An old water cliché tells us that “water flows uphill toward money.” It’s an adage born out of people’s frustrations about who benefits when water moves around in the Western U.S., popularized by author Marc Reisner’s 1986 book, “Cadillac Desert.”
El Niño was long considered a reliable tool for predicting future precipitation in the southwestern United States, but its forecasting power has diminished in recent cycles, possibly due to global climate change. In a study published today in Nature Communications, scientists and engineers at the University of California, Irvine demonstrate a new method for projecting wet or dry weather in the winter ahead.
A fast-moving brush fire destroyed eight homes in the Utah tourist town of Moab, while more than 3,000 people in Colorado and Wyoming fled multiple wildfires scorching the drought-stricken U.S. West on Wednesday.
Helen Fricker is worried. She says cities throughout the world, including San Diego, could be affected by the climate change that’s unfolding in the Antarctica.
Even in times of drought, California’s natural and human-made arteries run with the nation’s cleanest, most accessible water. So fundamental is the stuff to the state’s identity and to its residents’ daily lives that California law recognizes a human right to “safe, clean, affordable, and accessible water adequate for human consumption, cooking, and sanitary purposes.”
[Eliza] Griswold, a journalist and a poet, paid close attention to a community in southwestern Pennsylvania over the course of seven years to convey its confounding experience with hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a process that injects water and chemicals deep into the ground in order to shake loose deposits of natural gas.
The California Department of Water Resources is pleased to announce a 15-day public comment period for the Statewide Flood Emergency Response Grant Program Round 3, Draft List of Awards. After careful review of the applications received from the 2018 solicitation, DWR is proposing to provide funding for 25 grants as detailed in the draft list of awards.
Two dams critical to U.S. national security are at high risk for “insider threats” that could impair operations because of poor computer security practices such as too many employees having access to administrator accounts and failures to routinely change passwords, according to a new inspector general report.
Tuesday’s move by Sen. Lisa Murkowski extends an olive branch to Democrats and could allow the first floor debate on a key spending bill for the Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency since former President Barack Obama’s first year in office. It’s all part of an effort to avoid a catchall “omnibus” spending bill.
California’s 168-year run as a single entity, hugging the continent’s edge for hundreds of miles and sprawling east across mountains and desert, could come to an end next year — as a controversial plan to split the Golden State into three new jurisdictions qualified Tuesday for the Nov. 6 ballot. … Critics have long wondered how citizens of a state where the majority of water supplies exist in one region would react if negotiations over new interstate compacts to share the resource turned contentious.
Scott Pruitt’s top aide wanted to use special authority to hire a former Obama administration official to scrutinize climate science. The EPA administrator’s chief of staff, Ryan Jackson, suggested last year that Steven Koonin, a theoretical physicist and an Obama Energy Department appointee, could quickly get on EPA’s payroll.
In a few years, Marysville might become the impromptu destination when flood waters start to rise in Yuba-Sutter rivers. Despite the fact the city is shaped like a bowl, work on the Marysville Ring Levee will make the city one of the safest throughout the valley once improvements are completed, experts say.
Water flowing from Isabella Lake serves as a refreshing reminder that the Kern River does run through Bakersfield — sometimes, anyway, and not always because there’s been a recent abundance of rain or snowfall. … It may be worth noting that the Kern is running not because this has been a particularly wet year (it hasn’t been), but because of work the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is doing to shore up a dam upstream.
A Fresno Superior Court judge ruled in favor of the city of Fresno and upheld new water fees that ensure new homes will have enough water after some of Fresno’s largest developers filed a petition against the fees.
Backers of Measure Z led by Protect Monterey County urged the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday to reverse course and join an appeal of a Monterey County Superior Court ruling striking down much of the voter-approved initiative that sought to establish some of the nation’s toughest restrictions on oil and gas operations.
For the second consecutive year, the Coachella Valley Water District will not be increasing domestic water rates for its customers. The CVWD Board of Directors voted on the issue during their meeting Tuesday morning and decided to maintain current rates for the upcoming fiscal year.
Calaveras County Water District ratepayers will soon experience an increase in their bills that will vary in percentage terms for different ratepayer classifications and levels of water usage. … Approximately 30 people attended the meeting, many of whom went to the podium when public comments were permitted and expressed their disapproval of the proposed rate structure.
The frantic phone calls to the Community Water Center began in the summer of 2014. In the 7,000-strong unincorporated community of East Porterville, nestled against California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, homeowners’ wells were failing amid a historic drought.
On the ground once marked by devastation, a new city is rising. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake battered the gritty South of Market district, damaging the Embarcadero Freeway that walled off downtown San Francisco from the bay and left city leaders with a choice: Do they repair and retrofit it, or envision something bolder?
