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.
El Niño is here, and it’s only getting stronger. The
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration … forecasts
greater than 90% odds of a “strong” El Niño and a 63%
chance of a “very strong” event by early
winter. “That would rank among the largest El Niño events
in the historical record going back to 1950,” NOAA said.
… El Niño probably won’t significantly impact
California’s weather this summer. An enhanced Pacific
hurricane season may direct larger swells, more frequent
dry lightning or a rare tropical storm toward the state, but
the most pronounced effects are expected this winter. An
El Niño in historic territory would favor all of
California for above-normal precipitation this winter.
California will provide $46 million to address water quality
problems at the California-Mexico border, Gov. Gavin Newsom
announced Thursday. According to a press release by the
Governors office, the State Water Resources Control Board
opened grant applications targeting contamination in
cross-border rivers and coastal waters. The funding
comes from Proposition 4, a voter-approved bond covering safe
drinking water, wildfire prevention and drought preparedness
that passed in 2024. … According to the governor’s
office, funding will support projects that reduce bacteria and
trash pollution, address public health impacts from
transboundary contamination, and support restoration and
sediment management. The grants target both the Tijuana
River and other areas, with at least one project
selected from each waterway.
The Flaming Gorge Reservoir on the Utah-Wyoming border is known
for its kokanee salmon and trophy lake trout. But when the
water started dropping rapidly a few weeks ago, business at
Buckboard Marina started drying up, too. … The
Flaming Gorge provides a backstop for larger reservoirs in the
Colorado River Basin. Lake Powell, a few hundred miles
downstream, is less than a quarter full. The federal Bureau of
Reclamation warned in April that hydropower production could
stop at Powell in August if the water levels continued to drop.
To prevent a significant blow to the region’s power supply, the
bureau announced it would send up to 1-million acre-feet of
water from Flaming Gorge over the course of a year to prop up
levels at Lake Powell.
Wednesday, U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), a member of the
Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, and U.S. Sen. Martin
Heinrich (D-N.M.) introduced the Protecting Indian Water Rights
Settlements Act of 2026, legislation to ensure the federal
government fulfills its trust responsibilities by
providing dedicated, mandatory funding for Indian water rights
settlements through the Bureau of Indian Affairs’
Indian Water Rights Settlement Completion Fund. … While the
Bipartisan Infrastructure Law established the Indian Water
Rights Settlement Completion Fund to support settlements
authorized before November 2021, there is currently no
guaranteed funding source for agreements enacted after that
date. The Protecting Indian Water Rights Settlements Act of
2026 addresses this gap by amending the existing fund to
provide $2.95 billion in mandatory funding over ten years for
both already enacted and future settlements.
… The Razorback Suckers isn’t just a quirky team name. It’s a
statement about what matters to this community. The Grand
Valley, on the high-desert edge of Colorado’s Western Slope, is
deep in a fight to keep this endangered fish
alive. Razorbacks roamed the Colorado River for an
estimated five million years before humans almost fished them
out of existence and destroyed much of their habitat. Now
it’s up to today’s humans to save them. And on a recent
morning, hundreds of people gathered on the rocky banks of the
Colorado River in Palisade for a joyous razorback
release.
Subsidence from over pumping is still a problem in the Tulare
Lake subbasin covering most of Kings County. Opinions on how
much sinking is too much are still sharply divided. As are
views on how much pumping is too much and whether groundwater
can be moved from one area to another. Yet, the El Rico
Groundwater Sustainability Agency (GSA) voted June 9 on several
measures it expects will reunite the fractured region. That
includes an effort to write a single, subbasin-wide groundwater
plan rather than each of the five GSAs writing their own.
What’s changed? One man was fired from a water district in the
northern reaches of the county.
… The Tehama-Colusa Canal, which runs north to south
along the western edge of the Sacramento Valley, will function
as the primary outlet for Sites Reservoir, a long-planned water
storage project. Its construction has been approved to begin
later this year. The largest California reservoir project in
decades, the reservoir will collect and store water in wet
years and release it to customers during dry ones. When it
does, it will start in the Tehama-Colusa Canal, which dead-ends
just south of Dunnigan. To continue, the water needs to cross
miles of farmland, roads and Interstate 5 to reach stakeholders
in Southern California and elsewhere that have invested in the
project. Engineers from the Sites Project Authority, which
is in charge of building the reservoir, designed a solution in
the form of the pipeline, which would run underground and dump
into the Colusa Basin Drain.
The state of California is walking back protections meant to
keep destructive golden mussels out of Lake Oroville, one of
the largest and most important reservoirs in the
state. The move follows a new state-funded risk assessment
that the invasive species poses a lower risk to the lake, which
water managers say changes the state’s calculus on costly and
difficult measures aimed at keeping the invaders at
bay. No state agencies or scientists have found mussels in
Oroville yet. But invasive species experts say the revised
policy of the Department of Water Resources increases the
likelihood that golden mussels will invade Lake Oroville and
hitch a ride on boats to other lakes. They disagree,
though, about whether preventing such an incursion is even
possible.
Colorado’s drought is only expected to worsen with more dry
weather for the forecasted future and a below-average snowpack
to fill reservoirs, leading water managers and authorities to
urge conservation to ensure we have enough water for essential
functions like firefighting. … “Our snow pack is at 30% or
less of normal,” [Ruedi Water and Power Authority
Chair Greg] Poschman said. “Our reservoirs aren’t going to
fill this year, and we need to restrict water use — otherwise
it’s going to be very dire in the valley, and it affects
everyone. Outdoor watering is the biggest concern.” He
emphasized that overuse of water could reduce what is available
for the things that are vital, such as firefighting efforts,
which are expected to continue to worsen in tandem with the
drought.
Data centers are allegedly an unmitigated disaster: They guzzle
water, strain electric grids, and raise prices, all while
offering almost nothing in return. Little wonder that according
to a recent Gallup poll, 71 percent of Americans oppose
the construction of new AI data centers in their area.
Politicians of both parties are proposing moratoriums on new
builds, and local officials who have approved construction in
the past are losing reelection because of it. … Critics
argue that AI wastes billions of liters of water every year and
that this is an “environmental justice crisis.” … Data
centers certainly do use water. They are basically warehouses
of tightly packed, high-powered computers, and when computers
run, they get hot. Most data centers—though not all—use water
for cooling. But many of them use a “closed loop,” which
doesn’t actually waste much, because the water is recycled
repeatedly for the same purpose. –Written by Atlantic columnist Elias Wachtel.
The chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee
warned Arizona and two other states that rely on the Colorado
River on Wednesday that they will lose access to hundreds of
millions in conservation aid if they pursue litigation over
water rights. Roughly $354 million is still available
under a 2022 climate law. But the funds expire at the end of
September. “States that choose to sue their fellow basin states
over Colorado River operations should not expect Congress to
reward that decision with additional federal funding,” Sen.
Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah – one of the four Upper Basin
states, said at the outset of a hearing onthe stalemate among the seven states that share the
river. “Federal taxpayers should not be asked to
subsidize litigation among the states.”
Some farmers in southern Tulare County – where
excessive groundwater pumping has already caused
hundreds of millions in damage to the Friant-Kern
Canal – are back to pumping like crazy while there’s a
gap in oversight. It hasn’t gone unnoticed. “They have got
to be serious about stopping the pumping,” said Jeevan Muhar,
general manager of Arvin-Edison Water Storage District
Groundwater Sustainability Agency. “It needs to stop for the
canal to function as it is supposed to.” The “they” Muhar
referred to is the Tule East Groundwater Sustainability Agency
(GSA), which took over a large chunk of the Tule subbasin after
its predecessor, Eastern Tule GSA, folded. But there’s not
much that can be done right now as Tule East is still in its
formation stages.
The Trump administration is not going to set nationwide
environmental requirements or recommendations for the rapidly
growing data center industry, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said
Wednesday. While there are technologies and practices that
reduce air pollution and water usage, states
and communities know what works best for them, Zeldin said at
the POLITICO Energy Summit in Washington. … Just 37
percent of Americans would support a data center being built in
their area, according to a POLITICO poll earlier this year.
There are myriad reasons cited by opponents, but water usage
and air pollution are common complaints. Zeldin on Wednesday
cited closed-loop data center designs that don’t have to
regularly tap into local water supplies.
… If a potential super El Niño materializes later this year,
as forecasters expect with 82% probability by July, the
combined warming could disrupt ecosystems, harm marine life and
threaten the juvenile salmon that are heading out to sea for
the first time since populations began to recover. The
concern is specific and urgent. Young salmon that hatch in
rivers like the Sacramento, Klamath and Eel
spend their first months in the ocean, where they depend on
cold, nutrient-rich upwelling water to find food and survive.
When ocean temperatures rise, that food web breaks down. The
prey species that juvenile salmon depend on shift northward or
decline, and survival rates drop.
A recently published study on the 2021 Caldor Fire burn scar is
shedding light on how fires can impact snowpacks. Often
referred to as the “frozen reservoir”, the Sierra Nevada
snowpack provides 30% or more of California’s water. As
wildfires in the west are not only burning increasingly more
acreage, but are also going higher in elevation—including into
areas where snowpacks occur—it’s raising questions
about what that means for one of the state’s biggest water
resources. Marianne Cowherd set out to find
answers, studying the Caldor Fire area during the
2022-2023 winter along with others, including UC Berkeley
Central Sierra Snow Lab Director Andrew Schwartz. “These
fires are massively problematic for us trying to ensure we’re
managing our water correctly,” Schwartz said.
Northern Water earned a mixed scorecard on its troubled $2.7
billion, two-dam supply project in recent months, with the
northern Colorado provider lopping an entire dam to cut costs,
even as more cities depart the venture. The cities who
spent the spring researching whether to stay in or flee the
Northern Integrated Supply Project are also hearing distressing
news from Northern Water’s other stumbling showcase project,
Chimney Hollow reservoir. Towns like Erie now assume the
uranium contamination combined with lack of runoff to fill
Chimney Hollow mean they won’t be able to sell water from that
reservoir to customers for five or six more years, complicating
the fundraising they need to pay for their shares of the larger
NISP project.
Just off the Logan River is a new diversion structure designed
to help farmers in the Cache Valley use water more efficiently.
“The canal company spent almost $2 million over the last year
putting in a new diversion structure here behind us with
automated, real-time water measurement and piping the first
mile or so of our canal company,” said Nathan Daugs with the
Cache Water District. “That gives us the option, or ability, to
measure exactly what we’re diverting with our water right.” The
Cache Water District is looking at other ways of stretching
water resources further. Some of the small canal company’s
farmers are participating in a pilot project with the Great
Salt Lake Commissioner’s Office to test a new law allowing them
to treat water like another crop and lease it to the lake.
… Last week, Gov. Jared Polis declared a statewide
drought emergency. After record-low snowpack and persistent
above average temperatures, every county in Colorado is drier
than average. … The emergency declaration coincides with
moving to phase 3 of the state’s drought response plan. It
allows the Governor to access and appropriate money available
in Colorado’s disaster emergency fund and sets up stronger
state coordination on dispersing those resources. In addition,
it opens the possibility of asking the White House to issue a
federal emergency declaration. As it currently stands,
farmers and ranchers can apply for a suite of relief options
ranging from emergency loans, to grants for crop loss, to
reimbursements for the travel costs of hauling extra feed or
water for livestock.
The Center for Biological Diversity announced it sued the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service June 9 for failing to decide whether
western ridged mussels should be protected under the Endangered
Species Act. The center notified the service of its intent to
sue in March. … The agency missed a legally required deadline
to determine whether safeguards are warranted for the
freshwater mussels, which are disappearing from rivers across
Oregon, Washington, California, Idaho and Nevada. Many
historical sites no longer support mussels, and many local
populations no longer successfully reproduce. In California,
one of the 17 locations of live mussel observations since 1990
is Last Chance Creek in the East Branch North Fork Feather
River watershed, according to a report from the Xerces Society
for Invertebrate Conservation.
Julia Lee had no need for a new garden when she and her husband
purchased their Cheviot Hills home eight years ago. The
traditional 1950 home came with mature tropical plants in the
back and a sprawling grass hillside lawn in front, and it
suited them just fine. But as drought and wildfires dragged on
in California in recent years, she started to question whether
keeping the thirsty lawn made sense. … So in 2022, Lee
decided to replace her lawn with a drought-tolerant landscape,
using the LADWP Free Landscape Design Program, now called the
Landscape Efficiency Assistance Program, for help. She
also applied for the Metropolitan Water District’s turf
replacement rebate, which was $3 per square foot at the time
(now $5), and got $5,310 back when the garden was finished.
