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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Plans for a large development in La Quinta that would include
hundreds of houses, a hotel and a high-tech surf wave basin
— a centerpiece that’s drawn strong opposition from some
residents and climate experts — were unanimously rejected
by the city council Wednesday night following a
lengthy meeting in a room packed with both opponents and
supporters of the project. The vote marks a major defeat for
the current plans for Coral Mountain Resort, a roughly $200
million private development mapped for 386 acres of vacant land
on the southwest corner of 58th Avenue and Madison Street. …
[C]oncerns have largely centered on whether the wave basin
would be an appropriate use of water amid a historic drought
across California that experts say has been fueled by climate
change.
This week’s rain has been a welcome sight for those dealing
with the impacts of the Mosquito Fire. The early season
moisture has helped to significantly dampen fire activity over
the last several days. Estimates and measurements show
that anywhere from 1 to 2.5 inches of rain has fallen over the
burn region since Sunday morning. But as that rain runs
down the steep canyons and into Placer County’s many waterways,
ash and debris from the fire’s burn area can easily end up in
the water supply system. Andy Fecko, general manager of
the Placer County Water Agency, said plans to keep that water
supply safe began the night the fire was first reported near
Oxbow Reservoir.
A court ruling last week over senior water rights came as
welcome news to agricultural interests that have long battled
the State Water Resources Control Board over drought
curtailments. Yet while the decision sets a limit on the
board’s authority, the agency retains several regulatory tools
for curtailing the diversions, and lawmakers could add more.
California’s Sixth Appellate District Court of Appeal ruled the
board lacks jurisdiction under the state water code “to curtail
an entire class of pre-1914 appropriative water rights.”
Farmers obtained them before California began regulating water
rights in 1913 and have fought hard to preserve them ever
since.
Tribal scientists had hoped that the incoming fall run of adult
chinook salmon would escape the devastating effects of August’s
debris slide on the Klamath River, which killed tens of
thousands of fish. But they were disappointed. The salmon,
which were gathering at the estuary at the time of the debris
slide, migrated upstream early to spawn and found themselves
trapped in toxic waters. … What the river really needs,
according to Karuk Tribal Fisheries Field Supervisor Kenneth
Brink, is a good springtime flow to flush out the debris. But
spring, of course, isn’t coming anytime soon. There is water
behind Iron Gate, the Klamath’s lowermost dam, but toxic algal
blooms have made it hazardous to salmon, too.
Coastal urban centers around the world are urgently looking for
new, sustainable water sources as their local supplies become
less reliable. In the U.S., the issue is especially pressing in
California, which is coping with a record-setting, multidecadal
drought. California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently released a US$8
billion plan for coping with a shrinking water supply. Along
with water conservation, storage and recycling, it includes
desalination of more seawater. Ocean desalination, which turns
salt water into fresh, clean water, has an intuitive appeal as
a water supply strategy for coastal cities. The raw supply of
salt water is virtually unlimited and reliable.
As the state’s water worries continue, more Californians are
getting serious about saving water. In Sacramento, the city
said more people are turning off the tap and keeping an eye on
their neighbors. … New numbers reveal that when it comes
to water misuse, complaints from the public have more than
doubled. From July 1, 2021 to June 30, 2022, the city received
3,051 complaints about water misuse. The year before that,
1,170 complaints were received. Through a public records
request, KCRA 3 Investigates found countless complaints of
water-wasting; with people calling, emailing and sending photos
and videos to report water gushing down the drain.
At dusk, the bats appear in the ghost forest that surrounds
us—blackened tree trunks encrusted with a white coating. These
cottonwood and willow groves are long dead but, amazingly,
still upright after more than half a century underwater. I
am camped on the fickle shoreline of Lake Powell, the
second largest reservoir in the United States, after Lake
Mead. Once a vacation destination visited by two million people
annually—as a kid I learned to water-ski there during family
visits in the 1980s—Lake Powell is today just a hint of its
former self, littered with stranded boat ramps and even entire
abandoned marinas. Instead of a recreation idyll, it’s a symbol
of water troubles in the West and the impact of climate change.
To combat an increasingly hotter and drier atmosphere, state
officials are looking to fund new water projects that could
kickstart a recycled water system on the coast. With a
dwindling snowpack and fewer available resources, researchers
from the Department of Water Resources project that climate
change impact could reduce the state’s water supply by up to 10
percent by 2040. That’s about 6 million to 9 million acre-feet
of water supply. For comparison, the Shasta Reservoir holds 4.5
million acre-feet. To make up for losses, the state is
looking at financing major water projects. Last month Gov.
Gavin Newsom announced a slew of moves to increase water supply
and adapt to more extreme weather patterns caused by climate
change through 2040. One of the biggest ways it could do that
is through recycled water.
Calls for more time reverberated throughout the first public
hearing for the draft environmental impact report (EIR) of the
Delta Conveyance Project (DCP), along with continued pleas to
cancel the project in consideration of Bay Delta communities
and ecosystems. While the public review period will end on Oct.
27, many speakers at the Sept. 13 hearing characterized the
provided three months as insufficient to digest the EIR, which
spans thousands of pages over 39 chapters and touches on topics
such as water quality, seismicity, recreation, socioeconomics
and tribal cultural resources.
At times this summer, the shores of San Francisco Bay looked
like a piscine battlefront — strewn with dead white and
green sturgeon, leopard sharks, striped bass, bat rays, smelt,
anchovies, and other fish. It started in late July in Alameda
and expanded throughout the entire Bay. By late August, some
10,000 fish had reportedly died at Oakland’s Lake Merritt
alone. … The murk came from the sheer density of the culprit,
which was multiplying in the millions: a miniscule organism
called Heterosigma akashiwo — akashiwo means “red tide” in
Japanese.
The Environmental Defense Center (“EDC”) reached a final
settlement with the City of Lompoc over ongoing violations of
the federal Clean Water Act caused by the City’s operation of
its municipal wastewater treatment facility. Evidenced by the
City’s own reports, EDC discovered that the City has been
discharging water contaminated with toxic pollutants for over
twenty years into the San Miguelito Creek and the Santa Ynez
River. These discharges threaten public recreation
opportunities and impact downstream water quality and the
health of the Santa Ynez River ecosystem, which is important to
snowy plovers and other shorebirds, along with endangered
steelhead that travel through the River estuary to the ocean
and back upstream to spawning grounds as part of their
lifecycle.
As most reading this know, we have lost 90% of the wild fish
that used to navigate our rivers and streams in California.
Here on the South Coast, steelhead populations have dwindled
into the single digits and extinction is a very real
threat. CalTrout has been studying the causes and remedies
for the shocking decline in wild fish for over 50 years and
updating our Save our Salmonids (SOS) report as a roadmap back
to wild abundance. Five initiatives came out of that report,
one of them – Reconnect Habitat – calls for us to
remove barriers to fish migration to and from the ocean and
their spawning habitat. In this case, the barrier is the
100-foot Rindge Dam.
Like many other researchers, environmental engineering
professors Erin Hestir and Joshua Viers are trying to quantify
water use in California’s Central Valley. The difference is,
they are doing it from the sky. Through NASA’s applied sciences
program, their team will leverage the power of Earth-orbiting
satellites and drones to gather data with high spatial and
temporal resolution and then analyze it to help resource
managers make better-informed decisions, particularly around
water use in California’s San Joaquin Valley.
The great cities of the American southwest would not exist if
it weren’t for dams. Without the massive federal and state
projects to build dams, pumping stations, and aqueducts (most
of them completed 50 to 100 years ago), more than 60 million
Americans would be living somewhere else. Without dams to
capture and store millions of acre-feet of rainfall every year,
and aqueducts to transport that water to thirsty metropolitan
customers, the land these cities sit upon would be
uninhabitable desert.
Most parents take extra precautions to protect their children
from toxic chemicals — from locking cabinets of cleaning
supplies to scrutinizing ingredient labels. But some toxic
chemicals are near impossible to limit their exposure to.
California can change that. Perfluoroalkyl and
polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS, are a class of
over 9,000 industrial compounds that are added to
everyday products to repel stains, water or oil. … Commonly
referred to as “forever chemicals,” they do not break down in
the environment — ever. … According to the nonprofit
Environmental Working Group, these chemicals may be
contaminating the drinking water of up to 200 million
Americans.
-Written by Rebecca Fuoco, science communications
officer at the Green Science Policy Institute; and Arlene
Blum, founder and executive director of the Green Science
Policy Institute and a research associate in the Cell and
Molecular Biology Department at UC Berkeley.
[Colorado State University professor Stephanie] Kampf and her
team set out to determine whether more wildfires are burning at
high elevations. The answer is unequivocally yes. And the
consequences are dramatic: Snow in wildfire-burned areas is
melting 18 to 24 days earlier than average….And the snowpack
is critical to the health of Western people and ecosystems:
According to the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS),
it contributes 20% to 90% of surface water used for
agriculture, energy production, aquatic species habitat and
more.
Microplastics, or the small fragments of plastics and polymers
from clothing, packaging and cosmetics, are now found virtually
everywhere on Earth — from the highest peaks to the depths
of the ocean. At five millimeters long or less, these tiny
specks are also cropping up in the air we breathe, the food we
eat and the water we drink. Microplastics have been detected in
commercially farmed shellfish and, recently, in beef and pork,
with little known about how much plastic we’re ingesting — or
the impacts of this material on our health or the health of the
planet. That’s why this month, California took the first
step in regulating microplastics in its municipal water
supplies, making it the first government agency in the world to
do so.
Thirty-one years ago, supervisors in San Francisco passed a
landmark piece of legislation as a signal of the city’s
commitment to the environment and conserving water. Any
new buildings that were bigger than 40,000 square feet and
located in designated zones on the city’s west and east sides
would be required to have “purple pipes.” These pipes, which
are literally required to be the color purple, would be
installed to transport waste to a recycled water plant.
… Over the last three decades, San Francisco has seen
more than 70 structures go up with dual-plumbing systems that
separate potable from recycled water. … But there’s just
one problem. … San Francisco never built a recycled water
treatment plant for these buildings.
The compact — essentially an interstate treaty — set the rules
for apportioning the waters of the river. It was a crucial step
in construction of Hoover Dam, which could not have been built
without the states’ assent. The compact stands as a landmark in
the development of Los Angeles, San Diego, Denver, Phoenix and
other Western metropolises. But it is also a symbol of the
folly of unwarranted expectations. That’s because the
compact was built on a lie about the capacity of the Colorado
River to serve the interests of the Western states — a lie that
Westerners will be grappling with for decades to come.
-Written by Los Angeles Times columnist Michael
Hiltzik.
Much-needed rainfall and thunderstorms are hitting central and
northern parts of California, bringing relief to places that
typically see little precipitation in September. An upper-level
low-pressure system, an occurrence more likely in winter, is
churning off the coast of Northern California. It follows
unprecedented heat across much of California at the start of
September, when a prolonged heat wave shattered thousands of
records across the West.
