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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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.
When Reclamation District 800 (RD 800) was selected as one of
only four private levee districts nationwide to take part in a
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers pilot study in late 2022, it was
already a major win. The program promised expert inspection,
risk analysis, and long-term data — all at no cost to the
district. But what may be even more rewarding, district leaders
say, is that it also brought long-sought recognition and
support from the California Department of Water Resources (DWR)
– the most likely source for future funding. … The pilot
project began in earnest on Feb. 13, 2024, when Army Corps
engineers conducted their first levee tour on the north side of
the Cosumnes River. Top DWR officials from the Division of
Flood Management joined that tour — an unusual show of support
for a rural district long accustomed to going it alone.
Dogs drink water wherever they happen to find it — a puddle, a
pond, a toilet. But the stuff in their actual water bowls
almost always comes from the same tap their owners use. When
that water is contaminated, both dogs and humans may suffer.
The risk is especially high for the 15 million American
households that rely on private wells, according to a new
Virginia Tech study in the journal PLOS Water. In dog drinking
water sampled from wells across the country, 64 percent
contained excessive levels of at least one potentially toxic
heavy metal, such as lead, iron, sulfur, or arsenic.
… Because heavy metal contaminants are often tasteless,
odorless, and invisible, homeowners may not know there’s
something in the water — until their dog gets sick.
Throughout the school year, Eastern Municipal Water District
staff are helping to educate the students who one day may be
taking their jobs. A year ago, EMWD launched a modernization of
its longstanding education program. The focus is on developing
its future workforce through a yearslong Environmental Water
Resource Career Technical Education (CTE) program. The result
is that EMWD staff can promote water industry careers to the
industry’s future workforce. That program – the first of its
kind in the region – was recently honored by the California
Association of Sanitation Agencies (CASA) with its Excellence
in Public Outreach and Education Award. CASA is an industry
organization committed to the collection, treatment, and
recycling of wastewater.
… The Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta is an epicenter of
California’s bitter water wars, supplying water to fish,
farmers and semi-arid Southern California. Stakeholders —
fishermen, farmers, water managers, researchers, agencies —
often find themselves at odds with one another, in need of a
living and quick to fight. But recent fish and water crises
have challenged these groups to set aside their competing
interests. California’s commercial salmon fishing ban and
drought-induced water curtailment to agriculture have rallied
an unlikely coalition of fishermen, farmers and water managers
hoping to find solutions.
Tucson’s City Council is expected to vote Wednesday on whether
to annex land for the construction of Project Blue, a proposed
data center that has sparked concern among residents and public
health advocates over its potential environmental and health
impacts. On Tuesday morning, roughly 20 demonstrators gathered
downtown to protest the project, voicing fears about the
center’s water usage in an already
drought-prone region. … “Our water supplies are
dwindling,” said Mike Humphrey, vice chair of the Pima County
Board of Health and an outspoken critic of the project. “We
only have one source of water, which is our aquifer. We don’t
have lakes, we don’t have rivers. And we need to protect that
aquifer because it’s the only water source we have.”
Colorado’s congressional delegation has united to ask the Trump
administration to release $140 million in funding
previously granted to water projects in the state,
including $40 million to aid in the Colorado River District’s
purchase of the Shoshone water rights. … Of the
Colorado awardees, the largest allocation was $40 million to
the Colorado River District to purchase the Shoshone water
rights from Xcel Energy. … The Shoshone water rights —
which include a 1905 senior right tied to the Shoshone Power
Plant in Glenwood Canyon and a secondary, junior right
established in 1929 for other water users, including Front
Range providers — are among the oldest and largest
non-consumptive rights on the Colorado River.
It’s been an entire month since a measurable amount of rain has
fallen in Salt Lake City. And according to the U.S. Drought
Monitor, more than 60% of the state has fallen into severe
drought. National Weather Service Lead Meteorologist Christine
Kruse says little relief is expected in the coming weeks. If
current conditions persist, drought and fire risks will likely
worsen, and much of the next snowpack could be absorbed by
parched soil before reaching reservoirs. … The months of
June and July are typically dry. The average is just under an
inch-and-a-half of rain for both months in Salt Lake City. But
this year, the state didn’t receive even a quarter of that
average, and the whole state is seeing the impact of abnormally
dry weather.
Other drought and precipitation news around the West:
… Urban development and water shortages are
major drivers of farmland loss. Between 2016 and 2040,
California is projected to lose more cropland to urbanization
than any other state — over 300,000 acres. … There are few
truly small farms left that are aiming to turn significant
profits, according to Daniel Sumners, a professor of
agricultural economics at UC Davis. The operations that can
afford and benefit from agrobotics are mid-to-large farms that
can secure loans for equipment purchases. … Across
California’s Central Valley, a new generation of agrobotics
founders is reshaping how innovation happens on the farm.
… According to a study released last week in the
peer-reviewed academic journal Science Advances, fresh water
has been declining at an alarming rate since researchers began
observing global groundwater in 2002, creating areas of
“mega-drying” that cover much of the Northern Hemisphere.
… The United States, which sources half of its
drinking water from groundwater, has no unifying water
management plan, instead relying on a piecemeal local network
of regulations. California passed the Sustainable
Groundwater Management Act, which aims to regulate
water withdrawals and prevent aquifer exhaustion, in 2014, but
the state isn’t expected to reach sustainable water use
patterns until the early 2040s.
The Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday it will defend
the Biden administration’s aggressive rule for reducing lead in
drinking water against a court challenge, though public health
advocates worry officials could still weaken it. The rule gave
cities and towns a 10-year deadline to replace all of their
lead pipes and was the strongest overhaul of lead-in-water
standards in roughly three decades. Litigation against the rule
was on pause so the Trump administration could decide whether
it supported the policy. On Tuesday, the agency said it would
defend the tough standards.
The Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta’s waterways span over a
thousand miles. The region serves as a critical source
of water for California, a transportation corridor
linking ports in Sacramento and Stockton with the Bay Area, and
a habitat for hundreds of wildlife species. But these rivers,
streams and sloughs also conceal a man-made danger which poses
significant environmental and navigational threats. Dozens of
abandoned vessels — ranging from small speedboats and pleasure
craft, to barges and cruise ships — litter the Delta, some of
which have sat derelict for decades.
On the banks of the San Pedro River lies one of the American
Southwest’s few remaining old-growth mesquite bosques—a
streamside forest in more than 3,000 acres of
riparian ecosystem that is one of Arizona’s last intact
landscapes. Known as the 7B Ranch, the mesquite forest is vital
to the area’s biodiversity. … [J]ust eight miles up the
road is another proposed mine, this one pursued by Faraday
Copper, for which the Bureau of Land Management has approved
exploratory drilling. Now, the San Carlos Apache Tribe and a
coalition of environmental groups appealed to the BLM’s Arizona
state director to review the agency’s approval of Faraday’s
Copper Creek project, citing its impacts to 7B Ranch as a
property mitigating the impacts of a mine elsewhere, and for
the “serious risks to wildlife, water resources, landscape
connectivity, human health, and cultural resources” it poses to
the tribe, land and other local communities.
This past rainy season, a trash boom in the Tijuana River kept
500 tons of plastics, trash and other debris away from the
Tijuana River Valley and the Pacific Ocean, far exceeding
expectations. On Tuesday morning, Oscar Romo, director of Alter
Terra, the non-profit in charge of the boom, gave a tour of the
area to members of the Rural Community Assistance Partnership,
one of the agencies that helped secure funding for the trash
boom. … For the time being, the boom has been dismantled
but will be reassembled and operational in a few months. “RCAP
was funded through the California State Water Board to have the
booms, deploy them for two storm seasons,” [Rural Community
Assistance Partnership Community Programs Director Jennifer]
Hazard said. “We were able to extend that to a third storm
season.”
Top Democrats on the House and Senate energy, natural resources
and agriculture committees introduced bills to halt planned
firings at the Interior Department, the Forest Service and the
Department of Energy. The bills, introduced Monday, aim to
place a moratorium on any reduction in force (RIF) at the
agencies while Congress reviews their staffing needs. The bills
come after months of turmoil stemming from the Trump
administration’s efforts to cull the federal workforce. …
“The Trump administration is firing the public servants who
protect lives and communities by helping to battle deadly
wildfires, tracking extreme weather events, and keeping water
clean and public lands accessible,” [Natural Resources ranking
member Jared] Huffman [D-Calif.] said in a
statement.
A project nearly five years in the making by community
partners, and now 53 homes, which includes over a hundred
people, in West Goshen have access to clean, safe and reliable
drinking water through their faucets. … Thanks to a $3.4
Million state grant, through The Safe and Affordable Funding
for Equity and Resilience Program, SAFER, Goshen homes have now
been connected to Cal Water’s public water system. … The
Community Water Center has been providing water bottles and
jugs to locals for years. … The nonprofit says the
project should be complete within the next week and hopes to
continue reaching other communities in Tulare County, including
areas near Porterville and Cutler-Orosi.
Twenty-six Solano County educators recently immersed themselves
in the lessons of the Solano Water Institute for Teachers. The
three-day professional development program, hosted by
Solano Resource Conservation District, instructs the K-12
educators in the natural and managed water systems that define
the Solano County region. … The teachers explore the Suisun
Marsh at Rush Ranch Open Space. They learn wetland ecology and
management from experts like Steve Chappell from the Suisun
Resource Conservation District and Matt Ferner from the San
Francisco Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve. … The
teachers take the deep dive into [Water Education Foundation's
California] Project Wet program on the final day of
the institute at the Dunnell Nature Park & Education
Center in Fairfield.
Sunlight shining on specialized floaties can now produce fuel
for plants by recovering ammonia from wastewater. Researchers
designed a floatable amino-grafted (-NH2) MXene (Ti3C2)-based
(AMS) sponge that, when scaled efficiently, can provide two
sustainable solutions simultaneously: cleaning up wastewater
and providing ammonia (NH3), an essential nitrogen source for
plants, to farmers at a lower cost. … According to the
findings published in Nature Sustainability, the researchers
were able to recover ammonia at the rate of 0.6 mol/m2/h with
99.8% purity using ammonium chloride (NH4Cl) wastewater under
5-sun light intensity, without any added chemicals or energy.
Colorado’s entire congressional delegation, Republicans and
Democrats alike, is calling for the release of $140 million in
frozen funds for Colorado River water projects. In January, the
last days of the Biden administration, the Bureau of
Reclamation awarded funding for 17 projects as part of the
federal drought-response effort in the overstressed
Colorado River Basin. Three days later,
President Donald Trump issued sweeping executive orders that
aimed to reshape federal spending priorities to match his
administration’s policies. … It stalled hoped-for
progress on everything from irrigation ditch repairs to fish
passage projects. … [The lawmakers] sent the letter Monday to
the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Reclamation,
the agencies in charge of awarding the funds.
The Bureau of Reclamation announced the start of public
negotiation sessions with the Sites Project Authority for a
Partnership Agreement for the proposed Sites Reservoir Project.
Reclamation and the Sites Project Authority are collaborating
on a plan for a new 1.5-million-acre-foot [Sacramento
River] offstream reservoir, located about 10 miles
west of Maxwell, California. The agreement will outline the
terms and conditions for both parties involved. … The
public is invited to attend these sessions [Aug. 18 and
19] and will have the opportunity to offer comments on
the contracting action. Further details and the proposed
contract will be available at the sessions.
The Tucson City Council is slated to discuss the massive and
secretive Project Blue data center proposal for the first time
at a study session Wednesday afternoon. … Mayor Regina Romero
asked the city manager to initiate a review of data center
ordinances and regulations by other Arizona cities. … In a
summary of the draft’s key elements, the document includes
Project Blue’s water-related
promises. … [e.g.]The developers of Project
Blue will fund or directly invest in Tucson Water efforts to
secure new water resources to offset their water use. Project
Blue will use minor amounts of potable water that will be
offset annually. … More information on water-related promises
of the project are included in the updated Project Blue fact
sheet shared ahead of Wednesday’s meeting.
