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 Bureau of Reclamation announced an investment of $1.1
million to the Colorado River Indian Tribes to assess the
Colorado River Indian Irrigation Project. The funding will
assist the tribe to review existing infrastructure and identify
necessary maintenance. It will also be used to identify
potential opportunities to install new equipment and utilize
updated technology to modernize the project. “We appreciate the
Colorado River Indian Tribe’s collaboration for many years on
implementing its decreed water rights and the Water Resiliency
Act,” said Acting Commissioner David Palumbo. “We look forward
to utilizing this funding to further this partnership.” This
assessment is intended to assist the Colorado River Indian
Tribes as they evaluate a potential title transfer of the
project in order to take direct ownership. This could allow for
water leasing and other opportunities that could
contribute to overall water savings in the Colorado River
Basin.
The Yurok Tribe, California’s largest federally recognized
tribal nation, was given 73 square miles of land — or
47,097 acres — along the eastern side of the lower Klamath
River on Thursday. The land exchange is being called the
largest single “land back” deal in California history. … The
73 square miles of land is now owned and managed by
the Yurok Tribe as the Blue Creek Salmon Sanctuary and
Yurok Tribal Community Forest. … These lands — comprising
forests, river corridors, and prairies — support essential
habitat for many imperiled species, including coho and Chinook
salmon, marbled murrelets, northern spotted owls, and Humboldt
martens. In the face of climate change, Blue Creek remains a
crucial cold-water refuge for salmon, steelhead, and other
native fish.
Every year, boating enthusiasts across the Southwest hitch
watercraft to their vehicles and haul them down to Lake Mead,
a Colorado River reservoir straddling Arizona and
Nevada. This year, though, they’ll have to contend with
dramatically low water levels. According to the U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation, the reservoir’s 2025 elevation is the third lowest
it’s seen in a decade, and the Colorado’s
meager snowpack isn’t expected to help
matters. In response, the National Park Service is taking
steps to ensure that visitors can still recreate on the lake
this summer and beyond. But the future remains uncertain for
the country’s largest reservoir. … With reduced
supply, Lake Mead’s elevation is dwindling. At the end of May,
the reservoir sat at just 1,057 feet above sea level, according
to the Bureau of Reclamation. That’s 5 feet lower than the end
of April, which was another 4 feet lower than in March.
The small city of Lemoore recently joined the legal fight
against the powerful state Water Resources Control Board over
groundwater sanctions issued against Kings
County farmers by the state last year. The Lemoore City Council
on May 22 submitted an “amicus brief,” or friend of the court
motion, in support of an injunction that has, so far, held
those groundwater sanctions at bay. The injunction was
ordered by a Kings County Superior Court judge as part of a
lawsuit filed against the Water Board by the Kings County Farm
Bureau. The state appealed the injunction, which is now under
review by the 5th District Court of Appeal. … Because of
that injunction, local farmers have avoided having to meter and
register their wells at $300 each, report extractions and pay
$20 per acre foot pumped to the state. The sanctions were
issued after the Water Board placed the region on probationary
status in April 2024 for not having an adequate groundwater
plan.
The latest U.S. Drought Monitor shows growing dryness in
California. Parts of the northwest corner of the state are now
in the abnormally dry category. The typical impacts in this
category include growing fire risk, dry soils, and more
required irrigation. Other areas in the state remained
unchanged as of June 3, 2025. Much of Central and Southern
California are in some drought category. The Central and
Southern San Joaquin Valley from Merced County to parts of Kern
County is in moderate drought. Surrounding hill areas remain
abnormally dry. Farther south, from Santa Barbara to San
Diego Counties, coastal and inland communities remain in severe
drought. Dryness intensifies in parts of Inyo County, San
Bernardino County, Riverside County, San Diego and Imperial
County where extreme drought conditions are present. The most
intense category is exceptional drought which only covers a
small portion of the southeast corner of Imperial County.
After months of deliberation, the New Mexico Water Quality
Control Commission on May 14 voted to prohibit any discharge of
treated “produced water” from oil and gas extraction to ground
and surface waters. Produced water flows back to the
surface during fracking and conventional oil and gas drilling
and contains chemicals used in the extraction process as well
as numerous other hazardous compounds, including arsenic and
benzene, both human carcinogens. New Mexico creates around
two billion barrels—84 billion gallons—of this toxic wastewater
each year. Cleaning through multi-stage filtration,
desalination and other processes could allow for the reuse of
produced water for irrigation and other commercial
applications, saving precious water resources. But
environmental advocates, scientists and the New Mexico
Environmental Department (NMED) have urged that proper
regulations are not yet in place to make such reuse safe.
… The Groundwater Replenishment System facility in Orange
County, California, houses the pipes, filters and pumps to move
up to 130m gallons each day – enough for 1 million people –
processing it from dark to clear. The facility, which opened in
2008, is part of broader moves to help conserve water.
… The idea is to take the water from the sanitation
district next door and to push it through a three-step process
– microfiltration, reverse osmosis and ultraviolet light
purification – to make clean water. The facility provides 45%
of central Orange County’s water and helps manage storm water
inflows and reduce reliance on imported water. … In
general, once sewage has been treated, the water is returned to
our rivers, but extreme droughts and climate breakdown are
pushing cities to consider using recycled sewage for drinking
water. It is already done in Israel, Singapore and Kuwait, but
Orange County has been a US pioneer in this area, hoping to
reduce dependence on water piped from faraway rivers or pumped
from shrinking aquifers under the ground.
A collapsing coastal bluff is imperiling a key part of San
Clemente’s sewer system, the Linda Lane pump station, like
never before. Ten years ago, the city put up a retainer wall to
guard the pump station. An active, ever-encroaching landslide
has since forced San Clemente to scale the wall up to 8 feet in
height and reinforce it with raker system supports. Despite all
efforts, the slow-moving landslide has breached the wall around
the pump station and the city now faces the threat of a sewer
spill. The San Clemente City Council on Tuesday weighed
whether to approve a $2.3-million emergency contract to armor
the pump station with caissons and tiebacks before the arrival
of significant rainstorms or gamble by delaying the project for
a few months to solicit competitive bids. … According to
a city staff report, the pump station and beach trunk sewer
line transport about a million gallons of raw
wastewater every day to San Clemente’s water
reclamation plant to be treated.
A power outage caused by a vehicle collision, combined with a
backup system failure, has resulted in a massive fish die-off
at the Fish Springs Trout Hatchery near Big Pine. Both the
California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) and the Los
Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) have confirmed
details of the May 20 incident, which could impact
recreational fish stocking across the Eastern Sierra
for the next two seasons. The hatchery—operated by CDFW—lost
electricity after a vehicle struck a power pole in the Owens
Valley. … While Fish Springs is equipped with diesel
backup motors designed to continue pumping water during
outages, a software malfunction rendered the motors inoperable
at the time. … CDFW estimates that between 75 to 80
percent of the hatchery’s fish stock—ranging from eggs and
fingerlings to catchable-size trout—was lost during the outage.
The hatchery raises rainbow trout, brown trout, and Lahontan
cutthroat trout, which are vital to recreational fishing in
Inyo and Mono County waters.
… The City’s aging combined sewer infrastructure – and the
increasing cost to maintain it – forced San Francisco into an
odd position on the wrong side of clean water advocacy. This
recently culminated in March 2025. In a 5-4 decision, the
Supreme Court ruled in favor of San Francisco in its case
against the EPA, significantly limiting the federal
government’s ability to enforce water quality standards
nationwide. The case began when San Francisco challenged
EPA regulations to avoid penalties for discharging sewage into
the Bay and Pacific Ocean from its combined sewer system. The
city argued that the Clean Water Act doesn’t authorize the EPA
to include broad “end-result” requirements in
permits—essentially fighting for less oversight of its
pollution. … While the Supreme Court decision represents
a significant setback for clean water protections nationwide,
it also creates an opportunity for grassroots action. Cities
across America, including San Francisco, can voluntarily
implement so-called “Green Infrastructure” solutions that
reduce pollution without waiting for federal mandates.
… The Inland Water & Power Commission had an all-boards’
meeting on May 29. Since the IWPC is composed of different
boards, this was an opportunity for all the boards to hear the
same update. My takeaways are: PG&E is going to take down
the dams. A coalition has formed to build a New Eel
Russian Facility (NERF) that will divert water during
high water times from the Eel River to the Russian River. The
current projection is that the NERF will cost $40 million to
build and $10 million annually to operate. The process will
take years, and people/groups in both basins have agreed to
this plan. Storage of water on the Russian River side is
critical to making it all work, and a feasibility study by the
United States Army Corps of Engineers is beginning to study the
raising of Coyote Dam. That will be a very expensive and long
process. There has been a lot of work done by very dedicated
people, coalitions have been formed from entities from both
basins, and continuing to work through the issues is the only
realistic path forward to keep water flowing in both
directions. –Written by John Haschak, chair of the Mendocino County
Board of Supervisors.
Visitors have five new trails at Dos Rios Ranch State Park,
nearly a year after it opened southwest of Modesto. The public
can enjoy them starting at 7 a.m. Friday, June 6. They go
farther out on the Tuolumne and San Joaquin
rivers than the initial two trails. They also provide
easy access for the first time to swimming and fishing spots.
… Dos Rios was created on about 1,600 acres of one-time
floodplain where the two rivers join. Restoration began in
2012, led by River Partners and aided by the Tuolumne River
Trust. The nonprofits had more than $40 million from numerous
public agencies. Former farm fields gave way to native
trees, brush and grasses. Fast-growing cottonwoods, willows and
other plantings shelter and feed wildlife. The place was
designed to absorb high river flows, protecting Grayson and
other towns downstream.
You may have heard of the term subsidence but what does it
mean? Subsidence is the sinking of land which can be caused by
various factors including groundwater pumping. In California,
subsidence has been documented for over a century and is a
growing issue that impacts our water infrastructure and the
communities who rely on it. This summer, DWR plans to release a
draft best management practices document to help local agencies
minimize subsidence impacts around the state. For more
information about DWR’s efforts to sustainable manage
groundwater and reduce the impacts of subsidence visit DWR’s
Groundwater Management page.
A serendipitous observation in a chemical engineering lab at
Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science has led to a
surprising discovery: a new class of nanostructured materials
that can pull water from the air, collect it in pores and
release it onto surfaces without the need for any external
energy. The research, published in Science Advances, is
conducted by an interdisciplinary team including Daeyeon Lee,
Russell Pearce and Elizabeth Crimian Heuer Professor in
Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE), Amish Patel,
professor in CBE, Baekmin Kim, a postdoctoral scholar in Lee’s
lab and first author, and others. Their work describes a
material that could open the door to new ways to collect water
from the air in arid regions and devices that cool electronics
or buildings using the power of evaporation.
U.S. President Donald Trump has proposed eliminating funding
for the Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund – a program that
directs tens of millions of dollars annually toward supporting
salmon populations along the West Coast. The cut is part of the
Trump administration’s planned cuts to NOAA; preliminary fiscal
year 2026 budget documents outlined a USD 1.3 billion (EUR 1.1
billion) reduction to NOAA’s overall budget. Now, additional
budget documentation released by the federal government shows
which programs will be impacted by that cut, and salmon
recovery efforts are one of the major government programs on
the chopping block. For fiscal year 2026, the Trump
administration is proposing zero funding for the Pacific Coast
Salmon Recovery Fund, a program established in 2000 to help
restore Pacific salmon populations in California,
Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska.
… California was forced to cancel its commercial salmon
season for the third year in a row this year, while northward
fisheries continue to suffer from low abundance.
The Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, Coachella Valley
Water District and Desert Water Agency have agreed to settle
two long running water rights lawsuits, which the three parties
said in a news release will “enhance certainty and stability
over the future of water management and increases supply
reliability for Coachella Valley residents.” The
tribe’s historic water rights are affirmed in the
agreement, placing them at the head of the line for
water from a vast aquifer stretching under much of the
Coachella Valley, but they agreed to share it in times of
drought or water restrictions. Congress must approve the
proposed settlement, and the tribe and the agencies will also
ask for $500 million in federal funds and $15 million in state
funds under new legislation. More than 2,700 acres of the
280,000-acre Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National
Monument currently managed by the Bureau of Reclamation would
also be transferred in trust for the tribe’s use and benefit to
the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Look down from a plane at farms in the Great Plains and the
West and you’ll see green circles dotting the countryside, a
kind of agricultural pointillism. They’re from center-pivot
irrigation systems. But some farmers are finding older
versions, many built 10, 15 or even 20 years ago, aren’t
keeping up with today’s hotter reality. … By the time the
sprinkler’s arm swings back around to its starting point, the
soil has nearly dried out. The main culprit? Atmospheric
thirst. “A hotter world is a thirstier one,” said Solomon
Gebrechorkos, a hydroclimatologist at the University of Oxford.
He led a new study, published on Wednesday in the journal
Nature, which found that atmospheric thirst, a factor that
fills in some of the blanks in our understanding of drought,
over the last four decades has made droughts more frequent,
more intense and has caused them cover larger areas.
New Mexico’s relatively cool and moist weather so far this
spring will dry and warm up in coming weeks, putting fire
managers and forecasters on high alert for wildfires before the
start of the seasonal monsoon rains this summer. This year’s
low snowpack has already put much of the state
in drought conditions, and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham recently
declared a state of emergency and additional actions to prevent
fires over the coming weeks. … The rains lessened the
acute risks of fire in the Southwest, said Jim Wallmann, a
senior forecaster for the National Interagency Coordination
Center Predictive Services. But other parts of the county are
seeing wildfires “extremely early” in the fire season. …
“We’re having to spread our resources over a much greater
footprint of the country,” Wallmann said. “That could affect
how big a fire gets in California, if we’re
stretched and can’t send everything to California while it’s
burning; we’ll be on fires burning everywhere else.”
… Roughly 73 square miles (189 square kilometers) of
homelands have been returned to the Yurok, more than doubling
the tribe’s land holdings, according to a deal announced
Thursday. Completion of the land-back conservation deal along
the lower Klamath River — a partnership with
Western Rivers Conservancy and other environmental groups — is
being called the largest in California history. The Yurok
Tribe had 90% of its territory taken during the California Gold
Rush in the mid-1800s, suffering massacres and disease from
settlers. … The Yurok people will now manage these lands
and waterways. The tribe’s plans include reintroducing fire as
a forest management tool, clearing lands for prairie
restoration, removing invasive species and planting trees while
providing work for some of the tribe’s more than 5,000 members
and helping restoresalmon
and wildlife.
Fresno residents looking to save water and beautify their yards
may now qualify for more financial help from the city. The City
of Fresno has expanded its “Lawn to Garden Rebate Program,”
offering increased incentives for homeowners and businesses
that replace traditional lawns with drought-tolerant
landscaping. The program, which began in 2015, is designed to
reduce water use and promote sustainable gardening practices.
Thanks to a $5 million grant, the city has increased its rebate
to $2 per square foot-up to 1,500 square feet for residential
properties and up to 4,000 square feet for commercial
properties. That means homeowners can receive up to $3,000,
while businesses may qualify for as much as $8,000.
