the
voice for agricultural water users, representing irrigated
agriculture in the media and educating the public about the
benefits of irrigated agriculture, the release states.
As officials this week outline plans for a 264-foot-high
concrete dam proposed for a wooded canyon in the Medicine Bow
National Forest, irrigators and critics remain divided over the
project’s benefits and impacts. The two sides disagree whether
the estimated $80-million structure and accompanying 130-acre
reservoir are pork or progress, boon or bane. Federal officials
begin receiving public comments on the proposed dam on the West
Fork of Battle Creek in Carbon County as ranchers and
environmentalists disagree over whether 450,000 cubic yards of
concrete should plug a forested gorge and whether federal and
state agencies are conducting environmental examinations
appropriately. In what one official admitted is a complex
process with parallel reviews, two federal agencies will make
key findings to resolve the project’s fate.
Last year was a good one for trash. Or, rather, for the
prospects of reducing it. For the last several years, lawmakers
have passed new laws aimed at curbing plastic, from the 2014
ban on single-use plastic grocery bags to restrictions on use
of plastic straws. But in 2022, they went big and broad,
enacting Senate Bill 54, a revolutionary law that will start
phasing out all varieties of single-use plastic in 2025 —
basically everything on the shelves of grocery and other retail
stores — through escalating composting and recycling
requirements on consumer products packaging. Most importantly,
the law puts the onus on the producers of the packaging to
figure out how to make it happen rather than on consumers or
state and local governments.
Tucson Assistant City Manager Tim Thomure joined a unanimous
vote last month by a state water board that will allow for
state-run discussions with an Israeli firm over its proposal
for a $5.5 billion desalination plant in Puerto Peñasco on the
Gulf of California. The Water Infrastructure Authority of
Arizona voted 9-0 on Dec. 20, following a fierce,
afternoon-long debate, to authorize its staff to prepare an
analysis of the project. If the analysis finds the proposal
meets state requirements, the board chairman can negotiate an
agreement with the company to deliver desalted water to Arizona
at agreed upon terms including costs.
Colorado Springs will be making decisions this week that will
impact its growth and development for decades to come. The
following issues will be discussed by local leaders this week.
Check back here for updates on how they voted. Water supply The
city is considering an ordinance that would impact how and
where Colorado Springs extends its water service. The city
wants to make sure there’s enough water as it continues to
grow. Currently, Colorado Springs Utilities is required to
maintain a surplus water supply. But there’s no definition of
how much extra that actually is. So what they want to do is
define it as a 30 percent buffer between supply and demand,
calculated on a five-year rolling average. … Half the
city’s water comes from the Colorado River Basin, which is
threatened by drought and overuse.
Finally, after a 50-year effort, four massive dams on the
Klamath River in northern California and Oregon will start
coming down this July. For the Yurok, Karuk, Hoopa, Shasta and
Klamath tribes living along this river since time immemorial,
there’s much to celebrate. They have long fought for the lives
of the salmon that are harmed by these dams, and for their
right to fish for them. Even PacifiCorp, which marketed the
electricity of the four hydroelectric-producing dams, will also
have something to cheer about. PacifiCorp, which is owned by
billionaire Warren Buffett, won’t have pricey fish ladders to
install and its share of the cost of dam removal has been
passed to ratepayers in both states.
–Written by Rocky Barker, a contributor to Writers on the
Range
California is on the cusp of an opportunity squandered. The
atmospheric river and “cyclone bomb” projections suggest well
over 10 inches of rain and as many feet of snow could fall on
the state within a week’s time. What is California doing,
amidst the governor’s declared state of emergency, to squirrel
away as much of that runoff and flood water as the state’s
infrastructure will allow? With all this known water
coming into the system, why isn’t the State of California
moving as much water as can physically be moved into San Luis
Reservoir? Roughly half of the reservoir’s water at full pool
is owned by the federal government, with the other half
controlled by the state. A full San Luis Reservoir means
more water for Central Valley farmers and more available water
for the State Water Project. -Written by Todd Fitchette.
California is bracing for another week of destructive storms
that will probably bring flooding and hazardous winds Monday to
an already battered state. A series of atmospheric rivers that
pummeled coastal communities last week and left more than
400,000 without power in California on Sunday will be followed
by particularly brutal weather as rivers reach flood levels and
powerful winds wreak havoc, forecasters fear…. For days,
forecasters had warned of a “relentless parade of
cyclones” barreling out of the Pacific toward
California, and continuing until about Jan.
19, intensifying the risk of flooding in parts of the
state this week. A flood watch remains in effect for the
Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys and nearby foothills until 4
p.m. Wednesday.
As rain has deluged our parched state since New Year’s Eve,
many Californians have found themselves asking a familiar
question: Is this somehow because of El Niño? In the California
imagination, the climate pattern known as El Niño has an almost
mythological status as a harbinger of prolonged wet spells,
while its counterpart, La Niña, is associated with drought. The
past three years have been La Niña years. The continuing
procession of storms this winter has drawn comparisons to the
famed wet winter of 1997-98, when rain driven by El Niño
drenched the Golden State. Californians are bracing for one of
the season’s most intense storms to date on Monday and Tuesday.
But Daniel L. Swain, a climate scientist at the University of
California, Los Angeles, said that El Niño hasn’t taken over —
yet.
A bomb cyclone hit California this week, knocking out power,
downing trees, dumping massive amounts of water. Now, that last
one, massive amounts of water – it’s interesting because all
that rain is hitting in a state that has been stricken with
drought. Some California residents are watching this precious
resource wash away and wondering, why can’t we save the water
for later, for times when we desperately need it? Well, Andrew
Fisher, hydrogeologist and professor at UC Santa Cruz,
attempted to answer that question in an op-ed for The LA Times.
And we have brought him here to try to answer it for us.
Professor Fisher, welcome.
The torrential rainfall across much of central and northern
California may have helped to pull a tiny piece of the state
out of drought. Data from the U.S. Drought Monitor shows that
while 97.93 percent of California is experiencing some degree
of drought, the remaining 2.07 percent is only classified as
“abnormally dry.” … However, a lot more rain would be
needed to drag California out of its
decades-long megadrought, as short-term fluctuations in
how dry an area is at a given time is drastically different to
the long-term trend of dryness across the state.
The U.S. and Mexico share underground water basins that span
more than 121,500 square miles of the Borderlands. But the two
countries have no regulations for managing those common
aquifers, in part, because historically very little was known
about them. That’s changing. On Dec. 28,
researchers released the first complete map of the
groundwater basins that span the U.S.-Mexico
boundary…. With water becoming an increasingly precious
resource in the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico, the
researchers hope the new map will provide a basis for
developing a binational legal framework to regulate the
underground waters’ management…. It shows five shared
aquifers between Baja California and California, 26 between
Sonora and Arizona, and 33 between Texas and the Mexican states
of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas.
In October 2022, water agencies in Southern California with
Colorado River water rights announced plans to reduce water
diversions. The agencies offered voluntary conservation of
400,000 acre-feet per year through 2026. This annual total is
nearly 10% of the state’s total annual usage rights for the
Colorado River. The cutbacks help prepare for long-term
implications of climate change for the river’s management,
which are starting to be acknowledged. In urban Southern
California, an important aspect of this need is reducing
imported water reliance through investments in local water
resources. … What would happen if Southern California
lost access to Colorado River water for an extended period?
Usually, bouts of rain are a good thing for drought-stricken
farmers. But in California, where a downpour has
triggered widespread flooding, much of the water will end up in
the sea rather than helping crops, like the state’s famed
almond groves. The recent deluge highlights a decades-long
dilemma: A lack of infrastructure to store and shuttle water to
growers who produce three-quarters of US fruits and
nuts and more than one-third of its
vegetables. … While the rain and snow are
desperately needed after the driest three-year
stretch on record and billions of dollars in crop losses, much
of the precipitation will likely end up as runoff.
The string of wet storms streaming over California since the
end of 2022 have brought the San Joaquin Valley both relief and
frustration, depending on location. In the Fresno area, flows
out of Millerton Lake into the San Joaquin River have nearly
tripled from 600 cubic feet per second (cfs) to 1,600
cfs. In the coming days the Bureau of Reclamation, which
operates Millerton’s Friant Dam, expects releases to exceed
4,500 cfs. That’s great for agricultural water districts
that take Millerton water on the northern end of the Friant
system. And it’s great for the San Joaquin River Restoration
Program, which aims to bring back native spring Chinook salmon
runs. … Meanwhile, water managers on the southern end of
the Friant system are watching those flows with more than a
little frustration.
Elected officials in Marina have joined forces with three water
agencies in a lawsuit against the California Coastal Commission
over its tentative permitting in November of California
American Water Co.’s desalination project. The lawsuit, filed
in Monterey County Superior Court, cites plaintiffs as the city
of Marina, the Marina Coast Water District, the Monterey
Peninsula Water Management District and the Marina Coast Water
District Groundwater Sustainability Agency. The complaint
alleges the desal project is a “sprawling, expensive and
unnecessary” project that the Coastal Commission erroneously
and conditionally permitted that would have far-reaching
negative impacts on Marina and surrounding ecosystems.
During Sacramento’s centuries-long history of battling flood
waters, inhabitants have devised nearly every possible method
of slowing or diverting water, and one of those methods is
using the Sacramento Weir. Completed in 1916, the more than
1,900-foot long weir featuring 48 gates sits along the west
bank of the Sacramento River about three miles north of the
confluence of the Sacramento and American rivers. However,
the placement and purpose of the Sacramento weir differs from
typical weirs found along other streams and rivers.
