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 Chris Bowman.
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The proposal to turn treated wastewater into drinking water,
otherwise known as Advanced Water Purification, is moving
forward, according to the Arizona Department of Environmental
Quality. In early July, ADEQ announced the release of its draft
rule, which is the operating rule that will apply to utilities
that are considering Advanced Water Purification
technology. ”This is a critical point for us as a state to
have A.W.P. as an option for our utilities,” said ADEQ Water
Quality Division Deputy Director Randall Matas. “It certainly
can be a large component of Arizona’s water security portfolio
and I think going into the future indeed will be a very
important part.”
As the only state in the Great Basin that doesn’t use Colorado
River water for agriculture, Nevada’s farmers rely on
groundwater wells. Yet many of the state’s aquifers are
shrinking, threatening its cattle ranches and its cash crop,
alfalfa hay, which helps feed California’s dairy cows.
Groundwater is vanishing all over the country — the result of
decades of excessive use and climate change-fueled drought. In
some states facing severe groundwater decline, officials are
beginning to penalize over-pumping or ordering
farmers to stop irrigating because conservation alone
won’t be enough. … With $25 million in federal pandemic aid,
state officials decided to run a one-time test of whether
farmers would be interested in selling all or a portion of
their legal rights to draw groundwater. … By this spring,
they had their answer: There were more applicants than money to
pay them. Farmers and ranchers offered to sell $65.5 million
worth of water rights, more than two-and-a-half times the
available funding.
From the air, the Medicine Lake Highlands in Siskiyou County
appears as a vast expanse of mountains covered in forests of
pine and fir. But what has groups such as Trout Unlimited, the
Pit River Nation and Backcountry Hunters & Anglers of
California eager to get federal protection for the area can’t
be seen on the surface of the mountains or in the fields of
volcanic rock. Underground lies an aquifer so large that it
could hold the same amount of water as California’s largest 200
reservoirs combined, according to Trout Unlimited. That
subsurface reservoir feeds a system of streams that are part of
a valuable trout stream that extends south into Shasta County,
the group says.
One in 3 households on the Navajo Nation lacks access to safe
drinking water, but a $5 billion deal reached in May could
change that by giving the sprawling reservation’s 175,000
residents rights to the highly prized Colorado River. The
agreement needs Congress’ blessing, though. And there are
plenty of reasons for pessimism. Those include the eye-popping
price tag, as well as controversial provisions granting the
tribe the right to move water across legal boundaries and lease
its supplies to cities or farms. Those issues inject the
settlement squarely into the heated negotiations over how to
parcel out the Colorado River’s diminishing flows among the
seven states that rely on it.
Lithium needed for batteries that power electric vehicles and
store electricity from renewable energy projects is likely to
deplete—and in some cases, contaminate—local water supplies,
according to a new paper published this week. … And at
the Salton Sea in California, often referred to as
Lithium Valley due to its potential to provide enough of the
mineral by itself to support the nation’s energy transition,
local community groups and environmentalists have sued to try
to stop a [Direct Lithium Extraction] site on the verge of
beginning operation. They claim county officials conducted an
inadequate study of the project’s impacts on the
area’s freshwater supply. Much of what is needed for the
project will come from the declining Colorado River.
NOAA is recommending nearly $220 million in funding for 32
transformational habitat restoration and coastal resilience
projects this year, as well as an additional $66 million in
funding in future years. The projects are funded under the
Biden-Harris Administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and
Inflation Reduction Act. This is a historic investment in
strengthening the climate resilience of our nation’s coastal
ecosystems and communities. … landscape-scale effort in
California’s Sacramento River watershed will restore habitat
for endangered Sacramento River winter-run Chinook salmon,
a NOAA Species in the Spotlight. A suite of projects along
the Oregon coast will support the recovery of five populations
of threatened Oregon Coast coho salmon. The projects will
restore floodplain, wetland, and estuary habitats on which the
juvenile coho rely.
The Bay’s white sturgeon—huge, slow-to-reproduce “living
fossils” that have hardly changed over their approximately 200
million years on Earth—are now facing such peril that the state
of California has closed fishing for them under emergency
regulations while it considers listing them as a threatened
species. White sturgeon lurk in the murky bottom of San
Francisco Bay and the Delta, stealthily making their way
upriver to spawn and slurping up clams. Of San Francisco Bay’s
two sturgeon species, white sturgeon are the homebodies (in
contrast to anadromous green sturgeon, which spend much of
their lives at sea). But adult white sturgeon numbers have been
in decline for two decades, says UC Davis fish biologist Andrea
Schreier. “Changes to the Bay-Delta system and changes to
our climate are happening too quickly for them,” Schreier says.
If water strategy in California had to be distilled down to
just three projects with the greatest impact, the answers might
vary a great deal depending on who was asked. But in terms of
quality of life impact, the ongoing implementation of State
Water Resources Control Board to “Make Conservation a Way of
Life” is the clear winner. In terms of financial impact, it’s
the proposed “Delta Conveyance.” And in terms of potential to
actually increase California’s water supply by a significant,
game-changing quantity, it’s the San Joaquin County Blueprint’s
“Fish Friendly Diversions” proposal. —Written by Edward Ring, director Water and Energy Policy
with the California Policy Center
At HYDROVISION International this week, there was the acute
awareness that hydroelectric power globally is facing climate
change-induced challenges. California is a prime example, said
Lindsay Aramayo, who is an economist with the U.S. Energy
Information Administration (EIA). The Golden State was facing
its third straight drought year in 2022, and less water was
flowing. That year, she said hydropower represented 8% of
California’s generating mix, where it normally makes up 15%
during a good year. “There are bad years, there are also good
ones and they seem to fluctuate a lot,” said Aramayo. Aramayo
joined other panelists at a HYDROVISION mega session to discuss
the impacts of climate change on hydro infrastructure and the
tools available for operators to adapt.
… William A. Selby’s comprehensive account of California’s
varied meteorological phenomena, multitudinous microclimates
and seasonal extremes, “The California Sky Watcher:
Understanding Weather Patterns and What Comes Next,” solves
many such mysteries of the climate that creates — and is
created by — the state’s landscape and civilization.
Raised in Santa Ana, Selby is a retired Santa Monica College
professor who has conducted research for the National Weather
Service. His latest book, complete with helpful, dizzying and
sobering diagrams and photographs, could easily serve as the
text for a college earth science course. It takes a thoroughly
empirical approach to California’s four seasons and their
manifestation across its myriad topographies.
With Sacramento County facing backlash for ending water
delivery to about three dozen homeless camps amid a
record-breaking heat wave, the city of Sacramento will resume
delivery to at least one camp. Mayor Darrell Steinberg
announced Thursday the city will pay for water delivery to
resume for the rest of the summer at Camp Resolution in North
Sacramento, where about 50 people live in city-issued trailers.
“It’s the right thing to do,” Steinberg wrote in a statement on
X Thursday. “We made our first two deliveries last week and
this morning, and will continue regular drop-offs of water for
every resident.”
As severe heat drove Bay Area residents indoors, a ripple
effect may have triggered a spike in coronavirus infections and
COVID-19 diagnoses across the region. California is now
one of seven states where wastewater levels of the coronavirus
have soared to the “very high” mark for the first time since
winter, according to the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention. The swell is evident in various indicators,
including a rising number of repeat and first-time infections.
The summer surge is driven by more transmissible variants of
SARS-CoV-2, waning immunity from vaccinations, and more people
letting down their guard.
Leaders of the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe and San Juan Southern
Paiute Tribe gathered Wednesday to sign off on a $5 billion
water rights settlement that has taken decades. “Today
marks a very historic day for the three tribes that
we have here,” said Craig Andrews, vice chairman of the Hopi
Tribal Council, at the signing ceremony. “This is not
just an Indian water settlement; it is an Arizona water
settlement,” he added. The agreement stems from the
recently introduced Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights
Settlement Act of 2024, which would authorize the $5
billion to finance critical water infrastructure
projects.
… As climate change and human water use rapidly deplete
groundwater levels around the world, scientists and policy
makers need better data for where these groundwater-dependent
ecosystems exist. Now, a new study maps these ecosystems in
dryland regions globally, examines their protection status and
explores how they overlap with human communities. The research,
published in the journal Nature, marks the first time that
groundwater-dependent ecosystems have been mapped on a global
scale. … Their results show that 53% of these ecosystems are
in areas with known groundwater depletion, while only 21% exist
on protected lands or regions with policies in place for their
protection.
It may be the dog days of summer but it’s a busy time at
the Water Education Foundation as we prep for our fall
events! Space is becoming limited for one of our most
popular water excursions, the three-day Northern California
Tour in mid-October. Registration opens in
just a few weeks for our premier annual event, the Water
Summit, on Oct. 30 in Sacramento. Make sure you’re among the
first to know this year’s theme by signing up for Foundation announcements.
Water managers in the upper Colorado River basin took another
step this week toward a more formal water conservation program
that they say will benefit the upper basin states.
Representatives from Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico
unanimously passed a motion Wednesday at a meeting of the Upper
Colorado River Commission to explore creating a way to track,
measure and store conserved water in Lake Powell and other
upper basin reservoirs. The motion directed staff and state
advisers to prepare a proposal that lays out criteria for
conservation projects and creates a mechanism for generating
credit for those projects.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has begun water releases from
Glen Canyon Dam to cool the temperature of the Colorado River
and slow the reproduction of an unwanted fish. The exotic and
predatory smallmouth bass poses a threat to native species like
the threatened humpback chub. KNAU’s Melissa Sevigny spoke with
Reclamation’s Bill Stewart about the experimental program. So
how often do you anticipate having to do these cool water
releases? We’re in the really early phases of the
implementation…and we anticipate intermittently continuing
flows are needed to maintain that daily average water
temperature below that target of 15.5 degrees Celsius. We’re
doing this at locations where we know or suspect smallmouth
bass to reside below the dam.
As California finally cools off after baking under a heat dome
for more than a week, another spell of sweltering weather is
already coming to the Golden State this weekend. ”Yes,
this is happening…again,” said UCLA Climate
scientist Daniel Swain, who covers California weather in
his blog. The National Weather Service’s Weather
Prediction Center is warning the heat wave could
bring afternoon highs in the 90s to 100s and overnight lows in
the upper 60s to 70s to inland areas. “The likelihood of
significantly above-normal temperatures” from July 22 to 26 is
over 60%, the center said.
… Californians are most likely to name climate change,
forest fires and wildfires, and water supply and drought as the
most important environmental issues facing the state
today. Most believe that the effects of climate change
have already begun and that climate change is a threat to the
economy and quality of life for California’s future.
We asked our senior fellow Brian Gray, a retired environmental
law professor, to help us understand the implications of the US
Supreme Court’s recent decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v.
Raimondi, which overruled the “Chevron doctrine.” … What
are likely consequences of the Loper decision for
California water policy? I believe that the effects
of Loper will be relatively muted. Most aspects of
California water management and regulation are governed by
state law, and the California courts have generally deferred to
state agency interpretations of statutes governing water
rights, water quality, protection of fish and wildlife, and
management of wetlands and intermittent streams. In fact, the
California Supreme Court has held that judicial deference is
heightened when the statutory text is “technical, obscure,
complex, open-ended, or entwined with issues of fact, policy,
and discretion” and the agency has “expertise and technical
knowledge” over the subject.
