A collection of top water news from around California and the West compiled each weekday. Send any comments or article submissions to Foundation Writer Matt Jenkins.
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Just days after the federal government released new plans for
sharing water from the shrinking Colorado River, it is getting
sued by one of the states impacted by the plan. Water officials
in Nevada filed a lawsuit against the Interior Department on
Monday morning. … Arizona’s leaders are still
figuring out how to respond to the
lawsuit. … Much of the recent chatter
about Colorado River lawsuits has been focused on Arizona, and
a legal move called a “compact call.”
… Nevada’s lawsuit does something different. It alleges
that the federal government violated procedural laws
while drawing up its new plans for managing the river.
In short, the lawsuit argues that Interior failed to check
certain legally required boxes while writing its new strategy.
The California Supreme Court dealt a blow to a local
government’s ability to seize water utilities on Monday,
ruling that courts get the final say on whether a
public utility is necessary. Apple Valley, located in
San Bernardino County, California, will have to go back to the
drawing board for its plans to take over the privately owned
water utility, Apple Valley Ranchos Water Company. In a
unanimous decision sending the case back down to a California
appeals court, the California Supreme Court sided with
the utility company in the latest in a decade-long eminent
domain dispute between Apple Valley and the utility
company. … The case goes back to at least 2010
when investment firm Carlyle Infrastructure Partners bought
Apple Valley Ranchos Water Company and raised the rates
significantly.
Electric power generation for data centers is a threat to
water supplies even in states outside the arid
Southwest, according to a report published Tuesday by
the think tank Ceres. Data centers in the seven states with the
highest concentrations of them use about 3.4 trillion
gallons of freshwater for electric power generation every
year, but few electric power producers have connected
increasing power demand to water supply risks, says the report,
“The Water Behind the Watts.” That volume of water adds up to
10.4 million acre-feet—greater than the 8
million-acre-foot average annual urban water demand in
California that the state’s Legislative Analyst’s
Office reported in 2021. It’s the equivalent to 12-times the
annual water use of Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Washington, DC,
combined, the think tank that advocates for clean energy and
sustainable development found.
The world’s biggest oil, gas and cement companies are partly
responsible for California’s water shortages, a new study
finds, with their planet-warming emissions shown to
reduce the state’s snowpack by an annual amount roughly equal
to what would fill Shasta Lake. The study, published
Tuesday, is one of the first to attempt to quantify the impact
of climate change, and specifically industrial pollution, on
water supply and demand in the western United States.
The results suggest that emissions have significantly
undermined water security in the West. The
research appears in the Communications Earth and Environment
journal. It comes as part of the growing field of climate
attribution, which seeks to disentangle the drivers of various
climate problems and pave the way for solutions.
Our 42ⁿᵈ
annual Water Summit is the Foundation’s premier
event of the year and returns to Sacramento October 29 with
leading policymakers and experts addressing critical water
issues in California and across the West. Just one year after
the signing of Senate Bill 72, the Summit will
feature a panel discussion of California’s 2028 Water
Plan update as it undergoes a legislatively mandated
shift from being just a guidance document to a blueprint
providing a framework for implementation of actions. Capacity
is limited and filling up quickly, so register here
while seats are available!
One answer to Utah’s brutal drought could be a
large metal structure that looks like a football goal post at
the foot of the La Sal Mountains near Moab. … State agencies,
water utilities, ranchers and ski resorts across the parched
Western United States are increasingly spending millions each
year on new ways to create more rain and snow.
They’re betting on a growing body of research showing the
interventions could squeeze at least a little bit more water
from storm clouds. The practice, known as cloud seeding, has
been used for decades. It has typically involved injecting
particles of silver iodide into clouds from airplanes or from
the ground to nudge precipitation to fall. Drought fueled by
climate change is driving a quest for new ways to try it.
Extreme rainfall can send huge amounts of sediment rushing off
hillsides and into streams. But a new USGS study finds that
even an exceptionally wet year may deliver only a small
fraction of that sediment to San Francisco Bay—far short of
what is needed to help coastal wetlands and shorelines keep
pace with rising sea levels. That finding highlights a
paradox for coastal managers: climate change may produce more
intense rainfall and more landslides, but the additional
sediment generated by those events is still not enough, and
does not necessarily reach the coast quickly enough, to bring
much benefit to vulnerable Bay shorelines and wetlands.
… San Francisco Bay’s tidal wetlands and shorelines
depend on sediment to build elevation and maintain their
position as sea level rises.
In February 1998, almost a year’s worth of rain fell in
downtown Los Angeles, as a series of powerful Pacific storms
rocked California amid a “Super” El Niño. Deadly landslides
struck Southern and Central California, wiping out hillside
homes, and powerful waves pounded the state’s shoreline. These
waves destroyed a large section of the famous Santa Monica Pier
and caused widespread coastal flooding in San Francisco Bay
communities. Many Californians who experienced that event still
consider it to be the benchmark for how a Super El Niño can
alter life in their state. Now, with another Super El Niño
setting in — this time likely to be the strongest on record —
many are calibrating their expectations based on what happened
then.
… For years, the importance of water temperature for salmon
survival has been accepted. But scientists and fisheries
managers have had trouble drawing a direct link between warmer
water and the death of eggs or juveniles. But now Johnson and a
team of researchers from UC Davis and NOAA have some answers.
According to a report released Friday, the scientists have
identified a 15-day window when fertilized salmon eggs need
cold water to survive. Without it, their prospects for survival
are slim. … What they found was that, despite salmon
naturally spawning over the course of a few summer months, the
survivors came from redds that were fertilized in a very short
one- to two-week period. That indicates that many of the
fish that spawned outside of that window did not have offspring
that survived.
Coronado Mayor John Duncan challenged the validity of San Diego
County’s public health safety testing for ocean water at the
Aug. 18 City Council meeting. The tense conversation
focused on a relatively new testing protocol implemented in May
2022 to check the sewage levels coming from
Tijuana. Before adopting the method, known as Polymerase
Chain Reaction (ddPCR), the county relied on Enterolert – a
culture-based protocol standardized nationwide by the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA approved a pilot
program for the ddPCR protocol in 2021 and stated that a study
had “found good agreement” between the two
methods. However, beach closures in Coronado jumped
significantly after the county started using the ddPCR
testing.
… Appraisals is about water rights and marriage
and local farms and parenting and zoning laws and grandmothers,
which is to say it is about the emotional impacts of climate
anxiety in rural spaces, how these issues put us at odds with,
or, more hopefully, draw us closer to the people we love. … I
did not want to write a memoir, and I did not want to write
essays. I wanted to write a novel in which the water crisis of
the American West was “redeemed by the imagination.” For models
of how to keep the polemic from overpowering the personal, I
turned to other writers working in the subset of climate
fiction that I call contemporary agrarian.
In a major escalation of tensions between the seven states that
share the Colorado River, Nevada officials have filed a federal
lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s order for cuts
in water use. The complaint, filed early Monday morning in the
U.S. District Court of Nevada, asserts that the federal
government’s operating plan unlawfully authorizes the federal
government to reduce the state’s allocation of the
river by up to 71 percent annually, or a 213,556 acre-feet
reduction. Such a cut would slash the state’s share of
water far past its actual use, which came in at 198,000
acre-feet last year. Lawyers for the Colorado River Commission
of Nevada, the Southern Nevada Water Authority and the state as
a whole requested an injunction to halt
implementation.
Earth’s oceans were warmer than any day in recorded history
Friday due to a combination of long-term human-caused global
warming and short-term effects of El Niño. The average sea
surface temperature of 21.1 degrees Celsius, or 70
degrees Fahrenheit, breaks the old record of 21.09
degrees Celsius set many times in early 2024 during the most
recent El Niño. … Record ocean heat will have
cascading effects on global weather throughout the coming
months. Warmer seas provide storms with more energy
and moisture, which will make rainfall heavier and floods more
likely in parts of the world. That may include
California, as the arrangement of this El Niño
is shaping up similarly to those that have soaked the state in
the past.
City and county officials, labor unions, and environmentalists
packed the intimate Loma Linda City Council chamber to share
their views at the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control
Board’s Friday meeting on proposed new sweeping water runoff
regulations. Part of the state’s environmental agency, the
Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board is
proposing new regulations to decrease pollution in
water from storm drains and flood control channels
across large areas of the Santa Ana River Basin, with what is
known as the “Regional MS4 Permit.” … Though the Santa Ana
Water Board members did not vote to adopt MS4 – the
vote is scheduled for a Sept. 11 meeting – several
city and county officials made it clear in the City Council
chamber that they disapproved of the proposed
regulations.
The U.S. Forest Service acknowledged that its plan to roll back
protections on 45 million acres of national forest land could
impact endangered species, water supplies and
wildlife habitat across Arizona and the Southwest. The
agency filed a proposal on Aug. 18 to rescind the “roadless
rule,” which set aside over 60 million acres of forests and
grasslands within national forests as roadless areas.
… The Forest Service’s plan notes that rescinding the
roadless rule would increase soil erosion and sediment
pollution for about 24 million Americans. In the
Southwest, the repeal could affect 739 water intake
locations and nearly 2 million people, according to the
plan.
Irrigators in the Klamath Basin moved fast to stop an avian
botulism outbreak that threatened to kill up to 140,000 ducks,
saving most of the birds by using the basin’s
flow-through system. The outbreak killed around 13,000
birds. Irrigators used part of the basin’s flow-through system
to circulate water and prevent the disease from spreading
further. “Our managers and our staff have done a phenomenal job
of moving water around, circulating it, trying to keep water
moving,” said Scott Seus, president of the Klamath Water Users
Association. “Dead water is dead ducks.” Low water
levels created stagnant conditions that allowed the botulism to
develop. By moving water into refuges, irrigators
began solving the problem.
For California’s most endangered salmon, the difference between
surviving and dying may come down to just 15 days. In a study
published Friday in Science Advances, researchers say the
chance of juveniles surviving fell by about 73% for every
1.8-degree Fahrenheit increase in average river temperature
during those first 15 days. Sacramento River winter-run Chinook
have only one surviving population, with an average of a few
thousand fish returning in recent decades. Shasta Dam keeps the
salmon from returning to their original cold-water habitat
around Mount Shasta in Northern California. Instead, they spawn
in the Sacramento River, where warmer summer water can threaten
their developing eggs. Cold water is released from Shasta
Reservoir to keep the river cool enough for salmon eggs to
survive, but that water is also needed by farms and
cities.
A closely watched legal battle has erupted over what could
become one of California’s largest data centers — and
whether a county can pursue emergency measures to halt
development. The fight is centered in Imperial County, where
Huntington Beach-based developer Sebastian Rucci has been
pursuing a plan to build a data center half the size of Levi’s
Stadium. … After community outcry, the county passed a
moratorium on new data centers — preventing Rucci’s
application, and all others, from being approved. … Imperial
County is one of at least a dozen California localities that
have passed moratoriums on new data centers in response to
public fears that the developments could cause pollution, drive
up utility rates or suck up water.
Researchers from University of California San Diego and
University of California, Berkeley have found that certain
landscapes surrounding California communities are associated
with differing rates of Valley fever, a fungal respiratory
infection caused by inhaling spores carried in windblown dust.
Naturally dry, sparsely vegetated landscapes and some types of
farmland were associated with higher disease rates, while other
agricultural land uses were associated with lower rates. The
findings also suggest that fallowing farmland
may influence Valley fever rates in some circumstances. The
study was published on August 21, 2026, in Science Advances.
… These findings could have implications as
California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act accelerates
the fallowing of agricultural land in parts of the San Joaquin
Valley.
If not managed properly, invasive species in California could
further harm local ecology, damage infrastructure and impact
economic activity, state officials and experts said during a
virtual briefing Thursday. The golden mussel and the
glassy-winged sharpshooter were among invasive species
discussed in the briefing by representatives from the
California Natural Resources Agency, Department of Water
Resources, Department of Food and Agriculture, and the
Department of Pesticide Regulation. Golden mussels are an
invasive freshwater species of mussel, originally from
Southeast Asia. The species was first detected in the
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in October 2024, and authorities
do not know how they arrived in California, said Kristopher
Jones, an assistant manager at the California Department of
Water Resources.
