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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The McKinney fire began on July 29 and has exploded to more
than 60,000 acres, killing four people and becoming
California’s largest fire so far this year. According to local
tribal leaders, the fire has also led to the mass fish kill in
the Klamath River, which runs for more than 250 miles from
southern Oregon, through Northern California and out to the
Pacific Ocean. Up to three inches of rain fell on areas burned
by the fire on Tuesday, sending a debris flow of burned soil,
rocks and downed timber into the river, said Mike Lindbery, a
public information officer for the McKinney fire. That debris
turned into a plume of brown “sludge” that made its
way downriver …
Although we’re currently mired in the dog days of summer, it’s
time to look ahead to the rainy season. The state thirsts for a
wet winter, with extreme drought existing in just under 60% of
California. Below-average rain and snow have plagued the state
the last couple of years, coinciding with La Niña conditions
and expanding drought conditions. The Climate Prediction
Center (CPC) currently puts the odds of a third straight La
Nina year at 62-66%. With an exceedingly rare “triple dip” La
Niña expected, what can we expect for our water year that
begins in October?
Charlie Hamilton hasn’t irrigated his vineyards with water from
the Sacramento River since early May, even though it flows just
yards from his crop. Nearby to the south, the industrial
Bay Area city of Antioch has supplied its people with water
from the San Joaquin River for just 32 days this year, compared
to roughly 128 days by this time in a wet year. They may be
close by, but these two rivers, central arms
of California’s water system, have become too salty to use
in some places as the state’s punishing drought drags on.
Thousands of acres of crops, from corn to nectarines, surround
Melynda Metheney’s community in West Goshen, California — one
of the key battlegrounds where residents say irrigation and
overpumping have depleted drinkable water. … In 2012,
Community Water Center (CWC) told the Goshen community of about
3,300 that its water was contaminated with nitrates. Residents
spent two years fighting to connect to Cal Water — the third
largest regulated utility in the nation — and only some did.
Some of Metheney’s West Goshen neighbors still don’t have well
water.
Water is the lifeblood in the parched San Joaquin Valley,
sustaining endless acres of trees, seeds and pastures that feed
a hungry nation. But a controversial pipeline sits empty, as
dry as dust, caught in an angry feud between two of
California’s largest land barons, Silicon Valley developer and
farmer John Vidovich and Pasadena-based longtime cotton king
J.G. Boswell Company. Vidovich needs the pipe to move water.
The Boswell Company wants it blocked, saying it threatens the
company’s own water supplies, which run through a canal over
the pipeline’s underground route.
Proponents of a new plan to rehabilitate San Francisco Bay say
they hope to make significant gains in the coming years because
of millions of dollars in new federal funds. The estuary, the
largest on the west coast of North America, covers 60,000
square miles from the foot of the Sierra Nevada to the Golden
Gate, including the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The
estuary and the surrounding mountains, which hold about half of
California’s water supply, are home to highly diverse
ecosystems, including 100 endangered and threatened species,
and support a multi-billion dollar economy.
A California state agency didn’t waive its permitting authority
over four hydroelectric projects when it allowed the project
developers to withdraw water quality certification applications
that didn’t comply with state law …
Researchers at Stanford University and Emory University have
launched a nationwide initiative to monitor monkeypox,
COVID-19, and other infectious diseases in communities by
measuring viral genetic material in wastewater. The effort will
also provide health officials and the public with free,
high-quality data, which is critical to informing public health
decision making. The initiative is already producing data,
including the first detections of monkeypox DNA in wastewater
in the United States.
Monterey Peninsula residents will have the opportunity to share
their perspectives and give feedback on local water issues next
week. California American Water will host a community forum
from 6 to 8 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 9 at CSU Monterey Bay. Cal Am
staff, engineers, consultants and customer service
representatives will be in attendance to discuss water
resources. One of the main topics up for discussion at next
week’s forum will be the Monterey Peninsula Water Supply
Project — a proposed solution to the water crisis on the
Peninsula. The project aims to reduce existing water use on the
Peninsula by replacing reliance on the Carmel River.
Adam Wraight pulled a blue sewage “warning” sign out of the
sand near Imperial Beach Pier on Thursday morning, replacing it
with the more ominous yellow and red placard telling beachgoers
that waters were officially closed. … Shorelines from
the border up through Coronado were closed to swimming Thursday
as the result of a pipeline that ruptured in Tijuana near
Smuggler’s Gulch over the weekend. Sewage has been spilling
over the border into the river’s estuary for days, but it’s
just now making its way to the ocean and floating up the coast
on surging northward currents.
In a drought-prone area like Los Angeles, rainwater provides
tremendous potential to boost local water supply, as well as
provide multiple other ecosystem and community benefits. That’s
why in 2018, L.A. County voters approved Measure W, a tax that
raises about $280 million annually to capture, clean and reuse
water runoff. Measure W and the program it created, the Safe
Clean Water Program, funds projects to clean and strengthen the
local water supply and build community resilience. Research by
the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation and Stantec is helping to
ensure that these investments benefit all Angelenos, especially
residents of disadvantaged communities, as the program already
calls for.
A natural resources investment company announced Thursday it
intends to allocate up to 5,000 acre-feet of water annually to
the Salton Sea and Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indian Tribe
as part of a public-private partnership intended to help
reinvigorate the dying Salton Sea and ensure reliable potable
water for communities on tribal land. Los Angeles-based Cadiz
Inc. said that an agreement with the Salton Sea Authority,
tribe and Coachella Valley Water District will be part of a
wider water distribution enterprise known as the Cadiz Water
Conservation & Storage Project, which originally focused on
drawing water from the Colorado River and delivering it to
Southern California metropolitan areas via a single pipeline.
As the focus on the electron microscope resolved, Richard
Reynolds found himself feeling more resigned than surprised.
The slide before him was a snowpack sample collected from
pristine Colorado high country. The sample revealed, at intense
magnification, the snowpack’s expected sprinkling of rock
fragments and spikey grains of sand. It also revealed what
shouldn’t have been there at all: long, straight, human-made
fibers of plastic. … A host of wildlife and water
quality researchers are likely to descend on the study results
to gauge impacts of invisible plastic fibers riding snowmelt
into every crevice of the high country. They’ll also be looking
for any dangers for the cities downhill that rely on that
water.
In California, we know the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is in a
prolonged state of decline and the status quo is not working –
at best. Time is increasingly limited before more species go
extinct. More research along the lines of the last 40 years is
unlikely to yield novel breakthrough information and abate the
trajectory. More research is always needed, but more decisions
are also needed – if they are the right decisions. However, it
is challenging, especially given the ever-changing mix of
system thinking needed for each problem and through time. This
disorientation contributes to our bad intuition about
probability, poor perception of time, and faulty decisions
overall (Nowotny 2016).
A torrential downpour stranded 1,000 visitors and workers at
Death Valley as rain washed out hundreds of miles of roads in
the national park in California. All of the more than 1,000
miles of roads within the park remain closed while workers
evaluate the damage, the National Park Service said in a news
release Saturday, Aug. 6, one day after heavy rains slammed the
desert. The monsoon downpour, which dumped 1.46 inches of
rain — narrowly missing the 1911 record of 1.47 inches —
trapped 500 visitors and 500 workers in the park, CNN
reported.
Tucked high in a mountain range in San Diego County,
California, ranch managers Rob Paulin and Jeremey Walker rely
on “spunky” cows to mitigate wildfire by grazing on the
chaparral brush and shrubbery that traditional market cattle
won’t seek—let alone eat. … Originally from the Andalucía
region of Spain, these Raramuri Criollo cattle are small and
trim—weighing about 800 pounds each, compared to a
1,200-plus-pound Angus cattle. After being brought from Spain
500 years ago, they evolved in the mountains of Chihuahua,
Mexico, where they learned to survive by searching for food in
the far corners of the rough landscape.
The last leg of Nina Gordon-Kirsch’s monthlong hiking journey
was a 10-mile ascent up the western flank of the Sierra Nevada
to a pair of gleaming alpine lakes near Ebbetts Pass, about
equidistant between Lake Tahoe and Yosemite
National Park. … The moment capped a 33-day sojourn along the
length of the Mokelumne … She’s not alone: California’s
complicated relationship with water, strained by historic
drought, is driving all kinds of people to embark on “water
walks.” The practice involves tracing a river or waterway “from
sea to source,” or in reverse direction, under one’s own power,
in an effort to gain perspective on our complex water supply.
Millions of people in the Western U.S. are at risk of seeing
reduced access to both water and power as two of the nation’s
biggest reservoirs continue to dry up inch by inch. The United
Nations issued a warning on Tuesday that the water levels in
Lake Mead and Lake Powell are at their lowest ever and are
getting perilously close to reaching “dead pool
status.” Such a status means that the water levels are so
low that water can’t flow downstream to power hydroelectric
stations. At Lake Mead, located in Nevada and
Arizona, the country’s largest artificial body of water, levels
have gotten so low that it’s essentially become a graveyard
– human remains, dried-out fish and a sunken
boat dating back to World War II …
Knowing they are targets, farmers in southern Arizona and
California who receive irrigation water from the Colorado River
are discussing a plan that could go a long way toward meeting a
federal conservation mandate in the drying basin. With key
reservoirs Mead and Powell at record lows and despite the
continued decline of the Salton Sea, federal officials are
demanding historic cuts in water use next year, on the order of
2 million to 4 million acre-feet, or roughly one-third of the
river’s recent annual flow.
Island-dweller Lori Snell grimaced as she tallied her bill
recently at the Avalon Laundry — nearly $50 for three large
loads. … That preoccupation with water has now become
critical as severe drought grips California and its
Channel Islands — a rugged, eight-isle archipelago that hosts
several human outposts and a handful of species that exist
nowhere else on Earth. But although some of the island’s
wildlife is struggling for survival, conditions for humans are
a little different today than in droughts past, due largely to
a desalination plant that opened in Avalon in 2016. The plant
today provides about 40% of Avalon’s drinking water.
