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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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.
… After a scorching summer with temperatures climbing above
100 degrees, nearly 70% of California is now
experiencing either abnormal dryness or drought,
according to the latest date from the U.S. Drought Monitor.
… In January, none of California was experiencing
drought conditions, marking the first time in 25 years that the
state had been completely drought-free, according to the U.S.
Drought Monitor. … At the same time, a potentially
historic “El Niño is strengthening” in the Pacific, according
to federal forecasters. This could bring wetter
conditions to parts of California later this fall and
winter. Here’s a look at California’s current
drought conditions, water supplies and what El Niño could bring
in the months ahead.
Two water storage projects in Kern and Tulare
counties received $34 million in federal grants
through the Bureau of Reclamation’s Small Storage Grant
Program, according to an announcement Thursday. The
lion’s share of that funding, about $25 million, will go to the
Kern Fan Project, a 1,300-acre groundwater banking
project with an environmental “twist” that has been
under construction since 2024. Specifically, this latest
federal grant will help pay for a canal within the Kern
Fan Project to bring excess water off the California Aqueduct
in wet years into the bank. … The remainder of
the recent Bureau of Reclamation grant funding, about $9.28
million, will help repurpose an old gravel mine in
Tulare County to develop a 235-acre reservoir.
The Colorado River Conservation Water District’s multi-year bid
to acquire the historic Shoshone water rights on the
Colorado River has required collaboration, strange
bedfellows, bipartisan support and intense
fellowship. While the River District wants this spirit of
partnership to continue as the deal moves through
Colorado Water Court, it won’t compromise values — nor
those of the 17 Western Slope counties the district represents
— to do so, according to General Manager Andy Mueller.
… The Shoshone water rights are among the oldest
non-consumptive rights on the Colorado River, dating back to
1902 and 1929. …With the 1902 Shoshone right senior
to many others on the Colorado River, it gets priority
over junior rights — including those on the Western Slope and
many transmountain diversions that carry water to the Front
Range — when flows drop below 1,480 cubic feet per second.
… Nearly two years ago, as flames from the
catastrophic Eaton and Palisades fires
devoured Los Angeles County communities, everyone from wealthy
developer Rick Caruso to then-President-elect Donald Trump
wanted to know: where was the water? … The report that
dropped last November concluded Los Angeles’ water supplies
were robust but local water systems aren’t designed to
suppress “firestorm conditions impacting an entire
neighborhood of homes at the same time.” Nearly a year later,
though, state agencies haven’t issued specific
recommendations or guidance beyond the basics. … The
gap has left local fire services and water suppliers on
their own to figure out how to fight the growing
threat of wildfires in their own communities.
A new report from Pew Research finds cyberattacks
targeting U.S. water systems are on the rise including
incidents this summer tracked by the FBI which threatened
operations across seven states. While federal law enforcement
officials did not identify states impacted by a rash of
intrusion attempts in July, Utah facilities were among
those in the crosshairs of cyber criminals in recent
attacks. That includes a series of incidents outlined in an
intelligence note reviewed by ABC News that confirmed Utah
public safety officials “identified targeted reconnaissance”
against the state’s water infrastructure last fall.
… Cyberattacks on water systems can include
ransomware incidents, breaches of customer data and
intrusions into operational technology that can
disrupt service, damage infrastructure or compromise
technologies used to operate and monitor water systems.
U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-N.M.) on Thursday issued a
call for a “pause” on data centers in New Mexico, and released
a set of standards she said such developments should meet
before receiving approval. … Leger Fernández’s
announcement also comes as state lawmakers gear up to consider
a data center moratorium during next year’s legislative
session. … Leger Fernández, in a news release, said data
centers should abide by certain provisions if elected, which
she titled the No Blank Checks for Data Centers Principles.
Those principles include being able to demonstrate that a data
center won’t increase electricity bills or negatively impact
water resources and must meet the state’s renewable energy
requirements.
NOAA’s National Weather Service announced today that Flood
Inundation Mapping (FIM), a revolutionary tool for predicting
river flooding, is now available on an experimental basis to
nearly 100% of the U.S. population. This is a massive expansion
from FIM’s prior coverage of 60% of the country. FIM
produces estimates of land area covered in water based on model
forecast river flows and current conditions that predict where
flooding impacts may occur in the following days. It’s a tool
for forecasters, emergency managers and the public that alerts
users to the latest river and stream flooding conditions.
… It depicts flooding potential along 3.3 million river
miles throughout the continental U.S., U.S. territories and
Hawaii.
Nearly $7 million in grant funding is boosting a project to
restore marshlands and add sea-level protections in San
Rafael’s Canal neighborhood. The U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency awarded a $5 million grant to the Marin Audubon Society
this week to support the rehabilitation of Tiscornia Marsh, a
project years in the making. The marsh occupies 20 acres north
of Pickleweed Park and the Albert J. Boro Community Center.
… The funding announcement came just days after the
California Ocean Protection Council approved a $1.9 million
grant to the nonprofit for the same project. [Marin Audubon
Society president Barbara] Salzman said the project team has
hit its funding goal and is seeking permits to begin
construction in 2027.
Days before El Dorado County’s new Mosquito Road Bridge is set
to open to the public, residents are raising concerns about
construction debris they say they found scattered along the
banks and in the South Fork of the American River below the
project. … [Resident Cory] Blair said the group saw plastic,
buckets, pieces of wood, foam and other materials along the
riverbank. In the water, he said they found items including
rebar, wire, metal pins and plates. … After receiving
additional information describing rebar and construction
equipment, the Department of Transportation notified the
project’s contractor on Sept. 16 and directed it to plan for
the removal of project-related material, the county said.
While the Land of Oz and the Emerald City had the Wizard behind
the curtain, San Diego had Charles Hatfield. The
self-proclaimed rainmaker claimed he could produce enough rain
to tackle the drought crisis plaguing the city. The price tag?
$10,000 — a gamble San Diego would come to regret. … In
1915, after claiming success in previous rainmaking
experiments, Hatfield approached the San Diego City Council,
with help from Fred Binney, his unofficial agent in San Diego,
and told them he could fill the Morena Reservoir. … With
only a verbal contract with the City of San Diego, Hatfield
collected his evaporating pans and mysterious chemical formulas
and began constructing a 20-foot wooden tower near the banks of
Morena Reservoir on Jan. 1, 1916.
Blue-lit screens rise and tilt across the floor of UC
Berkeley’s Worth Ryder Art Gallery. At their center, a digital
river winds through an imagined watershed. Stools surround
them, each representing a different water regime, or system for
governing and allocating water — from Indigenous stewardship to
colonial extraction and AI-driven optimization. Sit on a stool
marked “Kinship,” and the dams and large-scale irrigation
infrastructure disappear. Sit on the “Water Projects” stool,
where the state diverts as much water as it can, and the river
shrinks as dams rise. Two stools offer competing visions of AI
— one that maximizes economic output and another that
prioritizes long-term ecological survival. When two or more
people sit stools at the same time, the regimes interact. In
some combinations, the system may prosper for a time; in
others, it may reach “day zero,” when drought or depleted
groundwater leave the watershed unable to meet competing
demands.
A Phoenix suburb ditched a plan to send recycled water
from toilets and other sources directly to residents’
taps, after political candidates made unproven claims
that the water is contaminated “poop water.” The affluent city
of Scottsdale mainly uses purified water from the city’s liquid
waste to recharge aquifers that can be drawn when other sources
are running low. But in June, as criticism mounted, the city
council replaced funding for the recycling program and
other water projects with a vague $100 million allocation for
new water sources and supplies. … Some experts
and residents said the budget change — along with a council
majority that frowns upon wastewater reuse — could
weaken resilience at a time when the West is mired in drought
and cities are facing significant cuts from the Colorado
River.
The Environmental Protection Agency agreed to permanently
restore about $19 million in University of California research
grants, including studies into wildfire-smoke health
effects and water management, that it canceled,
according to a settlement filed in federal court Wednesday.
The settlement would resolve one part of a broader
lawsuit, brought by a legal team that includes UC law
school professors and additional attorneys, challenging
roughly $2 billion in funding cuts across seven
federal agencies. Wednesday’s deal covers 24 research grants,
including projects at UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley. The
agreement still needs the approval of U.S. District Judge Rita
Lin, who previously ruled against the Trump administration in
the case.
Funding for a state drinking water program,
vital to many communities throughout the San Joaquin
Valley that struggle with groundwater
contamination and scarcity, is secure for one more
year after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed three budget bills into law
on Friday. The Safe and Affordable Fund for Equity and
Resilience (SAFER) program has $171 million to pay for
emergency supplies when homes, or entire communities, go dry,
and fund efforts to identify long-term water
solutions throughout the state. The funding came
after a harrowing ride through the legislature this
summer. SAFER was all but gutted in the spring, with $68
million. That is less than half of its previous annual funding
of $130 million. But a broad coalition of organizations
came together to get the program over the finish line at the
end of August.
Two New Mexico Supreme Court rulings will
allow water to flow and permitting to continue for
the Project Jupiter data center, which is
currently under construction. Meanwhile, one of the
conservation groups that lost its effort to cut off the water
says it is gearing up for a long legal fight. The site is
being built by Oracle and is expected to house
OpenAI, known for its ChatGPT platform. … The
recent rulings restore Oracle’s access to non-potable
groundwater via a private supplier. The Center for
Biological Diversity sued New Mexico State Engineer Elizabeth
Anderson in one case over water use, and the group New Energy
Economy sued New Mexico Environment Secretary James Kenney in
another, over air quality permitting.
New research finds only a small portion of the nation’s rivers
may be able to maintain today’s diversity of fish and other
aquatic wildlife as the climate warms. The study, published in
the scientific journal PLOS ONE, mapped waterways across the
Lower 48 to identify places that could give species more
options as temperatures and water conditions change.
… Some Western waterways stand out. Mountain rivers
in Idaho and Montana and headwaters of the Colorado
River system are among the more resilient areas
identified by researchers. Desert rivers in New Mexico,
Arizona and southern Nevada are more vulnerable, where
water is already scarce and a warming climate is putting
additional pressure on freshwater ecosystems. … Dams and
other barriers can leave fish with fewer options as warming
water pushes them toward cooler or more suitable habitats.
The California Department of Water Resources is pleased to
announce the publication of Bulletin 161–2026 – The 2026 Annual
Water Supply and Demand Assessment Summary Report to the State
Water Resources Control Board. This year, all urban water
suppliers that are required to submit an Annual Water Shortage
Assessment report have done so, achieving 100% reporting
compliance for the third year in a row! … Among this
year’s submissions, only a small percentage (3.6% of suppliers)
projected a potential shortage if next year turns out to be a
dry year. More importantly, every supplier that identified a
potential shortage also determined that they could fully
eliminate it through proactive drought response actions.
Kings County groundwater agencies are now in a race to head off
mandatory state pumping limits, which could be imposed by the
end of 2027. Water managers are scrambling to get a new,
unified groundwater plan to the state Water Resources Control
Board by April 2027 that they hope regulators will approve. But
Water Board staff has already begun writing its own
mandatory pumping plan for the region expected to be released
next summer. Given the severe subsidence, or land
sinking, in the Tulare Lake subbasin, which covers most of
Kings County, the state plan will likely include stringent
pumping limits. Or even pumping moratoriums, as a recently
released state plan could impose on farmers in the neighboring
Tule subbasin.
The San Benito County Board of Supervisors declared a local
state of emergency following the governor’s statewide emergency
declaration in preparation for the upcoming El Niño. County
supervisors unanimously approved the declaration as the county
takes “a proactive, preventative approach to forecasts calling
for historically rainy winter months with the possibility of
flooding and other damage.” State and local emergency
declarations will allow property owners and local jurisdictions
to clear creeks, culverts, ditches and other infrastructure
that could obstruct water flow without the usual approval
process from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife,
according to the county.
A federal public health agency has for the first time found
hydrogen sulfide in outdoor air near the Tijuana River reached
levels that could harm people’s health, concluding in a draft
report released Wednesday that short-term exposure to the gas
at those levels is a public health hazard. The Agency for Toxic
Substances and Disease Registry, which works alongside the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based its findings
on air monitoring at four sites. … Much of the shift
followed research by UC San Diego atmospheric chemist Kimberly
Prather. Her team, drawing on residents’ knowledge, identified
the Saturn Boulevard crossing as a primary source of the gas.
There, sewage and industrial waste spill from culverts onto
rocks below, creating turbulence that releases hydrogen sulfide
into the air.
