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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Recently, the United States District Court for the Northern
District of California refused to dismiss a lawsuit filed by a
concerned citizen against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
(Corps) and National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) alleging
Endangered Species Act (ESA) violations in connection with the
Corps’ operation of the Coyote Valley Dam on the Russian River
in Northern California. The court opined that federal
defendants cannot avoid having to defend their prior actions
simply by initiating the consultation process under section
7(a)(2) of the ESA, and the equities weighed against a stay of
the litigation while the consultation process unfolds.
Spanish soldier and California explorer Pedro Fages was chasing
deserters in 1772 when he came across a vast marshy lake and
named it Los Tules for the reeds and rushes that lined its
shore. Situated between the later cities of Fresno and
Bakersfield, Tulare Lake, as it was named in English, was the
nation’s largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River.
It spread out to as much as 1,000 square miles as snow in the
Sierra melted each spring, feeding five rivers flowing into the
lake. Its abundance of fish and other wildlife supported
several Native American tribes, who built boats from the lake’s
reeds to gather its bounty. -Written by Dan Walters, a CalMatters columnist.
California is once again bearing the brunt of inclement
weather, as a low-pressure system off the coast rapidly
intensifies and becomes a storm, tapping into another
atmospheric river that’s flowing between Hawaii and
California. The storm that started Monday night is
forecast to raise powerful winds along the coast that will
spread to all corners of the Bay Area, Central Coast and
Central Valley and peak just before sunrise on Tuesday. These
winds will ferry heavy rainfall, thunderstorms and the risk for
more flooding across most of the California coast and
eventually Southern California.
The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday proposed
limiting the amount of harmful “forever chemicals” in drinking
water to the lowest level that tests can detect, a long-awaited
protection the agency said will save thousands of lives and
prevent serious illnesses, including cancer. The plan marks the
first time the EPA has proposed regulating a toxic group of
compounds that are widespread, dangerous and expensive to
remove from water. PFAS, or per- and polyfluorinated
substances, don’t degrade in the environment and are linked to
a broad range of health issues, including low birthweight
babies and kidney cancer. The agency says drinking water is a
significant source of PFAS exposure for people.
The levee breach that left an entire California town underwater
this weekend is putting a spotlight on how the state’s vital
flood control infrastructure is being weakened by age, drought,
climate change, rodents and neglect — leaving scores of
communities at risk. On Friday night, the swollen
Pajaro River burst through the worn-down levee, flooding the
entire town of Pajaro and sending its roughly 3,000 residents
into what officials are now estimating to be a multi-month-long
exile. A second breach was reported on Monday…. Experts say
similar weaknesses plague levee systems across California and
the nation. As climate change threatens to intensify and
exacerbate extreme weather events — such as flooding and even
drought — the unease and desperation of residents and emergency
responders in communities near these crumbling systems is
growing.
The Southern Sierra snowpack is now the biggest on record, at a
whopping 247% of average for April 1, according to charts from
the California Department of Water Resources. “There is a whole
hell of a lot of water up there right now, stored in the
snowpack,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and
the Nature Conservancy, during an online presentation on
Monday. … Late last week, California was on the
receiving end of a warm atmospheric river, a band of
tropical moisture originating from waters near Hawaii. The
event raised concerns of rain-on-snow events, when runoff
from rain combines with snowmelt to overwhelm
watersheds. Such flooding happened over the weekend on the Kern
and Tule rivers, triggering evacuations and badly damaging
homes. But at higher elevations, the precipitation only
added to the Sierra snowpack.
The intensity of extreme drought and rainfall has “sharply”
increased over the past 20 years, according to a study
published Monday in the journal Nature Water. These aren’t
merely tough weather events, they are leading to extremes such
as crop failure, infrastructure damage and even humanitarian
crises. The big picture on water comes from data from a pair of
satellites known as GRACE, or Gravity Recovery and Climate
Experiment, that were used to measure changes in Earth’s water
storage — the sum of all the water on and in the land,
including groundwater, surface water, ice, and
snow. … The researchers say the data confirms that
both the frequency and intensity of rainfall and droughts are
increasing due to burning fossil fuels and other
human activity that releases greenhouse gases.
Water policy wonks like us at PPIC spend an extraordinary
amount of time analyzing information from the past, trying to
understand the present, and modeling or speculating about the
future. All this work goes toward identifying policy changes
that might help California better manage its water. But
for all our efforts, nothing improves our understanding of
water like a “stress test,” whether that test is severe drought
or extreme wet. And it is starting to look like we are
going to get one of those stress tests this spring in the San
Joaquin Valley. As news outlets have been reporting for some
time, there is an “epic” snowpack in the central and southern
Sierra Nevada… And while Californians have been laser focused
on managing drought over the past decade, it’s now time to
start thinking about what to do with too much water, at least
in the San Joaquin River and Tulare Lake basins.
It may be hard to believe after all the snow and rain that fell
― and keeps falling ― on the North State this winter, but Lake
Shasta water levels are still lower than normal for this time
of year. That could change with more storms on the way this
week. Predictions about the amount of water released through
Shasta Dam later in the year, as snow melts, could also change.
… So, could it be that Shasta Dam will make history
again? Will it open its gates at the top of the spillway to let
water flow? … There’s plenty of space for more rainwater and
snowmelt, said Donald Bader, area manager for the U.S.
Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the dam.
Lake Powell is currently close to 180 feet below full pool and
coming off a summer last year where several boat ramps were
closed and owners were advised to retrieve their houseboats
from the docks. Releases from a couple of upstream reservoirs,
including Flaming Gorge, were made last summer to help the
nation’s second largest reservoir and its Glen Canyon Dam,
which provides power generation to Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New
Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and Nebraska. A Monday briefing
from the drought integrated information center of the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said there is wet relief
on the way for Lake Powell, which typically gets its maximum
flows well into July.
An unfinished section of the new Friant-Kern Canal suffered a
“severe breach” at Deer Creek in Tulare County Friday night as
the normally dry creek swelled with rain and snowmelt and
overran its banks into the construction zone. “This was worse
than the one before,” said Johnny Amaral, Chief Operating
Officer of the Friant Water Authority, at the authority’s
executive committee meeting on Monday. “We haven’t gotten a
handle on it yet but it’s tough to do anything out there right
now with what we’re expecting tomorrow.”
Federal officials have proposed closing commercial chinook
salmon fishing off the coast of California over concerns for
expected low numbers of fall-run chinook salmon returning to
the Sacramento River this year. The Pacific Fishery Management
Council announced its three alternatives for recreational and
commercial fishing Friday. Ocean recreational fishing from the
Oregon-California border to the U.S.-Mexico border will be
closed in all three proposals, “given the low abundance
forecasts for both Klamath and Sacramento River fall chinook.”
the council said in a news release issued Friday. Commercial
salmon fishing off the coast of California also will be closed,
the council said. Ocean fishing restrictions were also
announced for Oregon and Washington.
The atmospheric rivers that flowed over California in January
dumped about a foot of rain — equal to an entire year’s average
— in many parts of the state’s parched Central Valley, which
encompasses only 1% of U.S. farmland but produces 40% of the
nation’s table fruits, vegetables, and nuts. With February,
ordinarily the second wettest month, still to be counted, talks
of all the land that will have to fallowed as a result of the
drought have quieted for now. But most Golden State growers
have come to realize that droughts will simply be a part of
farming going forward, and the safety net is gone. That
safety net was groundwater pumping. For more than a
half-century, farmers in the Central Valley, the multi-faceted
state’s chief production area, have been pumping more water
from aquifers than can be replenished, causing wells to be
drilled deeper and deeper.
Ask any of the wine grape growers planting own-rooted stock why
they’re farming these massively risky grapevines and they’ll
all tell you the same thing: They just want to make really
great wine. But there’s another benefit to the gamble,
too—unlike most American wine grapes, which are overwhelmingly
grown on grafted rootstock, own-rooted vines are especially
drought-tolerant, produce a more predictable crop and use
significantly fewer resources. There’s a huge downside to
using own-rooted vines, though. If they get attacked
by phylloxera, the entire crop will die. It won’t be a
loss of just one season’s grapes—the entire vineyard itself
will be totally destroyed. And the invasive species is present
in the soil in vineyards throughout America.
Mark Sigety has owned land in the Harquahala Valley near
Tonopah since 2003. Since then, he says several investors have
reached out to buy his half-acre plot along with other parcels
in western Maricopa County. … The Harquahala Groundwater
Basin is one of three in rural Arizona set aside specifically
to import water to the Valley once water gets scarce. It’s
known as an Irrigation Non-Expansion Area, or INA. It’s a
place where the state or political subdivisions that own land
eligible to be irrigated can pump groundwater and transport it
into areas where groundwater is regulated in Arizona, known as
AMAs, or Active Management Areas. The Phoenix AMA is one
of them and covers land from west of Buckeye to Superior.
Solano County supervisors are scheduled Tuesday to receive an
update on the latest Delta tunnel project. “The Delta
Conveyance Project is the latest iteration of an isolated
conveyance by the state Department of Water Resources to remove
freshwater flows from the Delta for use in central and Southern
California,” the staff report to the board states. “The (Delta
Conveyance Project) includes constructing a 45-mile long,
39-foot diameter tunnel under the Delta with new diversions in
the North Delta that have a capacity to divert up to 6,000
cubic feet (of water) per second and operating new conveyance
facilities that would add to the existing State Water Project
infrastructure.”
The United States Environmental Protection Agency has filed a
complaint against the operator of a mobile home park in Acton,
alleging that the park is using two large unlawful cesspools to
collect untreated raw sewage. The complaint identifies Eric
Hauck as the operator of Cactus Creek Mobile Home Park in
Acton. He’s also identified as a trustee of Acton Holding
Trust. The EPA alleges that Hauck has two illegal cesspools on
the property, despite large capacity cesspools being banned by
the environmental agency more than 15 years ago. Cesspools,
according to the EPA, collect and discharge waterborne
pollutants like untreated raw sewage into the ground. The
practice of using cesspools can lead to disease-causing
pathogens to be introduced to local water sources, including
groundwater, lakes, streams and oceans.
Some of the tall, stately trees that have grown up in
California’s Sierra Nevada are no longer compatible with the
climate they live in, new research has shown. Hotter, drier
conditions driven by climate change in the mountain range have
made certain regions once hospitable to conifers — such as
sequoia, ponderosa pine and Douglas fir — an environmental
mismatch for the cone-bearing trees. … Although there
are conifers in those areas now, Hill and other researchers
suggested that as the trees die out, they’ll be replaced with
other types of vegetation better suited to the environmental
conditions. The team estimated that about 20% of all
Sierra Nevada conifer trees in California are no longer
compatible with the climate around them and are in danger
of disappearing. They dubbed these trees “zombie forests.”
Regenerative agriculture is a holistic land management approach
with principles that date back to Indigenous
farmers. Instead of letting the land fallow or repeating a
cycle of planting water-intensive crops that cannot survive the
harsh conditions along the lower Gila River, Hansen has worked
to develop strategies to make less water go further. He has
successfully introduced arid-adapted crops, integrated
livestock on his land and used non-traditional farming methods
to improve soil health and biodiversity. While
regenerative agriculture has been a way to conserve water and
grow healthier crops for centuries, the alternate farming
method has seen a resurgence in popularity in recent years as a
way to potentially reverse the effects of climate change by
rebuilding soil organic matter and restoring degraded soil
biodiversity, resulting in both carbon drawdown and
improvements to the water cycle.
Even with winter’s remarkable rainfall, Mono Lake will not rise
enough to reduce unhealthy dust storms that billow off the
exposed lakebed and violate air quality standards. Nor will it
offset increasing salinity levels that threaten Mono Lake
Kutzadika’a tribe’s cultural resources and food for millions of
migratory birds. Any gain Mono Lake makes surely won’t last due
to the [Los Angeles Department of Water and Power's] ongoing
diversions….If DWP won’t voluntarily cooperate in finding a
way to protect Mono Lake, then the State Water Board needs to
step up and save Mono Lake – again. -Written by Martha Davis, a board member for the
Mono Lake Committee.
