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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Groups opposed to California’s Delta Conveyance Project had a
second chance Thursday to argue why the massive water project
fails to meet essential criteria and should return to the state
water department for further workshopping. The Delta
Stewardship Council heard appeals to a certificate of
consistency for the massive water transfer system,
making no decision that day whether to reject the appeal or
send it back to the Department of Water Resources for more
tweaking. The council can’t outright deny the project.
A decision is expected Dec. 9. … Those
appealing and the Delta Protection Commission, the latter an
advisory body for the council, said the water department failed
to meet the mark. … Department officials argued its
benchmarks were narrow, saying its revised certificate of
consistency complied with the Delta Plan.
… Beleaguered Front Range water utilities responded to
historic drought conditions in the just-ended
watering season with a variety of mandates, restrictions, price
increases, friendly reminders and educational
seminars. The results were decidedly
mixed. With no guarantee that predicted
El Niño weather will bring deep powder in the
spots drained by Front Range cities, utility experts
will be studying their results in case they need to redeploy
restrictions in 2027. We asked a handful of cities to
tell us what they learned, and to add up the numbers. Not
every water agency measures its savings the same way or uses
the same historic period for comparison, so we’re presenting
their savings in the way they talk about it in their
communities.
Winter is coming, and it looks warm and wet in California,
according to new data. In a winter outlook published on
Thursday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
provided national temperature and precipitation forecasts for
December, January and February. The new outlook features
how El Niño, the climate phenomenon that emerged in June and
could reach historic strength this year, will influence winter
weather. In California, meteorologists have expected El
Niño to tip the odds in favor of a wetter season, especially in
the southern part of the state. Sure enough, the
outlook shows a 50% to 60% chance that there will be
above-normal precipitation for much of California, from the Bay
Area to the southern border. North of the Bay Area, that
probability drops to 40% to 50%; and in the northern-most
sliver of the state, it’s 33% to 40%.
Gov. Katie Hobbs is lashing out at those who are trying to
undermine plans for what some call a “toilet to
tap”system of converting waste into drinking
water. The governor’s comments come as the question of
whether cities should pursue programs to produce purified water
from what has been sewage has become an election issue in at
least one Arizona city. There, a candidate is running on a
platform to kill the program, even making a campaign video
featuring some brown-looking liquid and telling viewers that is
what they are being asked to drink. “It’s irresponsible
to spread the kind of misinformation that’s being
spread about technology that we need to continue into the
future,” the governor said after speaking at an event to
promote work done by a program at Arizona State
University tasked with finding new sources of water and
conserving what the state has.
Ahwatukee residents flooded a town hall in Mesa with Attorney
General Kris Mayes on Wednesday to voice their concerns about
a massive data center under construction in their
community near homes, businesses, health offices and a
preschool. … Some in the audience were concerned the
facility’s cooling systems could leech toxic chemicals into
local water supplies and that emissions from the generators
could result in higher rates of cancer or heart disease.
… Mayes told residents her team would be
exploring whether a nuisance lawsuit could be wielded
as a final community backstop. Mayes previously used
nuisance law to challenge a Saudi alfalfa farming
operation that was draining groundwater supplies in La Paz
County.
Candidates for Navajo Nation president and vice president faced
off on Tuesday in the final debate before the November general
election. … Council Speaker Crystalyne Curley said, if
elected president, she’d continue her work to bring
water to the Navajo Nation. … As speaker,
Curley has advocated for congressional approval of a settlement
to resolve tribes’ water rights claims. The federal
deal would bring Colorado River water to the Navajo, Hopi and
San Juan Southern Paiute tribes, but it’s being
stalled in Congress by Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico.
… Curley’s opponent, New Mexico-based attorney Justin
Jones, pointed out that Congress’s window to approve the deal
is rapidly closing. … He continued: “We need to
do some serious lobbying, not only in Washington but also in
the Upper and Lower Colorado [Basin] compacts and
commissions.”
Based upon California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW)
projections, anglers will have met the Lower Trinity River
adult fall-run Chinook salmon quota below the Denny Road Bridge
at Hawkins Bar for the 2026 season as of 11:59 p.m. on Friday,
Oct. 16. This triggers the closure of the adult Chinook salmon
fishery on the Trinity River from the Denny Road Bridge at
Hawkins Bar to the confluence with the Klamath River. The quota
for this portion of the river is 536 adult fish. The reach will
remain open, however, to the harvest of jack (2-year-old)
Chinook salmon (less than or equal to 23 inches). All adult
Chinook salmon caught must be immediately released. The
Klamath and Trinity rivers are managed as quota fisheries
allowing for the combined take of approximately 3,200 adult
fall-run Chinook salmon in 2026.
PFAS chemicals are contaminating waterways across Colorado,
putting fish, wildlife and drinking water at risk. That’s the
conclusion of a new report from CoPIRG Foundation, Environment
Colorado Research & Policy Center and Frontier Group. The
study, PFAS in America’s Rivers and Lakes, finds that PFAS were
detected in Colorado’s waterways at 63% out of 16 testing
locations from 2022 to 2024. … The new report, which
covers 40 states, draws on data from the national Water Quality
Portal maintained by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Researchers detected as many as 18 different PFAS compounds at
one or more water testing locations in Colorado. … As
early as 2019, Colorado legislators began to ban the use of
PFAS, starting with certain firefighting foams. Ensuing bills
have tackled a range of consumer products including carpets,
food packaging, juvenile products, dental floss, outdoor
apparel and artificial turf.
Following months of deliberation, Nevada City Council
officially moved to adopt a five-year rate schedule for water
and wastewater (sewer) rate increases during its regularly
scheduled meeting on Wednesday, October 14 at City Hall. The
decision was made in the wake of a lengthy public hearing on
the matter, in which numerous residents questioned the timing,
practicality, and affordability of potential rate changes while
urging the council to consider funding alternatives for
improving the city’s aging infrastructure — including water and
sewer lines that officials described as nearly a century old.
Per city officials, under the proposed schedule, water rates
will be set to a recommended increase of approximately 25%
annually, while wastewater charges will rise under a separate
schedule with recommended increases of roughly 12%
annually.
The Phoenix area as we know it today wouldn’t exist without a
massive, gravity-defying canal that cuts through the
desert. For decades, the metro has grown on the back
of an unusual water supply. The
Central Arizona Project is a canal system that
pulls water from the Colorado River on the
state’s western border, then carries it more than 300 miles,
uphill through a series of pipes and pumps to the Phoenix and
Tucson areas. Today, water shortages threaten that
improbable system, and a series of warnings about the
canal’s future from the 1960s, largely ignored for decades,
seem prescient. … The architects of the CAP, 1960s
policymakers who championed it as a promising part of Arizona’s
future, were clear about the fact that it would not
work forever without extra help. They publicly
forecasted big drops to its flows in the 21st century and laid
out a plan to avoid them. … Now, decades later, we know
those suggestions never became reality.
… The national El Niño pattern becomes less reliable around
Northern California and Tahoe. The National Weather Service in
Sacramento says precipitation correlates
little with most El Niño and La Niña patterns in
Northern California. Southern California tends to
receive much more than average precipitation during El Niño. A
National Weather Service graphic based on seven strong El Niño
winters shows that three produced wet conditions in the
Sierra Nevada, while two were dry and two were near
normal. The analysis measures precipitation, which can
fall as either rain or snow. … The UC Berkeley Central
Sierra Snow Lab, at 6,894 feet, found similarly mixed results
when it examined snowfall during nine strong or very strong El
Niño seasons. … The very strong El Niño seasons
generally produced average to above-average
snowfall, but the lab cautioned that the sample was
small. It called the coming winter “still a toss-up.”
An all-hands-on-deck effort saved one of the state’s
most effective drinking water programs, at least for
next year. But what happens after that? The SAFER program,
which had received $130 million annually to provide emergency
water and long-term solutions for families whose wells go dry,
was set to be cut by nearly half until an unlikely
coalition of social justice, farmer and water manager groups
rallied to save it. On Oct. 8, about 40 people
gathered on the dusty bank of a Tulare County recharge basin to
celebrate that win, which resulted in one-time funding
of $171 million for SAFER in the 2027-28 fiscal year.
About $71 million of that will come from the state’s greenhouse
gas reduction fund and the rest is Proposition 4 money.
It’s salmon squeezing time at California’s newest, most
technologically-advanced fish hatchery. Standing in a
large tank filled with 54 degree water, a fish technician
passes an ultrasound wand across the abdomen of an adult female
Chinook salmon to ensure its eggs are fully developed. If
so, techs then squeeze out some eggs from the salmon’s belly
while feeling for the looseness of the remaining eggs. Each
ripe female is then transported into a separate holding tank
for spawning the following day. Male broodstock get similar
handling, except the squeezing is employed to express milk. The
males also get scanned (via a transponder tag embedded in their
abdomen) to determine which are the least genetically related
to the females. Why? Because the last thing biologists
want, especially when resurrecting a salmon run that was killed
off for more than six decades, is inbred fish.
What role will desalination play in the arid West? That topic
is one of many engaging conversations that will be
explored at our Oct. 29 Water
Summit revolving around this year’s theme,
Stewarding a New Era in Western Water. Led by Central
Arizona Project’s General Manager Brenda Burman, the
panel will discuss all topics worth their salt - from
emerging desalination technologies to the latest
developments in innovative desalination programs to the
regulatory challenges and opportunities that face the
region. The Water Summit is the Foundation’s
premier event of the year and returns to Sacramento on Oct. 29
with leading policymakers and experts addressing critical water
issues in California and across the West. Capacity is
limited and registration closes soon, so grab your ticket
here while they’re still available!
A self-imposed timeline for the Stratos data center in Box
Elder County has come and gone with few new details about the
project. Despite the project receiving approval from Utah’s
Military Installation Development Authority and the Box Elder
County Commission, little information has been made public
about factors that could have a major impact, including
how much water the data center will use. It’s
information Utahns have been waiting on for months. When KSL
Investigators spoke with developer Kevin O’Leary on July 1, he
said details about water demand would be included in a
water permit application expected to be publicly
available by the end of August. … [O'Leary Digital CEO
Paul] Palandjian said the application will include detailed
hydrological studies and engineering analysis for water
treatment and recycling. … Palandjian said on
Tuesday that it is complete, in final review, and will be
submitted “shortly.”
The Western U.S. is facing parallel and escalating hazards in
the form of ongoing drought and increasingly frequent
wildfires. Although the region’s ecosystems have
evolved with wildfires, the intensity and frequency of blazes
where people live and recreate remains a persistent challenge
for communities. New research examines tradeoffs in wildfire
resilience when Western communities face hard decisions about
adaptation strategies to drought, such as retiring or
converting irrigated cropland. … The research, published
October 12th in the journal Environmental Research
Letters, was co-led by Austen Lorenz and DRI’s Bea Gordon
alongside colleagues including fire managers. … The study’s
results found that cropland serves as a landscape-scale
buffer to wildfire as demonstrated across 11 Western states.
... The research has implications for
improving management of both water saving strategies
and wildfire risk reduction, which the authors suggest
should be managed jointly, rather than in isolation.
PG&E plans to start repairing a void at the base of
Cape Horn Dam by Nov. 20, according to a letter the
utility filed with federal dam-safety regulators Oct. 6. Cape
Horn Dam holds back Van Arsdale Reservoir on the Eel
River in Mendocino County. An intake 400 feet upstream
of the dam sends Eel River water into the Potter Valley
Project’s tunnels. The water runs to the Potter Valley
powerhouse, which empties into the East Fork of the
Russian River. PG&E is obligated to deliver up to
19,000 acre-feet of that water to the Potter Valley Irrigation
District, according to the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission. The dam is also home to the Van Arsdale Fisheries
Station, where salmon and steelhead climb a fish ladder
past the dam.
Conservation and public health groups filed a lawsuit today to
force the Trump administration to develop required water
quality standards for atrazine, a cancer-linked pesticide found
at dangerous levels in thousands of U.S. waterways and in
drinking-water supplies. … Atrazine is the nation’s most
widespread pesticide water pollutant. According to a new Center
for Biological Diversity report, the pesticide contaminates 25%
of all river miles in the continental United States at levels
the Environmental Protection Agency recognizes as harmful to
aquatic life. Atrazine pollution is caused by industrial
agricultural operations using tens of millions of pounds of the
pesticide each year. Today’s lawsuit challenges the lack of
water quality protections in American waterways as required
under the Clean Water Act. The Act requires the EPA to develop
water quality standards for pollutants like atrazine. The
agency initiated but failed to complete that step in 1999.
NOAA Fisheries has received a request from the Sonoma County
Water Agency (SCWA) for authorization to take small numbers of
marine mammals incidental to Russian River Estuary management
activities in Sonoma County, California over the course of five
years from the date of issuance. NOAA Fisheries is announcing
receipt of the SCWA’s request for the development and
implementation of regulations governing the incidental taking
of marine mammals. NOAA Fisheries invites the public to provide
information, suggestions, and comments on the SCWA’s
application and request.
With an El Niño winter threatening heavy rain, the State
Auditor warns that California’s aging dams “continue to pose a
risk to public safety,” especially in the Bay Area, San
Diego, and Los Angeles areas. Lawmakers gave the
state the power to penalize dam owners that violate
safety requirements in 2017, after the Oroville
spillway failure forced the evacuation of nearly
200,000 people. Water managers have yet to use
that power, the audit found. Even if state water
managers had wielded their enforcement powers, dam owners
likely couldn’t have afforded the fixes. An audit released
Monday found 57 dams in poor or unsatisfactory
condition as of May, up from previous counts. … The
auditor applauded the water resources department’s inspection
program but blasted its failure to enforce against dam owners
who fail to meet state planning, safety or other
requirements.
