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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Officials in the Upper Colorado River Basin plan to continue
draining Flaming Gorge in Wyoming to protect Lake Powell, one
of the basin’s largest reservoirs. The Colorado River
Basin, which extends from Colorado to California and northern
Mexico, uses a network of reservoirs to store vital water
supplies for cities, farms, recreation, the environment and
millions of people. But the basin’s overall storage has
dropped to a third of its capacity, officials said
during an Upper Colorado River Basin meeting
Monday. Lake Powell holds about 22% of its total
capacity. Since April, the Bureau of Reclamation has
released about 450,000 acre-feet of water to help boost storage
in Lake Powell. Colorado and other Upper Basin state officials
agreed Monday that those releases should continue
through April.
… [S]omething unusual is sliding up the west coast of Mexico
right now, and it is aimed squarely at California. A mass of
warm, elevated ocean water hundreds of miles long is
moving north at roughly 6 mph — about the pace of a
jogger — and currently less than 350 miles from Southern
California’s beaches. … For Sacramento and the Delta
region, the connection is closer than it looks on a
map. The Delta is tidal, and in early fall — when
river flows are near an annual low — the ocean’s twice-daily
pulse reaches all the way up the Sacramento River to downtown.
A higher ocean at the Golden Gate Bridge also
translates into a smaller but measurable lift in water
levels through the Delta’s leveed margins upstream. It
also shifts the balance in the ongoing tug-of-war between river
outflow and salty bay water pushing inland.
The Tule East Groundwater Sustainability Agency in southern
Tulare County just can’t seem to put a foot right. The
state is bearing down, demanding an end to overpumping that has
sunk huge swaths of land – taking the critical
Friant-Kern Canal with it. Surrounding farmers and water
managers want action and they want it now. Tule East directors
and staff are still dotting the “i”s to create a
legitimate governing agency. Meanwhile, Tule East
farmers have apparently abandoned all restraint and are
“pumping like it’s the wild west.” The situation is a mess,
according to someone familiar with the process and the players
who agreed to talk with SJV Water.
Byron Sher, a collegial Stanford University law professor who
ran for Palo Alto City Council in the 1960s after losing a
battle over the widening of a local street, then rose to the
state Legislature, writing many of California’s landmark
environmental laws over three decades, has died. … Over
a career that stretched from 1980 to 1996 in the state
Assembly, and from 1996 to 2004 in the state Senate, Sher
passed dozens of groundbreaking bills that made California a
national leader in environmental policy. Among them are the
California Clean Air Act in 1987, the state’s Safe
Drinking Water Act in 1989, and a complex deal with
former Sen. Dianne Feinstein in 1999 to preserve thousands of
acres of old-growth redwoods at Headwaters Forest in Humboldt
County.
Hand-width cracks crisscross Armin’s pistachio orchard in
southeastern Iran, damaging irrigation pipes and swallowing
precious water as the ground beneath him sinks. … The region
has long covered much of the world’s demand for pistachios, but
a combination of drought and groundwater
extraction for irrigation has made Rafsanjan one of the
fastest-sinking areas in Iran. One study found parts
of the ground are dropping by up to 37 centimeters (14
inches) annually. And that is impacting
production. It’s a similar picture in California,
where some pistachio farmers are also seeing their ground
sink. … The link between growers in the two
countries goes back to the 1960s when US famers started
building a pistachio industry. They did it using an
Iranian variety.
In a rugged, sparsely populated patch of Arizona, there’s a
fragile system of rivers and creeks that cuts through
the desert. The San Pedro River and its tributaries,
locals and environmentalists say, are a unique gem. Now,
they’re sounding the alarm about a number of potential
threats to its water and surrounding ecosystems.
Residents are pushing back on a number of proposed
developments, including two mining projects, a natural gas
pipeline and a petroleum pipeline. Organizers say they could
harm the San Pedro, one of the last undammed,
free-flowing rivers in the Southwest, and the Aravaipa
Canyon area, a striking section of wilderness that attracts
tourists from around the state. Melissa Crytzer Fry, chair of
the board of directors for the Lower San Pedro Watershed
Alliance, said new mining activity could pose a “grave danger”
by leading to over-pumping of groundwater.
Members of Arizona’s congressional delegation on Monday
announced a $2 million investment into water reuse
research for semiconductor manufacturing. The federal
funding will go to Arizona State University to “develop, test,
and demonstrate innovative water reuse technologies.” The
announcement comes from Democratic Sens. Ruben Gallego and Mark
Kelly, along with Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari and Congressman
Greg Stanton. The project will test out various water
treatment technologies at ASU’s MacroTechnology Works
facility in Tempe. Researchers will measure each
technology’s water savings, cost reductions and any operational
benefits. The data can inform what works best for
water conservation.
Municipalities across the Grand Canyon State are raising
concern over the rapid rise of data centers,
especially when it comes to water consumption in the
drought-stricken Southwest. But an Arizona tribe that
shares a 108-mile border with the Colorado
Riverhas enacted a moratorium on its nearly 1
million-acre reservation. The Hualapai Tribal Council
in northern Arizona recently passed a resolution opposing “the
irresponsible development of hyperscale data centers.” Such
facilities powering AI, they say, pose “a direct and severe
threat to the tribe’s sacred water, lands, environment and way
of life.” … According to the city’s project FAQ webpage,
Page has not committed any municipal water source to the
pending data center — adding that rumors about drawing from
Lake Powell remain “speculative at this time.”
NOAA Fisheries is directing $103 million toward habitat
restoration projects across the country, with several of the
largest awards aimed at improving habitat for commercially
important salmon, shrimp, oysters, and other species.
… A significant portion of the funding will go toward
salmon habitat and fish passage projects. … California
projects include $5.4 million for California Trout to reconnect
floodplain habitat for coho salmon in the Klamath River. The
California Department of Water Resources will receive $8
million for fish passage work benefiting salmon and
sturgeon. Farther north, NOAA awarded $6.1 million to The
Freshwater Trust for salmon and steelhead habitat restoration
in Oregon’s Sandy River Basin.
E. coli levels in the Tijuana River watershed are often 30,000
times higher than the federal standard for freshwater bodies,
according to a new report San Diego Coastkeeper released last
week. And chemicals researchers said they can’t find thresholds
for because they’re not expected to be found in water are also
being detected in the binational river. … Coastkeeper’s
findings come ahead of what could be another public health
report on the Tijuana River crisis. San Diego County announced
last week that it’s launching a second survey with the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). … CDC and
county volunteers conducting the survey are expected to select
households randomly Sept. 17 and 18 between 2 p.m. and 7 p.m.
and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Approximately $158.2 million of bond money approved in 2024
will pay for projects in the State Water Project and
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta levees, according to an
announcement from state Sen. Jerry McNerney, D-Stockton. The
money was approved as part of the budget bill Assembly Bill
113, which passed the legislature in August and is on the
governor’s desk. According to McNerney’s office, the funding
comes from Proposition 4, which California voters passed in
2024. … Part of that money, $90.2 million, will go to
paying for fortification of the Delta’s aging levees, while $68
million will pay for the State Water Project’s California
Aqueduct and canals. … According to a 2025 report from
the California Department of Water Resources, the State Water
Project has suffered from underinvestment and deterioration.
People visiting parks in San Jose and other cities across
California will soon see less grass and more bark as part of an
effort to save water. Cities are making the move to the more
brown look in order to comply with Assembly Bill 1572, which
goes into effect January 1, 2027. “Basically it says cities
generally cannot use potable or drinking water to irrigate
grass that does not serve a recreational, community or public
use function,” said Ed Bautista with San Jose Parks, Recreation
and Neighborhood Services. In San Jose, sections of
non-functional turf at about 50 city parks will be replaced
with tanbark or mulch. ”We’re turning off the irrigation
in areas that are on the periphery of parks, that are not
really recreation areas that are used for sports or designated
picnic areas,” Bautista said.
Stand beside almost any mountain creek in Colorado,
and there’s a good chance no one has ever measured
how much water is flowing past your boots. Of the thousands of
small headwater streams that lace the state’s high country,
feeding its rivers, irrigating its farms, and sustaining fish
and wildlife, only a small fraction has a
streamflow gauge. For the rest, knowing whether a stream is
running high, low, or somewhere in between has traditionally
meant a trip into the field and an educated guess.
Researchers in the Department of Ecosystem Science and
Sustainability, ESS, have built a new tool designed
to close that gap. CSUFlow25, a free, publicly
available web application, lets anyone drop a pin on a Colorado
stream and get a statistically modeled estimate of how that
stream flows across the year, no gauge
or field visit required.
As Clear Lake, which sits in Lake County, north of
Napa, faces mercury contamination, toxic algal blooms
and predatory invasive fish, the Clear Lake hitch — known by
local tribes as the chi — are in serious trouble. Another fish
unique to the watershed, the Clear Lake splittail, is already
extinct. After years of advocacy and on-the-ground work to save
the fish, the seven tribes around the lake signed an agreement
with state agencies and local governments Friday to
formally co-manage the troubled body of water. Nearly
two centuries after Europeans took over these lands, it’s a
literal watershed: the first agreement governing a watershed
since the state launched an initiative to bring 7% of
California’s lands and waters under the care of
tribes. The tribes hope it will turn their ad hoc
emergency work — which has coincided with an increase of chi in
the lake — into a lasting strategy to protect the fish.
The State Water Resources Control Board issued a water quality
certification for the proposed Sites Reservoir Project in
Northern California. The certification satisfies one of the
major requirements for construction of a 1.5
million-acre-foot water storage facility that would be
the largest built in California in more than 50 years. The
off-stream reservoir in Glenn and Colusa counties, near the
community of Maxwell, would divert water from the Sacramento
River when flows are relatively high. The stored water would
serve farms, cities and the environment. The water quality
certification is separate from the Sites Project Authority’s
related water rights application, which the State Water
Board will consider at its Nov. 4 public
meeting.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is launching a
new scientific study designed to identify a broad
range of known and previously unidentified pollutants that
may be present in drinking water. The research will
use non-targeted analysis, an analytical approach that allows
scientists to screen samples for thousands of potential
contaminants rather than testing only for a predetermined list
of chemicals. EPA said the study will examine potential
pollutants including pharmaceuticals, per- and polyfluoroalkyl
substances (PFAS) and more than 1,000 other contaminants.
… EPA said the findings are expected to help
inform future research and prioritize potential agency
actions.
The Department of the Interior last month announced Colorado
River supply cuts affecting the basin states of Arizona, Nevada
and California, leaving many communities bracing for reduced
water access. San Diego, though, says decades of costly
investments — some criticized for driving up water bills — have
positioned the region to avoid the pain other Southwest
communities now face. … San Diego
continues to grapple with the costs of securing its own water
future, but its investments have shielded it from the outcomes
of other Colorado River communities that are vulnerable to
shortages. That’s created an opportunity for San Diego
to sell its water to those communities — such as
a deal it made with Riverside, netting $100 million in
the first five years.
Washington County officials know the idea of drinking treated
wastewater can be hard to stomach for some. They’re hoping a
new $7 million demonstration facility can help get
southern Utahns past that “ick factor.” The Washington
County Water Conservancy District is designing the facility to
allow visitors see — and taste — the purification process
firsthand in hopes of building public confidence in
recycled water long before the district’s full-scale
treatment facility comes online. “We want to be
transparent,” said Zach Renstrom, district general manager.
“People will be able to come [to the facility] and actually see
the process … and we will describe all the different methods
that we have to go through to get to that [drinkable]
standard.”
A steady stream of industrial chemicals, heavy metals and
pesticides are flowing into the Tijuana River on a regular
basis, according to a new water quality report from San Diego
Coastkeeper, a pattern the nonprofit’s executive director says
points to ongoing, unregulated discharges from
manufacturing plants across the border. … The
report, released this month, documents a year of monthly
sampling at four sites in the lower Tijuana River watershed,
tracking sewage contamination, heavy metals, industrial
chemicals, pesticides and other pollutants flowing
across the border from Mexico into the river, its estuary and
the Pacific Ocean. … E. coli levels at all four sites
exceeded the laboratory’s measurable range for most of the
year, according to the report.
A partial collapse of a glacier was likely the trigger of a
devastating flash flood in Nepal that has so far left over
1,000 dead and another 4,000 missing. The disaster a world away
from California has raised a question for people who live along
the state’s Sierra Nevada mountain range, where glaciers still
populate its highest peaks: Could something like that happen
here? Andy Jones, a paleoclimatologist at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison who has spent years studying California’s
glaciers, said a catastrophic event such as the one in Nepal is
extremely unlikely in California – mainly because glaciers here
are smaller and the region is generally drier. “It doesn’t seem
like a similar event could happen in the Sierra Nevada,” Jones
said.
