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.
One of the most picturesque and affluent communities along Lake
Tahoe is dealing with a nasty problem: potential raw sewage
contamination. A boil water notice was sent Monday to residents
of Incline Village, situated on the north end of Lake Tahoe in
Nevada, after a water main break resulted in a loss of pressure
in the water distribution system. In the notice, officials with
the community’s general improvement district said the loss of
pressure could cause backups through cracks and joints in pipes
and pose a “high potential that fecal contamination or other
disease-causing organisms could enter the distribution system.”
… [E]very positive development in the embattled Klamath basin
seems to come with a catch, and the catch this time is ominous:
The Trump administration has shown disregard for the salmons’
well-being, cutting already allocated funding for needed
ongoing river restoration, fish-monitoring and fire-prevention
projects, and firing the federal officials who helped
facilitate them. Even worse, in the event of drought — which
has plagued the basin for most of this century — the
administration has signaled that it intends to drastically
reduce the river flows that salmon need so that upper-basin
farmers get full water allocations. –Written by author Jacques Leslie.
The EPA has begun cleanup work at the Lukachukai Mining
District Superfund Site on the Navajo Nation, where uranium
mining left decades of contamination. The agency said crews
will remove thousands of cubic yards of uranium-contaminated
waste rock from the Mesa V complex and place it in a newly
built engineered repository designed to prevent further erosion
or groundwatercontamination.
The project is expected to take about a year to
complete. Officials said the area is used for grazing and
other activities by Navajo families, and the cleanup will help
reduce risks from exposure to radioactive materials.
… [S]tate and local water managers are battling to keep
golden mussels from reaching uninfested
lakes and reservoirs. They’re racing to keep them from damaging
the pumping facilities that send Delta water to farms and
cities in Central and Southern California. … In the
urgency to stop the spread, state agencies have
prioritized protecting the rest of the state from the
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, over protecting the Delta itself.
Residents and local leaders feel overlooked. And they fear that
the stigma of a golden mussel infestation will drive visitors
and boaters away from one of the country’s largest
estuaries.
The Utah Division of Water Rights is reviewing an application
to repurpose a Green River–basin water right for municipal use
that could draw from the Colorado River near
Cisco, where a new residential community is proposed off
Interstate 70 about an hour from Moab. The San Juan Water
Conservancy District filed the change application July 1,
requesting permission to convert Water Right 91-5233 from power
generation — originally allocated for a nuclear power plant
that was never built — to municipal use.
The Bay Area is in for another atmospheric river storm this
week, and forecasters expect the North Bay to receive the bulk
of the wet weather. … While the rain will mostly be
beneficial, localized nuisance flooding is possible. Minor
coastal flooding could also occur Tuesday through Saturday due
to spring tides. … The warm storm will push snow
levels in the Sierra Nevada to above 7,500 feet,
resulting in the bulk of the snowfall at higher elevations.
Lassen National Park and the highest peaks of the Sierra could
see some snowfall, and snow levels could dip below 7,000 feet
on Wednesday night if temperatures fall.
A new University of California San Diego study uncovers a
hidden driver of global crop vulnerability: the origin of
rainfall itself. Published in Nature Sustainability, the
research traces atmospheric moisture back to its source.
… They discovered that when more than about one-third of
rainfall originates from land, croplands are significantly more
vulnerable to drought, soil moisture loss and yield declines –
likely because ocean-sourced systems tend to deliver heavier
rainfall, while land-sourced systems tend to deliver less
reliable showers, increasing the chance of water deficits
during critical crop growth stages.
More data centers may be built in the Tucson area as well as
the controversial Project Blue. … But just like Project
Blue, these projects are also raising still-unanswered
questions about their projected energy and water use — and
facing opposition from many of the same activists who have
fought Project Blue. … If the Davis-Monthan data center
requires the drilling of new wells for its water supply, the
Arizona Department of Water Resources will require that the
center operator demonstrate its water use won’t cause
significant declines in any neighboring wells.
A team of UC Riverside researchers has uncovered a potential
breakthrough in solar desalination that could reduce the need
for energy-intensive saltwater treatment. Led by Luat Vuong, an
associate professor of mechanical engineering in UCR’s Marlan
and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering, the team has
demonstrated for the first time how the highest frequencies of
sunlight—specifically invisible ultraviolet (UV) light—can
break the stubborn bonds between salt and water.
In the continuing effort of the New River Improvement Project
to improve the local ecosystem, volunteers from far and near
joined the Imperial Irrigation District’s Community Action Day
to plant more than 1,000 native plants in local wetlands on
Saturday, Nov 1. … These native plants will help the
wetland grow stronger to serve its natural function of
filtering the water of the New River, aiding in erosion and
waste control. … [T]hose same contaminants would end up
polluting the Salton Sea as well. Now, with
the New River Improvement Project completed, any polluted water
has its physical debris separated and is treated before
entering the New River.
… [T]he Walker River Paiute Tribe was awarded $20 million in
funding from the EPA’s Community Change
Grant. … The grant would also fund the last leg of
a water infrastructure project that would
support dozens of new fire hydrants on the reservation and
secure reliable clean water for 425 existing homes and over 100
future homes. … [O]n May 1, the $20 million Community Change
Grant was officially terminated by EPA Administrator Lee
Zeldin, along with more than 780 other environmental
justice grants as part of Trump’s executive order to eliminate
DEI across the government.
The Kings River Fisheries Management Program is gearing up for
its annual fish “check in.” The program is seeking volunteers
over 18 to assist biologists Nov. 18, Dec. 2 and Dec. 3 to
conduct its annual fish population survey. … The survey
provides critical insight into the balance, biodiversity and
health of the fish in the lower Kings River and ensures the
ecosystem is thriving. Biologists and volunteers will use
electrofishing equipment, which shocks but does not harm the
fish, to collect and examine fish, collecting data such as
size, density, the fish’s condition and the variety of fish in
the river.
On October 29, 2025, the Fifth District Court of Appeal in
Kings County Farm Bureau v. State Water Resources Control Board
reversed a broad preliminary injunction that had barred the
State Water Resources Control Board from imposing regulatory
fees and mandating groundwater extraction monitoring and
reporting in the San Joaquin Valley’s critically overdrafted
Tulare Lake Subbasin. … The Kings County Farm Bureau opinion
provides guidance to help GSAs and stakeholders use Periodic
Evaluations to make the case for protecting sustainable
subbasins, or portions of subbasins, against the potential for
probation when other subbasins or portions of subbasins are
failing to show progress toward achieving sustainability.
… Both the city and state are upgrading their respective
[water] systems. The state is undertaking a high-mountain
project to reconstruct the Comstock-era dam at Marlette Lake,
which FEMA found could fail in a 6.5 earthquake or larger.
Estimated to cost more than $23 million, with $10 million in
FEMA grant funding, that project is expected to be completed by
autumn 2026. Meanwhile, the city is upgrading the Quill plant
off Kings Canyon Road to increase treatment of surface water
from the Marlette system and nearby creeks to 4 million gallons
a day.
A former Biden administration official who led water protection
efforts along the U.S.-Mexico border is now working at a major
engineering firm. Maria-Elena Giner, the former U.S.
commissioner of the International Boundary and Water
Commission, joined Black & Veatch last week as a portfolio
leader. She is on the firm’s water resources and community
planning team, working with federal agencies, state and local
governments, utilities and private companies, including tech
firms. Giner said her new role will focus on environmental and
infrastructure challenges affecting the water sector.
With state negotiators in the Colorado River Basin still at
odds ahead of a key deadline, the Trump administration could
soon be tasked with deciding where to cut water use across the
West and appears to be weighing options like draining
reservoirs or curbing senior water rights. … Without a
deal, the Interior Department and its Bureau of Reclamation
have threatened to step in to wield federal authority — a
largely untested power — and potentially tap reservoirs in the
Upper Basin and reduce flows to the Lower Basin.
After a warm, dry weekend across Northern California, wet
weather is forecast to return this week. Widespread rain and
the strongest winds so far this season are predicted in the Bay
Area, North Coast, Sacramento Valley and Sierra Nevada as an
atmospheric river-fueled storm sweeps through
the region. … Because of the warm wind direction, this
week’s storm isn’t anticipated to be a big snowmaker in the
Sierra Nevada. … Several inches of rain is forecast
around the headwaters of the Sacramento and Feather rivers,
which is important for water supply early in
the wet season.
Two neighboring groundwater agencies in Kings County are
preparing for a showdown over how much farmers can pump even as
the state Water Resources Control Board restarted probationary
sanctions for farmers in the Tulare Lake subbasin. Farmers will
be required to report how much they pumped from July 14, 2024
through Sept. 25, 2025 by May 1, 2026, according to a Water
Board press release issued Friday evening. Fees of
$20-per-acre-foot pumped won’t be far behind.
… Zebra mussels are bad news for western waterways.
Spread mainly by hitching rides on watercraft, the
fast-reproducing mollusks clog water infrastructure, cling to
marinas and docks, and outcompete native species. Colorado has
taken costly measures to keep its lakes and rivers free of the
mussels, but recorded the first official infestation in the
state’s portion of the Colorado River this year. Quagga
mussels, zebra mussels’ close relatives, and other aquatic
nuisance species, have made their presence known at reservoirs
in the Colorado River Basin, like Lake Powell and Lake
Mead.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) plans to
inject 350,000 Chinook salmon eggs into the North Yuba River
this fall as the state government looks for new ways to help
struggling salmon populations recover. This is the second year
CDFW has taken this approach, collecting eggs fertilized at the
Feather River Fish Hatchery in Oroville and then hydraulically
injecting them into the river’s gravel substrate in November.
… Salmon populations have struggled in California rivers
as they face rising temperatures and fish passage blockages
like dams.
