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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Please Note: Some of the sites we link to may limit the number of stories you can access without subscribing. Also, 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.
Sturgeon have been around far longer than humans—a jaw-dropping
200 million years to our comparatively short 6 million—and
survived the cataclysm that terminated the age of dinosaurs.
But can these ancient fish survive the age of people? New
insights into the secret lives of these little-known fish, as
well as into their increasing vulnerability, suggest ways of
strengthening protections for sturgeon in California. All 27
remaining species of sturgeon live in the northern hemisphere
and all are at risk. Threats include overfishing, poaching for
their caviar, and dams that block access to their spawning
grounds. Fish in the San Francisco Bay are also threatened by
harmful algal blooms called red tides, which release toxins
that can kill aquatic life.
My fellow Californians often remark that the weather in this
state feels like it has been reduced to two seasons, both
defined by natural disasters: In summer and fall, huge, intense
wildfires rip their way across dry land, while winter and early
spring bring intense atmospheric rivers with heavy rainfall,
floods and landslides along with winds that take down trees.
The weather extremes here are so common, and climate change is
so in your face, that many people now just expect to jump from
one natural disaster to the next. And this pessimism means it’s
hard to enjoy it when — for once — nature deals us a good hand.
But this year, after several brutal years of fighting drought,
we finally got the water that we have so sorely needed for so
long. We damn well better enjoy it. -Written by Andrew Schwartz, lead scientist and
station manager at the University of California, Berkeley,
Central Sierra Snow Lab.
Plans to build a new dam for Pacheco Reservoir in southeast
Santa Clara County are on hold after a superior court judge in
May ruled that the project developer had incorrectly claimed it
is exempt from state environmental laws. Santa Clara
County Superior Court Judge Theodore Zayner on May 18 ruled
that the project applicant, the Santa Clara Valley Water
District, had filed a “notice of exemption” that was not in
compliance with the California Environmental Quality Act. The
ruling was issued in response to a lawsuit filed in June 2022
by Stop the Pacheco Dam Project Coalition, and later amended to
include the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band and the Sierra Club.
Valley Water has proposed building a larger dam that would
expand Pacheco Reservoir’s water storage capacity from 5,500 to
140,000 acre feet.
As the temperature on an early April afternoon crept
above 80 degrees, Cruz Marquez, a member of the Salton Sea
Community Science Program, stood at a folding table under a
blue tent, scrubbing a small glass vial with the cloth of his
T-shirt. … Over the last 25 years, the Salton Sea has lost a
third of its water due to an over-allocated Colorado River. As
it shrinks, the sea’s salts plus pollutants from agricultural
runoff reach higher concentrations. All those extra nutrients
fuel algae blooms that then decay in the sulfate-rich sea,
resulting in a rotten-egg smell that can extend for miles. As
temperatures rise and the water retreats further, locals
suspect that the contaminated sediments in the exposed lakebed
are worsening air quality; the area’s childhood asthma rate is
one of the highest in the state.
U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., convened his first hearing as
chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works subcommittee
on Fisheries, Water, and Wildlife, on Wednesday. Sen. Padilla
appeared on the KCRA News morning show on My58 and said the
hearing will focus on how rising water rates, aging
infrastructure and extreme weather events have affected access
and affordability of clean water across the country.
… According to a state audit in 2022, California
required an estimated $64.7 billion to upgrade its water
infrastructure. In April, the EPA awarded a fraction of that,
$391 million. To hear more about the subcommittee’s
initiatives, watch the attached video.
(Editor’s Note: This is a repost of a blog originally published
in June 2020).
Damming rivers was once a staple of public works and a signal
of technological and scientific progress. Even today, dams
underpin much of California’s public safety and economy, while
having greatly disrupted native ecosystems (Quiñones et al.
2015, Moyle et al. 2017), displaced native peoples (Garrett
2010), and deprived residents of water access when streamflow
is transported across basins. California’s dams are aging and
many will require expensive reconstruction or rehabilitation.
Many dams were built for landscapes, climates and economic
purposes that no longer exist. California’s current dams
reflect an accumulation of decisions over the past 170 years
based on environmental, political, and socio-economic dynamics
that have changed, sometimes radically.
Protecting and responding to threats of the Colorado River
endangered fishes (Colorado pikeminnow, razorback sucker,
bonytail, and humpback chub) are an important part of the
Bureau of Reclamation’s mission. Threats such as fish
entrainment in water diversions, have long been recognized by
resource managers as a threat to native, especially endangered
and threatened fish in the Colorado River Basin. Fish
entrainment is the unwanted passage and loss of fish through a
water intake, for example, when fish are transported with the
flow of streams, creeks or rivers that are being diverted for
irrigation and other uses.
Thanks to this year’s big winter rain and snow season, City of
Roseville officials say they have been able to store more
groundwater than ever before. Improving groundwater storage is
an important part of the greater Sacramento region’s plans to
increase the security of the drinking water supply. During
times of drought, groundwater acts as a water savings account
for when surface water from reservoirs is less available. In
recent decades, groundwater has been significantly overdrawn
throughout California. For the past several weeks, the U.S.
Bureau of Reclamation has been making increased releases at
Folsom Lake. Thanks to a contract with the City of Roseville,
some of that excess water is being stored in aquifers below the
city.
The tremendous rains over the winter have filled California’s
reservoirs, blessed the snowpack and brought waterfalls and
ancient lakes back to life. In some parts of the state, the
precipitation has also revived something that was thought to
have been a thing of the past: green lawns. Last spring, when
California was still in a worsening drought, Jeff Fox and Amy
Bach let the grass in their San Francisco backyard go dry. They
covered their desiccated lawn with bark chips, added some
succulents and well-placed rocks, and welcomed their new,
drought-friendly landscaping. They were among the thousands of
people who abandoned the California dream of a single-family
home surrounded by a lush, neatly kept lawn. Then this winter,
the Bay Area, like much of the state, was battered with
enormous amounts of rain.
The federal government is putting $160 million in public lands
— including over $19 million to two sites in Utah — to restore
the landscapes, restore wildlife habitats and improve water on
public lands. The effort is part of President Joe Biden’s
Investing in America agenda. In a news conference Wednesday,
Bureau of Land Management leaders announced a total of 21 sites
would receive funding for restoration. Among those sites were
two in the Beehive State — the Upper Bear River in northeastern
Utah and for Color Country in southwestern Utah. The Upper Bear
will receive $9.6 million in funding, while Color Country will
receive $9.73 million. … Southwest Utah’s booming
population is in large part why the BLM chose to focus part of
the funding on that region of the country, said BLM Senior
Policy Advisor Tomer Hasson during the news conference.
Each and every day, the Carpinteria Sanitary District sends
over one million gallons of highly treated water through our
outfall pipeline and into the Pacific Ocean. In 2016 we began
working in partnership with the Carpinteria Valley Water
District on a plan to recapture this valuable resource and
create a new, drought-proof water supply for our community. The
Carpinteria Advanced Purification Project, or CAPP, has now
moved into the final design stage. We are just a few short
years away from having a reliable source of highly purified
water that will augment our local groundwater aquifer and meet
a quarter of Carpinteria’s demand for potable water. -Written by Craig Murray, General Manager of
the Carpinteria Sanitary District.
To achieve water stability and sustainability, the state must
realign its priorities by putting people and communities over
the profiteering industries that are driving the water and
climate crisis. … Our water crisis is inextricably tied to
climate change, which is ironically being driven by two
industries very familiar to California: fossil fuels and
industrial agriculture. The science is very clear: In order to
stave off unthinkable climate chaos we must move off fossil
fuels, and very quickly transition our economy to a near future
of completely clean, renewable energy. … Yet just this year,
under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s watch, the state has approved nearly
1,000 new fossil fuel extraction permits. -Written by Chirag G. Bhaka, the California
Director of Food & Water Watch.
In recent years, it is the dry side of California that has
captured headlines: dwindling reservoirs where boat ramps lead
only to sand, almond orchards ripped up for lack of irrigation
water, catastrophic wildfires that rage through desiccated
forests and into towns. In the longer view, though, the state’s
water problems have come just as often from deluge as from
drought. Other parts of the country can count on reasonably
steady precipitation, but California has always been different,
teetering between drenching winters and blazing summers,
between wet years and dry ones — fighting endlessly to exert
control over a flow of water that vacillates, sometimes wildly,
between too much and too little.
It’s a fickle fish — one that evades even the most experienced
anglers and darts for cover when curious passersby try to spot
its freckled body against the backdrop of a gravel-lined
stream. Despite capturing the attention of many local
scientists and conservationists, California’s Central Coast
steelhead trout remain listed as threatened under the federal
Endangered Species Act, according to the latest review of the
species released in May by the National Marine Fisheries
Service, an arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration. The population segment on the south-central
California coast reviewed by the federal agency, which has a
range stretching from the Pajaro River in Monterey Bay to
Arroyo Grande Creek, was first listed as threatened in 1997. It
hasn’t appeared to improve since then.
This year’s historic snowpack has meant epic amounts of
water flowing through California’s rivers, streams and creeks.
… That’s more than the capacity of four standard 40-foot
shipping containers rushing by each second. Around 40% of
the roughly 500 stream gauges across the state are running
above normal, provisional data from the U.S. Geological
Survey shows. A few dozen are registering record highs for
this time of year, especially along the central and southern
Sierra. With peak melt season expected in the coming weeks,
this means plentiful amounts of water running into reservoirs,
but also dangerously fast flows and the risk for
potential flooding.
Much of California’s developed water supply originates in the
Sierra Nevada, making the state’s water supply largely
dependent on the health of forests. But those forests are
suffering from widespread tree mortality and other ecosystem
degradation resulting largely from the growing frequency
of severe droughts and wildfires. On our Headwaters Tour June
22-22, we will visit Eldorado and Tahoe national
forests to learn about new forest management practices,
including efforts to both prevent wildfires and recover from
them.
Ranchers and Republican lawmakers are welcoming a Supreme Court
ruling that narrows the range of waters subject to federal
regulation, calling it a win for private property rights that
reins in overeager regulators. … But environmental groups
said the ruling in Sackett v. EPA will be “disastrous for
Arizona, where water is rare and protecting it is critically
important to both people and endangered species.” “It leaves
almost all of Arizona’s creeks, springs and washes without any
federal protections against water pollution.” said Taylor
McKinnon, Southwest director for the Center for Biological
Diversity. … The ruling earlier this month ends a
long-running dispute between Michael and Clara Sackett, who
wanted to build a house on land they bought near Priest Lake,
Idaho, and the Environmental Protection Agency, which said the
property contained wetlands.
Groundwater recharge – or the lack of it – was a driving force
behind the sweep of new board members who took over the
behemoth Westlands Water District last fall. “Urgently develop
groundwater recharge,” was the top plank in the platform of
four candidates who won election in November. And the district
has, indeed, built a 30,000-acre network of grower-owned
recharge ponds with enough capacity to recharge, or absorb,
3,300 acre feet a day into the overtapped aquifer. So, it
was surprising that the district showed it was only recharging
a total of about 572 acre feet per day through April
30, according to a report at Westlands’ May 16 board
meeting. A map presented at the meeting shows only a small
fraction of recharge ponds in use.
News of water shortages, exacerbated by climate change,
population growth, mining and other development, is everywhere
these days in the American Southwest. But on the Navajo
Reservation, a sovereign tribal nation that sits on about 16
million acres in northeast Arizona, southern Utah and western
New Mexico, nearly 10,000 homes have never had running
water. How that can and should be resolved is one aspect
of a case brought before the U.S. Supreme Court on March 20,
with the justices’ decision due any day now.
The people of Fairmead, California, in the Central Valley, have
struggled to gain reliable access to drinking water for years.
The unincorporated community of around 1,300 — “mostly people
of color, people of low income, people struggling and trying to
make it,” according to Fairmead resident Barbara Nelson —
relies on shallow wells to meet its needs. But in recent years,
the combination of drought and excessive agricultural pumping
has caused some domestic wells to go dry, and one of the
town wells is currently very low. Last year, Fairmead
received a grant to help plan for farmland retirement in order
to recharge groundwater under California’s Sustainable
Groundwater Management Act, or SGMA.
