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 Doug Beeman.
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As Colorado River water users prepare to meet in Las Vegas next
month, the reality they face is one of growing uncertainty with
few simple options left on the negotiating table. The math is
well understood: There are more demands for the river than
there is water coming into its reservoirs. But cutting
back at the scale necessary — and on a voluntary basis — has
proven painstakingly difficult this year as top officials from
across the Colorado River watershed have failed to reach a
settlement. If the cuts are inevitable based on physical
realities, questions remain about what form they will take.
Will they be voluntary? Mandatory? Both? And how would they be
enforced?
Thomas Birmingham, general manager of the massive Westlands
Water District since 2000, Wednesday announced plans to step
down at the end of 2022. His announcement follows the election
of four new members to the Westlands Board of Directors on Nov.
8 who would give a so-called “change coalition” a solid
majority of six seats on the nine-member board. The top
priority for the coalition is “a change in leadership,”
according to Sarah Woolf, who along with Jon Reiter helped
coordinate a group of increasingly frustrated Westlands farmers
to run the slate of change candidates, SJV Water
reported.
Drought, human-caused climate change, invasive species and a
“legacy” of environmental issues are permanently altering
California’s landscape and placing some communities and
ecosystems at increasing risk, a panel of experts told water
officials recently. Invasive species and decades of disruptions
from massive land and water developments are partly responsible
for a continuous decline in native California species, experts
told the California Water Commission on Nov. 16. Also, rural
communities, many of whom are lower income and rely on
privately owned wells, are disproportionately contending with
water contamination and scarcity amid recurring cycles of
drought, experts said.
A lot has changed for California’s reservoirs over the last
five years. In April 2017, then-Governor Jerry Brown issued an
executive order that declared California’s drought state of
emergency over in most counties (Fresno, Kings, Tulare and
Tuolumne counties were initially excluded). The emergency order
had been in place since 2014 following several years of
historic drought conditions. … Shasta is currently
at 31% capacity, down from its historical capacity of 57%
this time of year. Storage level graphs from the
California Department of Water Resources show today’s water
level hovering above 2014’s historically low levels.
As California awakens to the worsening risk of extreme climate
events, researchers are shedding new light on last year’s
anomalous and extreme Pacific Northwest heat wave. One study
published this week said such heat waves could become 20 times
more likely to occur if current carbon emissions continue
unabated. … The nine-day event in late June and early
July 2021 seared parts of Northern California, Oregon,
Washington and British Columbia, where Canada saw its highest
temperature on record, 121.3 degrees. The heat wave claimed
hundreds of lives, sparked several devastating wildfires and
killed an estimated 1 billion sea creatures. … In
California and other parts of the western United States,
increasing heat, drought and aridification are
contributing to long-term drying of soils, which means there’s
less water to be evaporated into the air.
The San Joaquin River is a vital source of water for
agriculture and the environment and it is also home to a unique
program that hopes to restore native fish runs. It is a complex
program and SJV Water was fortunate to take advantage of a tour
offered through the Water Education Foundation Nov. 2-3 that
helps break down the various aspects of restoration efforts.
The restoration program is a nearly one billion dollar endeavor
to restore spring-run Chinook salmon to the river which went
extinct there after Friant Dam and other obstructions were
built.
As California prepares for a fourth consecutive year of drought
and farmland across the Golden State increasingly goes idle,
growers continue to face mounting economic challenges. In a new
report about the financial toll of the state’s extreme drought
conditions, researchers estimated that the state’s irrigated
farmland dropped by 752,000 acres, or nearly 10%, from 2019 to
2022. Fields meant to harvest rice, almonds and other crops are
instead going unplanted, causing the level of fallowed land
across California to surpass the prior peak seen during the
state’s last drought that ran from 2012 to 2016. As a result,
the researchers found, California crop revenues fell by $1.7
billion, or 4.6%, during that time …
California already has one of the most variable climates in the
United States, and it’s getting more extreme. Our “weather
whiplash,” as it’s becoming known, is increasingly marked by
long periods of warm, dry conditions punctuated by stronger and
wetter atmospheric river storms. … Recognizing the
influence of atmospheric rivers on California’s changing
climate, Yuba Water is working with the Scripps Institution of
Oceanography’s Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at
UC San Diego, the California Department of Water Resources, the
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and others to
implement Forecast-Informed Reservoir Operations in the
Yuba and Feather river watersheds. FIRO is a flexible water
management strategy that uses improved weather and water
forecasts …
The entire Mississippi River basin is experiencing drought
conditions that are being compared to the Dust Bowl days of the
1930s. The scenes — from exposed shipwrecks to sand dunes
cropping up where the river used to flow — are surreal, and
people from New Orleans to the Upper Midwest are getting
nervous. I’m increasingly being asked: Is this the future of
the Mississippi? And what would that mean for the world’s food
supply — 92% of all U.S. agricultural exports are produced in
the Mississippi River basin? Underpinning these questions is
the same fear: Will the Mississippi turn into a new Colorado
River—which is so oversubscribed it never reaches its historic
delta anymore? -Written by John Sabo, director of ByWater Institute at
Tulane University, avid fly fisherman.
In a deep muddy creek near Silicon Valley’s busiest freeway, a
large furry head pokes up. And then quickly submerges. The
brief sighting, along with a growing collection of video
footage, confirms something remarkable: After being hunted to
extinction in the 1800s, the North American beaver is returning
to the creeks of the San Francisco Bay Area. Ecosystem
explorers, beavers were re-introduced to Lexington Reservoir in
Los Gatos about four decades ago, and made homes in upper Los
Gatos Creek. Since then, they’ve expanded their range north
along the edge of the Bay to the Guadalupe River, Coyote Creek,
San Tomas Aquino Creek in the wetlands by Sunnyvale’s Water
Pollution Control Plant – and, now, Palo Alto’s Matadero Creek.
The promise of job security and work-life balance drew Fernando
Gonzalez to become a water operator. Now that he’s worked as
one for a few years, he sees his job as much more than fining
people for using too much water. On a given day, he’s
patrolling neighborhoods spanning from farmland to Malibu
mansions, looking for evidence that residents are wasting
water. He hands out notices of leaky sprinklers or when
residents run sprinklers right after a rainstorm, sure, but the
most rewarding part of his job is interacting with customers
about how they can save water, and why it’s so
important. … Here’s how Gonzalez earns $70,000 a
year, or nearly $100,000 with overtime, as a water operator in
Calabasas, Calif.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has made a
radical but logical decision: The utility will no longer shut
off service when low-income residents and seniors can’t pay
their bills. Instead, those customers will be put on payment
plans that can stretch over several years, offered incentives
to help lower their water and power use and, if they qualify,
be enrolled in federal programs to help households in poverty
pay for utilities. It’s an important change, recognizing
that water and power are essential services. It’s cruel to cut
people off if they fall behind on their bills due to financial
hardship.
Without any regard to impacts on wildlife, fire danger, rural
residents or recreational users at Loveland Reservoir near
Alpine in San Diego’s East County, the Sweetwater Water
Authority (SWA) on November 16 began draining down the lake
with an intent to reduce it to “dead pool” level – less than
one-half of one percent of the reservoir’s capacity, once
draining is completed over the next couple of weeks or so. The
water is being piped to Sweetwater Reservoir in Otay Mesa. From
there, it will be used to provide drinking water and other
water needs to residents in the South Bay communities of Chula
Vista, National City and Bonita. -Written by Miriam Raftery.
Conservationists have notified U.S. wildlife officials that
they will sue over delinquent decisions related to protections
for two rare fish species that are threatened by groundwater
pumping in the drought-stricken West. The Center for Biological
Diversity sent a formal notice of intent to sue the Fish and
Wildlife Service last week over the Fish Lake Valley tui chub
near the California-Nevada line and the least chub in southwest
Utah. Utah and Nevada are the driest states in the country, and
the planned lawsuits are among the many fronts on which
conservationists are battling water districts and the users
they cater to over plans to siphon water to either maintain or
expand consumption.
Millions of Houston residents were told Sunday night to boil
their water before drinking it after a power outage at a water
purification plant caused water pressure to dip and triggered a
mandatory boil-water notice, officials said. The order prompted
officials in Texas’s largest city to close public schools for
at least one day. Officials said the orders were issued out of
an abundance of caution and that they had not received any
reports of customers getting sick from drinking contaminated
water. … Erin Jones, a spokeswoman for Houston Public
Works, said that the agency, which serves about 2.3 million
customers, is following state protocols and testing water
samples. The boil order is likely to remain in effect until at
least Tuesday morning, she said.
“The sewage is killing us.” Imperial Beach Mayor Serge Dedina
did not mince words in 2017 after yet another spill from
Tijuana’s broken wastewater system contaminated local beaches.
He also did not waste time. Dedina pushed for answers from U.S.
and Mexico officials, and got none that were satisfying. So he
sued the federal government in 2018 and was later joined in the
lawsuit by Chula Vista and the Port of San Diego.
… Imperial Beach has long been a beach town beset by
water contamination due to sewage spilling from Mexico. The
battle for clean water has sometimes turned neighbor against
neighbor, such as when Imperial Beach officials criticized
their more affluent neighbor Coronado for not joining the 2018
lawsuit.
Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an
Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced it will be
water positive (water+) by 2030, returning more water to
communities than it uses in its direct operations. The company
also announced its 2021 global water use efficiency (WUE)
metric of 0.25 liters of water per kilowatt-hour, demonstrating
AWS’s leadership in water efficiency among cloud providers. AWS
is already well on the path to becoming water+ and as part of
this new commitment will report annually on its WUE metric, new
water reuse and recycling efforts, new activities to reduce
water consumption in its facilities, and advancements in new
and existing replenishment projects.
To many of the 100 or so full-time residents of Red Mountain, a
historic mining town on the northwestern tip of San Bernardino
County’s desert, John Hall is unofficially known as mayor.
Hall, 75, isn’t quite sure why. Maybe it’s because he’s lasted
more than 30 years in this hard-scrap place, where locals truck
in water to avoid the arsenic that decades of mining left in
the ground and their tap water. … It’s estimated the
state has about 47,000 abandoned mines. And of the roughly
24,400 sites on BLM-managed land, some 84% present physical
hazards, such as open mine shafts, while 11% present
environmental hazards such as contamination. Red Mountain
has both. Soil testing has found as much as 10,000
milligrams of arsenic per kilogram in some parts of Red
Mountain.
In the fall, rice fields in the Sacramento Valley usually shine
golden brown as they await harvesting. This year, however, many
fields were left covered with bare dirt. “It’s a disaster,”
said rice farmer Don Bransford. “This has never happened.
Never. And I’ve been farming since 1980.” … California
has just gone through the state’s driest three-year period on
record, and this year the drought has pushed the fallowing of
farmland to a new high. In a new report on the
drought’s economic effects, researchers estimated that
California’s irrigated farmland shrank by 752,000 acres, or
nearly 10%, in 2022 compared with 2019 — the year prior to the
drought. That was up from an estimated 563,000 acres of
fallowed farmland last year.
