A collection of top water news from around California and the West compiled each weekday. Send any comments or article submissions to Foundation News & Publications Director Chris Bowman.
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At least $11 billion would be needed to upgrade wastewater
treatment facilities across the Bay Area if regulators impose
anticipated stricter environmental rules, according to a
regional water board that seeks to protect the San Francisco
Bay. The upgrades at dozens of sewage treatment plants,
needed to prevent toxic algae blooms and protect fish, would
cost an average of $4,000 per household, and consumers may end
up funding the improvements. The key culprit? Nitrogen
found in urine and fecal matter, which feeds the growth of
algae.
Southern California’s Imperial Irrigation District, which
supplies water to farmers who grow most of the nation’s winter
vegetables, planned to start a conservation program in April to
scale back what it draws from the critical Colorado River. But
a tiny, tough fish got in the way. Now, those plans won’t start
until at least June so water and wildlife officials can devise
a way to ensure the endangered desert pupfish and other species
are protected, said Jamie Asbury, the irrigation district’s
general manager.
Hydropower generation in the U.S. West plunged to a 22-year low
last year — dropping 11 percent from the year before, according
to a new federal data analysis. The total amount produced
in the region amounted to 141.5 million megawatt-hours, or
about 60 percent of the country’s total hydroelectricity output
in the 2022-23 “water year,” per the data published
by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).
… On the other hand, a series of atmospheric rivers in
California spurred an increase in hydroelectricity production
in the Golden State — nearly doubling it in comparison to the
previous water year, the analysis noted.
National Weather Service (NWS) meteorologists shared a map on
social media that reveals which Southern California cities
will be hit hardest by an approaching storm expected to arrive
this weekend. California has faced an abnormally wet winter as
moisture-laden storms and atmospheric rivers dumped a deluge of
rain and snow on the state, beginning in January. The excessive
rainfall has resulted from a slew of atmospheric rivers that
have battered the state this month. Last year, more than a
dozen of them helped alleviate the state’s severe drought
situation and replenished many of the state’s reservoirs, but
the storms also caused devastating floods and landslides.
No Mainer would assume that David Byrne — legendary frontman
for the Talking Heads and endlessly inventive musician and
artist — would be fascinated by the Penobscot River Restoration
Project. … This Saturday he’ll be giving a talk and leading a
panel discussion at the Waterville Opera House with local
experts about the dam removal project in the lower Penobscot.
… The project began in 1999 as a collaborative effort
between many Maine organizations and businesses to better
balance hydropower needs with restoring native fisheries and
getting the river closer to its natural, pre-industrial state.
Between 2012 and 2016, the Veazie Dam and Great Works Dam in
Old Town were removed, and a bypass was constructed on the
Howland Dam.
Flooding could affect one out of every 50 residents in 24
coastal cities in the United States by the year 2050, a study
led by Virginia Tech researchers suggests. The study, published
this month in Nature, shows how the combination of land
subsidence—in this case, the sinking of shoreline terrain—and
rising sea levels can lead to the flooding of coastal areas
sooner than previously anticipated by research that had focused
primarily on sea level rise scenarios. … The study
combines measurements of land subsidence obtained from
satellites with sea level rise projections and tide charts,
offering a more holistic projection of potential flooding risks
in 32 cities located along the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf
coasts.
The frustration for farmers continues to grow after recent news
of recent water allocation numbers. The Bureau of Reclamation
has announced a 35 percent federal allocation for Central
Valley Project recipients, as the California Department of
Water Resources has allocated 30 percent of State Water Project
requests. The news comes as the snowpack in the Sierra
Nevada sits at or near normal. … Joe Del Bosque of Del
Bosque Farms … says he and other farmers were extremely
disappointed with the recent numbers. He tells me with the
current snowpack, and recent, and potentially incoming storms,
the allocation should have been higher.
For the first time in four years, water is being pumped from
Tulelake to the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge. The
historic Pumping Plant D in Tulelake Irrigation District (TID)
was constructed at the base of Sheepy Ridge in 1942. TID
Manager Brad Kirby said the five massive pumps ran year-round
for nearly 70 years. … In 2020, drought conditions and
federal regulations rendered the plant inoperative. As of
Monday morning, the D-Plant is up and running again, pumping
water from the Tulelake National Wildlife Refuge through Sheepy
Ridge to the Lower Klamath refuge thanks to the efforts of TID,
Ducks Unlimited and U.S. Fish and Wildlife.
Gov. Jared Polis and Dan Gibbs, Executive Director,
Colorado Department of Natural Resources announced Jason
Ullmann as the next Colorado State Engineer and Director of the
Division of Water Resources (DWR). … Jason brings over 20
years of experience in water resources engineering, 14 years of
which have been at DWR, most recently as the Deputy State
Engineer. Before his time with DWR, he gained valuable
experience in water resources management as a City Engineer for
the City of Montrose and as a consulting engineer for various
ditch and reservoir companies throughout Colorado.
Karrigan Börk, UC Davis professor of law and Associate Director
at the Center for Watershed Sciences, has been awarded the
prestigious $10,000 Morrison Prize for his paper on water
rights. The Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State
University recognizes Börk’s paper as “the most impactful
sustainability-related legal academic paper published in North
America” for 2023. Börk’s winning paper, “Water Exaction
Rights,” published in the Harvard Environmental Law Review,
proposes a solution to address current and future water crises
in the US: an exactions framework.
Last year, Pacific Gas & Electric announced that it would
demolish the [Eel River's] Scott and Cape Horn dams and
decommission the entire Potter Valley power project.
… Removing the dams will help restore natural river
flows, which will improve fish habitat along the Eel River.
That’s been a longtime objective of the Round Valley Indian
Tribes. The tribes have strong historic and cultural ties to
the river and its bounty. When the dams come down, the Eel
River will become the longest free-flowing river in California
according to fish advocates. Salmon, steelhead and trout all
will benefit. Lake Pillsbury will disappear. Demolition is not
restoration, though, and there will be ripple effects on other
nearby natural areas.
To address the concern of historic groundwater overdraft in the
San Joaquin Valley, the California Water Institute at Fresno
State, with assistance from students and faculty, conducted a
feasibility study to explore the potential for groundwater
recharge within disadvantaged communities. … The analysis
identified four potential locations for the design and
construction of recharge basins near or in the cities of
Kerman, Raisin City, Caruthers and Laton.
Two Tahoe towns are saying no to plastic water
bottles. South Lake Tahoe’s ban on single-use
plastic water bottles and paper cartons is slated to go into
full effect next month, soon after neighboring Truckee
passed an ordinance to implement a similar
ban. … The League to Save Lake Tahoe found that
single-use plastic bottles are one of the top five types of
litter in the Tahoe Basin, Truckee’s news release
states.
Fishers are fighting tire companies’ attempt to dismiss an
Endangered Species Act suit over the use of a rubber additive
known as 6PPD, which harms salmon, telling a California federal
judge the companies are trying to delay accountability…
Spring is here, but the rainy season is clearly not
over in California. Two separate storms are poised to impact
the Golden State this week. The first one is predicted to
impact only Northern California on Wednesday, bringing light
rain. The second one is expected to sweep the
entire state over the weekend, likely delivering a shot of
moderate rain to Northern California and a more substantial
heavy soaking to Southern California. The National Weather
Service’s Los Angeles office is starting to sound the alarm
bells and called the system a “late season
significant storm” in its forecast.
The Mid-Kings River Groundwater Sustainability Agency is
looking to impose a pumping fee of nearly $100 per
acre-foot. Mid-Kings River GSA is comprised of the Kings
County Water District, the City of Hanford and Kings
County. The big picture: The GSA is proposing a
pumping fee maximum of $95 per acre-foot. This comes after
the State views that the region has not made enough progress
through the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act
(SGMA). The state wants agriculture and industrial water
pumpers to cut back or pay to mitigate the impacts on
other users. The state could move to put the subbasin in
probation if it does not feel confident in local groundwater
management, and could completely take over operations in 2025.
… Lake Powell’s levels have fallen throughout the winter, but
as the weather warms, the snowpack that has accumulated in the
mountains over the winter will begin to melt. That water will
feed rivers and streams across the West — including the
Colorado River, which fills Lake Powell on Arizona and Utah’s
shared border. … The National Weather Service Colorado
Basin River Forecast Center predicts that 5.4 million acre-feet
of unregulated runoff will spill into the reservoir between
April and July. … According to the Colorado Basin River
Forecast Center, spring runoff this year will be 85% of the
average runoff between 1991 and 2020.
California farmers could save massive amounts of water if they
planted less thirsty — but also less lucrative — crops such as
grains and hay instead of almonds and alfalfa, according to new
research by scientists who used remote sensing and artificial
intelligence. Such a seismic shift in the nation’s most
productive agricultural state could cut consumption by roughly
93%, researchers with UC Santa Barbara and the NASA Jet
Propulsion Laboratory reported Monday. But Anna Boser, the
study’s lead author, acknowledged that replacing all of
California’s water-intensive crops with the least-intensive
ones is an unrealistic economic scenario. … In a
less-extreme scenario, Boser and her colleagues reported that
fallowing 5% of fields with the most water-intensive crops
could cut water consumption by more than 9%, according to
the study, published in the journal Nature Communications.
A vast burn scar unfolds in drone footage of a landscape seared
by massive wildfires north of Lake Tahoe. But amid the expanses
of torched trees and gray soil, an unburnt island of lush green
emerges. The patch of greenery was painstakingly engineered. A
creek had been dammed, creating ponds that slowed the flow of
water so the surrounding earth had more time to sop it up. A
weblike system of canals helped spread that moisture through
the floodplain. Trees that had been encroaching on the wetlands
were felled. But it wasn’t a team of firefighters or
conservationists who performed this work. It was a crew of
semiaquatic rodents whose wetland-building skills have seen
them gain popularity as a natural way to mitigate
wildfires. A movement is afoot to restore beavers to the
state’s waterways, many of which have suffered from their
absence.