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 Interim Director Doug Beeman.
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A lithium-ion battery fire broke out at the Moss Landing Energy
Storage Facility on Thursday, burning through the night and
flaring up again Friday. A local state of emergency was
declared on Friday, and the county board of supervisors will
look to ratify it at a special meeting on Tuesday. The battery
facility, one of several located at the former Moss Landing
Power Plant, is owned and operated by Vistra Energy. The Vistra
facility is the largest battery storage plant in the world.
… Elkhorn Slough Reserve is closed until further notice
due to potential health risks from the fire. The Environmental
Protection Agency is expected to conduct water testing in the
coming days, per the County of Monterey. Additionally, there is
potential for soil testing being discussed.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife has begun the
process of planting Central Valley steelhead trout in the
Feather River and Sacramento River. Officials say that the
steelhead, which were raised at the Feather River Fish
Hatchery, were planted at two locations along the Feather River
and Sacramento River. The California Department of Fish and
Wildlife says a total of 540,222 yearling-sized steelhead that
were raised in 2024 will be released in local waterways between
January 10 and January 30.
Aquafornia is off Monday, Jan. 20, the federal holiday
honoring the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
We will return with a full slate of water news on Tuesday.
In the meantime, follow us on Twitter for breaking
news, and on LinkedIn, Facebook and
Instagram for
Foundation news.
… Decisions by the [Department of Water and Power], both in
the years before the Palisades fire and in the hours after it
exploded, have generated stinging criticism, prompting Gov.
Gavin Newsom to order an inquiry. On Tuesday, the L.A. City
Council voted unanimously to demand that the DWP publicly
present an analysis of its actions during the Palisades fire.
Water officials and experts interviewed by The Times said that
municipal water systems in L.A. and elsewhere, even in areas
with greater wildfire risk, generally are not designed to fight
firestorms that rage through entire neighborhoods. Collins’
remarks offer the first detailed account of the DWP’s response
to the most destructive fire in L.A. history.
About 27 million people live in parts of the U.S. where water
availability is limited, according to a first-of-its-kind
federal assessment. The analysis from the U.S. Geological
Survey compared water supply and demand from 2010 to 2020. It
found “severe” limitations on the amount of available water in
groundwater and surface waters in California, the arid
Southwest, and much of the Great Plains and Texas. Other
regions facing slightly less severe water constraints include
Florida and eastern Washington state and Oregon. The
report is the most comprehensive federal study to date on
whether the U.S. has enough water to power the economy,
researchers said during a call Thursday.
These are contentious times for Colorado River policy, with
strained relations between the Upper and Lower Basin states in
public view. It is, therefore, perfect timing for me to
recommend adding the book, Sharing the Waters:
Reflections on Developing Colorado River Policy 1988–2008,
by Robert W. “Bob” Johnson, to your 2025 reading list.
At only 124 pages, this powerful little book is packed with
concise explanations of key Colorado River management matters,
along with personal insights on how highly contentious river
matters have been effectively navigated in the past— insights
that are highly relevant today. The book, published
posthumously, also features many great photos, including this
review’s accompanying photo heralding peace on the Colorado
River.
Registration is now open for our next slate of spring programs,
part of a year packed with engaging tours, workshops and
conferences on key water topics in California and across
the West. Seating is always limited for our events and tickets
for our first water tour of 2025 – along the Lower Colorado
River in March – have been going fast!
Registration is now open for our Water
101 Workshop and our Central Valley
Tour, both in April.
A federal survey of conditions in the Tijuana River Valley,
where sewage and toxic chemicals spill over from Mexico,
affirmed what people have reported for years: their household
lives have been upended and their chronic conditions have
worsened. On Thursday, the San Diego County public health
department unveiled the results of an October survey conducted
in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention and the state. … “While most households are aware
of the situation, many continue to risk exposure,” the study
said.
An extremely warm summer and fall. An unusually dry winter.
Hillsides covered with bone-dry vegetation. And strong Santa
Ana winds. In the mix of conditions that have contributed to
the most destructive fires in L.A. history, scientists say one
significant ingredient is human-caused climate change. A group
of UCLA climate scientists said in an analysis this week that
if you break down the reasons behind the extreme dryness of
vegetation in Southern California when the fires started,
global warming likely contributed roughly one-fourth of the
dryness, one of the factors that fueled the fires’ explosive
spread. Extreme heat in the summer and fall desiccated shrubs
and grasses on hillsides, they said, enabling those fuels to
burn more intensely once ignited. The scientists said without
the higher temperatures climate change is bringing, the fires
still would have been extreme, but they would have been
“somewhat smaller and less intense.”
A proposed new agricultural water district could brighten
what had been shaping up as a grim future for a number of
farmers in the northern part of Tulare County’s flatlands under
the state’s groundwater law. Four private ditch companies are
working to form the new district to cover 84,000 acres, 24,000
of which are totally groundwater dependent. Pumping
restrictions under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act
(SGMA) are expected to severely limit crop production in such
groundwater reliant areas. The proposed Consolidated Water
District has indicated it will use land assessment fees to buy
surface water and build systems to convey surface water
throughout the district. That’s significant, said Mark Larsen,
General Manager of the Greater Kaweah Groundwater
Sustainability Agency (GSA), which covers the area where the
new district is proposed.
Americans deserve a clean environment “without suffocating the
economy,” Lee Zeldin said during his Senate confirmation
hearing Thursday to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, a
department likely to play a central role in President-elect
Donald Trump’s pledge to slash federal regulations and promote
oil and gas development. “The American people elected President
Trump last November in part due to serious concerns about
upward economic mobility,” Zeldin said. “A big part of this
will require building private sector collaboration to promote
commonsense, smart regulation.” The hearing occasionally grew
pointed when Democrats questioned Zeldin about climate change
asking what, if anything, he thinks should be done about a
problem that has worsened floods and raised sea levels but that
Trump has dismissed.
Facing a $258 million budget deficit, San Diego City Council
members spent an hour Tuesday night delivering an unprecedented
public bashing of the region’s main water seller for
ever-climbing costs. Water purchases from the San
Diego County Water Authority are the city of San Diego’s
second-largest expense and its price increase this year was
double what the agency once forecasted. The city’s Public
Utilities Department has begun a campaign to alert City Council
that growing Water Authority prices threaten to eat up much of
the city’s water budget. The result means delays on city water
projects and maintenance on 3,000 miles of pipeline, and
potential staff cuts which has the labor union representing
city public utilities workers shook.
Eschmeyer’s Catalog of Fishes is the definitive global source,
with the Latin name for 65,000 species compiled by biologists
at the California Academy of Sciences under the leadership of
Bill Eschmeyer of San Anselmo, who spent 40 years on an
odyssey that took him to every museum with a collection of dead
fish in jars. The database he created, which started before the
Internet, was still growing and being refined long after
Eschmeyer retired and moved to the East Coast to be near his
three adult children. He died Dec. 30 at an assisted care
facility in Nashua, N.H., said his daughter Lanea Tripp, who
was named for an 18th century Swedish biologist her father
admired. Eschmeyer had suffered from dementia compounded by
long COVID. He was 85.
There are significant myths regarding almonds. Most of it is
about how they use too much water, but they get four crops from
every drop of water. They’re very efficient. Clarice Turner is
president and CEO of the Almond Board of California. “Part of
what we’re doing is just making sure that the public is aware
of the facts, Turner said. “And by the way, it’s not
marketing hype because we are a quasi-government overseen by
the USDA. Everything we publish has to be fact-based. That’s
coming from at least three peer-reviewed academic studies in
the traditional process. That’s how we get our information,”
she said. “It’s unfortunate that people think almonds use too
much water. A statement like this grows arms and legs.
When you irrigate almonds, you get four crops per drop—
There’s the kernel we eat, which grows inside a woody shell,
fuzzy outer hull, and the tree. The trees store tons of carbon
each year, the shells become livestock bedding, and the hulls
are nutritious dairy feed, reducing the water needed to grow
other feed crops,” explained Turner.
The collapse of a $1.5 billion plan to enlarge Los Vaqueros
Reservoir in Contra Costa County and share the water with
residents across the Bay Area is a disappointing setback for
the state’s efforts to expand water storage, and should be
studied to reduce the chances of it happening again with other
projects, state water officials said Wednesday. At a meeting in
Sacramento, several members of the California Water Commission,
a state agency which had promised the project $477 million in
state bond funding in 2018, said Contra Costa Water District
leaders should have kept them better informed when negotiations
between Bay Area water agencies on costs and risks began to
unravel this summer. … The project was scheduled to
begin construction by next year. It was considered by
water experts statewide as one of the most promising ways to
expand California’s water supplies in an era of more severe
droughts. It had no major lawsuits and wasn’t controversial
with environmental groups, largely because it was proposing to
expand an existing reservoir rather than damming a river.
A billionaire couple was accused of withholding water that
could help stop Los Angeles’ massive wildfires. Democratic
leadership was blamed for fire hydrants running dry and for an
empty reservoir. Firefighters were criticized for allegedly
using “women’s handbags” to fight the fires. Those are just a
few of the false or misleading claims that have emerged amid
general criticism about California’s water management sparked
by the fierce Los Angeles fires. Much of the misinformation is
being spread “because it offers an opportunity to take potshots
at California Democratic leadership while simultaneously
distracting attention from the real contributing factors,
especially the role of climate change,” said Peter Gleick,
senior fellow at the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit he
co-founded that focuses on global water sustainability.
Snowpack in the upper Colorado River basin is slightly less
than normal for this time of year, meaning Arizona could see
sustained water cuts through 2026. Though trends could change
through the rest of the winter, the snowpack in the basin is
about 94% of the median for mid-January. While Arizona’s share
of Colorado River water in 2025 is already set, the snowpack
numbers are early indicators of how much river water the state
could get next year. Even with an average snow year, water
managers say dry conditions and warming temperatures could
create below-average runoff, keeping Arizona water users in
shortage.
Extreme Santa Ana winds whipped flames across Los Angeles
County last week, with gusts catapulting embers across
tinder-dry landscapes spreading devastating
wildfires across the region. The Palisades and Eaton fires
have caused at least 25 deaths, as of Tuesday, and destroyed
over 12,000 structures. One factor that drove the destructive
blazes began years earlier. California has some of the U.S.’s
most variable precipitation, with increasingly dramatic swings
between wet and dry periods, also known as “hydroclimate
whiplash.”
The US Forest Service likely overstepped its authority by
ordering bottling company BlueTriton to remove its California
water infrastructure, a federal judge ruled. Judge Jesus G.
Bernal this week granted BlueTriton Brands’ motion for
preliminary injunction, thereby allowing the company to keep
using water infrastructure in the San Bernardino National
Forest for the foreseeable future, according to an order filed
in the US District Court for the Central District of
California. The decision marks the latest win for BlueTriton,
known for popular water brands Arrowhead and Ozarka, in its
battle to maintain California water operations.
… In December 2024, a new framework took effect to
minimize harm to endangered species from the operation of
California’s two biggest water projects. The framework,
developed by federal fishery agencies and called a “biological
opinion,” replaces a framework that had been in place since
2019. … The new science and additional flexibility that
underpin the revised framework allow water project operators to
respond more nimbly to real-time conditions in California
rivers and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, where rivers drain
to San Francisco Bay. Farms and cities have the potential
to gain additional water supply, while endangered species are
protected. … The State Water Project, a network of
reservoirs and pumping plants, provides some or all of the
water used by 27 million Californians and 750,000 acres of
farmland. Since the new biological opinion went into effect on
December 19, the State Water Project – a major source of
Southern California water supply – already has gained 12,500
acre-feet of additional water supply beyond what would have
been possible under the 2019 framework. The additional supply
is approximately enough water to meet the needs of
37,500 households for a year.