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 Vik Jolly.
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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.
Hundreds of homes and businesses in Marin County were impacted
by significant weekend flooding as a large storm and
record-high tides combined to inundate coastal communities,
local officials said Monday. … Local officials said the
incident illustrated the importance of long-term resilience and
flood-prevention projects as climate change intensifies storms
and sea levels rise. For example, a levee built in the
1980s was breached by floodwater on Saturday,
requiring emergency repairs. Marin County Supervisor Mary
Sackett said the county has a plan to replace it, but is still
seeking funding for construction.
… After a relatively slow start to the winter rainy
season, a series of atmospheric river storms has sent
hundreds of billions of gallons of water pouring into
reservoirs across California over the past three weeks, easing
the concerns of water managers and significantly reducing the
likelihood of shortages next summer. … Since Dec. 16,
the state’s largest reservoir — Shasta, a massive 35-mile-long
lake near Redding — has risen by 36 feet. … Similarly,
the water level at Oroville, the state’s second-largest
reservoir, has jumped 69 feet over the same three weeks.
Arizona’s Lake Powell is in trouble. U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
modeling shows the reservoir dropped roughly 36 ft between
December 2024 and December 2025, a decline that is no longer a
warning but an operating condition engineers are designing
around. The drop is compressing the margin between routine
operations and hard infrastructure limits at Glen Canyon Dam as
negotiations over post-2026 Colorado River operating rules
remain unresolved. … Basin representatives have asked
Reclamation to evaluate protecting Lake Powell elevations near
3,490 ft and to study infrastructure modifications that would
allow releases below that level. Any such work would represent
a new class of climate-driven capital investment at one of the
federal government’s most critical water and power assets.
Friant Water Authority and the City of Fresno filed suit in
2016 over a federal government decision in 2014/15 to withhold
San Joaquin River water typically sent 150
miles south down the Friant Kern Canal. The federal Bureau of
Reclamation severely limited their allocation that year due to
extreme statewide drought conditions. … The appeal of the
lower court rulings headed to the Supreme Court in 2025, some
10 years later — and as of Dec. 15, the high court “denied” the
Friant claim without comment sustaining the government’s and
lower court position that the Bureau of Reclamation who
orchestrated the Central Valley Project, owns
the water.
The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday said it would
propose a drinking water limit for perchlorate, a harmful
chemical in rockets and other explosives, but also said doing
so wouldn’t significantly benefit public health and that it was
acting only because a court ordered it. The agency said it will
seek input on how strict the limit should be for perchlorate,
which is particularly dangerous for infants, and require
utilities to test. The agency’s move is the latest in a more
than decade-long battle over whether to regulate perchlorate.
The EPA said that the public benefit of the regulation did not
justify its expected cost.
U.S. lawmakers largely rejected U.S. President Donald Trump’s
proposed budget cuts to NOAA Fisheries in a new compromise
appropriations bill Congress needs to pass before the
government once again runs out of money on 30 January. On 5
January, House and Senate appropriations leaders released a
compromise piece of legislation that will fund the U.S.
Department of Commerce – which houses NOAA Fisheries – through
the rest of fiscal year 2026, which runs until the end of
September. The compromise bill’s spending for NOAA Fisheries
largely aligns with the original Senate version of the
legislation, ignoring the Trump administration’s proposal to
slash the agency’s funding and eliminate programs.
The Klamath Indigenous Land Trust recently purchased 10,000
acres along the Klamath River, signifying one of the largest
Indigenous-led private land purchases in U.S. history
as salmon continue to make their historic return to
the newly revived watershed. The expansive property,
located mostly in California and extending into Oregon,
includes the sites of reservoirs that existed up until
the removal of four of the Klamath’s dams in
2023 and 2024. PacifiCorp owned the parcel for a century prior
to the purchase and partnered with KILT to complete the
transfer, the land trust announced in a news
release last week.
… Writing in Nature Water, Daniele Penna synthesizes
information from almost 700 forested watersheds around the
globe to understand how forest characteristics control flow
pathways. … Structured around eight hypotheses drawn from the
hydrological literature, the study examines the pathways,
dynamics and controls on water contributing to streamflow in
forest watersheds. Some results from the analysis confirm
existing ideas: that forest streamflow is dominated by
pre-event water (rain that fell prior to the event) moving
through subsurface flow paths. However, many results challenge
our preconceptions.
Water is precious in Nevada, now more than ever. As population
growth and industrial needs increase the demand for water,
researchers at the College of Engineering’s Nevada Center for
Water Resiliency (NCWR) seek solutions. The issues are
highlighted in a new 30-minute documentary, “Water Masters,”
which premiered in December at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Produced by Emmy-winning director Dan Druhora, “Water Masters”
explores water use along the Truckee River Watershed, the water
system connecting Lake Tahoe to Pyramid Lake.
The Sacramento Valley Conservancy (SVC) is proud to announce
the launch of its Vernal Pool Stewardship Program, a
community-driven effort to protect some of the region’s most
rare and ecologically important landscapes through hands-on
stewardship, education and volunteer engagement. Sacramento
Valley Conservancy is entrusted with the protection and
stewardship of more than 8,000 acres of vernal pool preserves
in Sacramento County, including 3,300 acres of rare vernal pool
wetlands in Rancho Cordova and the surrounding area. These
seasonal wetlands support unique plants and wildlife found
nowhere else, and play a critical role in water quality, flood
management and regional biodiversity.
Every day, Santa Clara County relies on a mix of local and
imported water to meet our community’s water needs. As climate
change brings longer and more severe droughts, Valley Water is
exploring ways to strengthen our water supply. One key project
under evaluation is the State of California’s Delta Conveyance
Project. To plan for a reliable supply of safe, clean water now
and in the future, Valley Water follows the Water Supply Master
Plan 2050. This long-term plan guides investments that support
water reliability, sustainability, and resilience in the
decades ahead.
Heavy rain and snow has pounded California in recent weeks,
causing floods, power outages, mudslides and other disruptions.
But the storms have also filled reservoirs and deepened the
snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountain range, easing drought
concerns in a state that is perpetually worried about not
having enough water. The near-constant pace of storms so
far this winter has brought the state above-average
precipitation, driving the storage level in most of
California’s water reservoirs to well above normal for this
point in the rainy season. Measurements show virtually no
drought in the state.
A California appellate court dealt a setback [late
last] week to the state’s Delta tunnel project, ruling
that the Department of Water Resources lacks the legal
authority to issue billions of dollars in bonds to dig the
controversial conveyance under the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta
to Southern California. In an opinion issued Wednesday,
the state’s 3rd District Court of Appeal said the bond plan —
first approved by water managers in 2020 — was too vague and
gave the department “unfettered discretion” to decide what to
build and how to pay for it. The court upheld a 2024 decision
by a Sacramento judge, siding with project opponents led by the
Sierra Club and several capital region counties, including
Sacramento.
… Data from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation shows that the
water elevation at Lake Mead’s Hoover Dam was
1,062.24 feet at the end of December. That’s the lowest it’s
been during this time of the year since 2022, when it was
1,044.82 feet. Before that, levels were the lowest in 1936,
when the region experienced a severe drought. Lake Mead stored
8.59 million acre-feet of water on Dec. 31, according to USBR
data. The lake can store about 26 million acre-feet of water,
meaning it was only about 33% full at the end of the
year.
Just a couple weeks ago, the Phillips Station site near Lake
Tahoe — the location where California officials conduct regular
manual snowpack surveys — was dry ground. But that’s changed.
On a sunny day near the end of December, the site was blanked
by a couple feet of snow. But officials say the state is
still below average. Researchers with the state’s
Department of Water Resources reported a snow depth of 24
inches at Phillips Station. That’s 50 percent of average for
this site. Statewide, snowpack levels are at 71 percent of
average for this date.
As salmon return to Klamath River headwaters for the first time
in over a century, the newly formed Klamath Indigenous Land
Trust announced the purchase of 10,000 acres in and around the
former reservoir reach of the river. The move is one of the
largest private land purchases by an Indigenous-led land trust
in U.S. history, according to the announcement. … With
the acquisition complete, the land trust’s next steps include
developing comprehensive land management plans using input from
area tribes, ensuring stewardship reflects both cultural values
and ecological priorities, the announcement said. Those plans
will address habitat recovery, cultural resource protection,
fire management and public access considerations.
The City of Camarillo filed a Writ of Mandate in Santa Barbara
County Superior Court, seeking an urgent review of a recent
groundwater ruling that city officials claim relies on outdated
science and could threaten the region’s water security for
decades. … City leaders argue the decision established a
“dangerously low” safe yield for the local basin— the amount of
water that can be pumped sustainably— by ignoring critical
evidence and modern modeling. … At the heart of the dispute
is Camarillo’s $70 million North Pleasant Valley Desalter. The
city alleges the court excluded evidence regarding the
facility’s role in treating salty groundwater and meeting state
mandates to reduce reliance imported water from the
Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta.
A House Natural Resources subcommittee this week will take up
two aspects of forest management — clean water and reliable
electricity — at risk in an era of worsening wildfires. The
Subcommittee on Water, Wildlife and Fisheries will hear
testimony on efforts to step up forest thinning and related
work, highlighted in the “Fix Our Forests Act,” H.R. 471,
that’s awaiting further action in Congress. The legislation —
which is bipartisan thanks mainly to a Democratic push from
California — would ease certain environmental
reviews of forest projects aimed at removing vegetation from
utility rights of way or protecting vital watersheds, among
many other provisions.
… A major escalation to Mr. Trump’s attacks on the state
[Colo.] came on Tuesday, when he used the first veto of his
second term to kill a pipeline project to provide clean
drinking water to the state’s eastern plains, a largely
conservative area. … The bill would have helped to fund
a 130-mile pipeline to bring water from a reservoir near
Pueblo, Colo., to small farming and ranching towns on the
state’s eastern plains, where groundwater is contaminated with
salt and even naturally occurring radioactive elements. The
project has been in the works since the 1960s.
2025 is the year for salmon success in California’s Yuba River.
A nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting and restoring
the watershed has positive results to share this year.
… The South Yuba River Citizens League, or SYRCL, is
leading the charge when it comes to salmon restoration in the
Yuba watershed. … And for 2025, they’ve recorded 6,200
adult chinook salmon and counting, the most they’ve seen in
more than a decade. … Restoration science is being
implemented around the state, with many other streams and
waterways seeing similar results. And being a keystone species,
salmon play a critical role in our ecosystems and represent
healthy waterways.
