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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Please Note: The headlines below are the original headlines used in the publication cited at the time they are posted here, and do not reflect the stance of the Water Education Foundation, an impartial nonprofit that remains neutral.
Inside the Outdoors, OCDE’s popular environmental education
program, is partnering with the Orange County Municipal Water
District (MWDOC) to provide free water education programs to
elementary, middle and high students across the county.
Available for students in grades three through 12, the programs
provide water-focused presentations, assemblies, activities and
guided lessons that give youth the opportunity to identify
local water supply sources and the importance of using water
wisely.
A recent study identifies Morro Bay Estuary as a priority
location for restoring the native Olympia oyster population
through conservation aquaculture. It’s a project that unites
shellfish lovers and conservationists on the Central
Coast. April Ridlon, a post-doctoral researcher at UC
Santa Barbara, said oysters are not as charismatic as other
marine organisms she has studied, but they are a foundation
species — meaning they create a habitat for other animals that
live on or near their shells.
There have been all kinds of efforts and money allocated to
trying to solve California’s water woes. Now an organization
states it has the solution — the 2 percent solution. In what
it’s calling the 2 percent solution More Water Now is working
to place an initiative on the November 2022 ballot that would
require 2 percent of the state budget to be allocated to the
state’s water resources. If placed on the ballot and approved
the water abundance ballot initiative would set aside 2 percent
of the state budget to water.
The city is looking to secure grant funding to help fund three
wells and extend water mains and laterals with the
municipality’s sphere of influence. City staff Tuesday will ask
for council permission to apply for a Small Community Drought
Relief of $22,322,250 through the Department of Water
Resources. Corning’s sphere of influence is to Viola Road west
across Interstate 5, north to Finnell Avenue and east across
Interstate 5. Staff recommends the council approve applying for
this grant.
Stuart Woolf, a large almond and tomato producer, recently
bulldozed 400 acres of almond orchards in central California —
about 50,000 trees that under normal conditions would have
produced $2.5 million of nuts every year for another decade.
It’s a fraction of the 25,000 acres his family farms, but
razing the land was a necessary triage — “Like cutting off your
horribly infected hand to keep the rest of the body going,” he
told me. Woolf plans to replace the trees with cover crops
he’ll neither sell nor harvest, but will use to sequester
greenhouse gasses in his soil. -Written by Bloomberg columnist Amanda Little.
Napa Sanitation District is willing to explore being part of
the winery wastewater disposal solution — if it can be
convinced there is a pressing problem. … Napa County has
several hundred wineries that create wastewater containing
biodegradable organic matter and other materials. This winery
wastewater is hard for the NapaSan treatment plant to handle on
a large scale, though the plant does treat some.
While the event laid idle in 2020, over 90 vendors revived it
this year. These farmers, artists, cooks and other vendors come
from as far as Sacramento and Oregon, to as near as the
community park’s backyard. … Jessanna Levitsky was
selling produce from her farm, Heartbeat Farm, all day, but
says the drought didn’t make it easy. Her domestic well has run
dry and her family now depends on their agricultural well to
both grow and live. It means less water going to the olive
trees and less produce being harvested.
While California’s severe drought has hit nearly every corner
of the Golden State, it has delivered a crushing toll to
communities that received little bounce back following the last
drought that peaked seven years ago. Case-in-point? Kettleman
City. Kettleman, perhaps best known to Californians as a Kings
County stopover midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles,
serves as the junction of Valley residents traversing to the
Central Coast via Highway 41 and metropolitan drivers roaring
across Interstate 5.
[G]rowers in the Palo Verde Irrigation District are taking part
in a new $38-million program funded by the federal Bureau of
Reclamation, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern
California and other water agencies in Arizona and Nevada. The
farmers are paid to leave a portion of their lands dry and
fallow, and the water saved over the next three years is
expected to translate into 3 feet of additional water in Lake
Mead, which has declined to its lowest levels since
it was filled in the 1930s following the construction of Hoover
Dam.
State water officials took a significant step on October 1
toward reversing damage to the Mono Lake Basin from excessive
water diversions through major revisions to the Los Angeles
Department of Water and Power’s (LADWP) water rights
licenses. The changes approved by the State Water
Resources Control Board provide significant updates to an
existing stream restoration program and will restore instream
flows to 20 miles of creek and fisheries habitats in the basin.
Come Wednesday, Oct. 13, utility services for Imperial
residents more than 60 days past due will start to be cut off,
but the city will continue to offer public assistance services
to help those who are behind in their bills, it was announced
at the City Council meeting this week. Some 164 utility
customers (water, sewer, and trash) are past due 60 days or
more and will be affected this upcoming date, and more than 800
customers are 30 days past due…
People who live in the Southwest know it’s been especially hot
and dry the past couple of years, but a new government report
shows those conditions are actually historic. Precipitation
across multiple basins in six states from January 2020 through
August 2021 was the lowest recorded since researchers started
tracking with gauges in the late 1800s. Meanwhile, the 20-month
stretch had the third-highest average daily temperatures since
researchers started measuring with instruments.
Doug Thompson couldn’t believe what he’d just been told. His
wife, a botanist, was advising a Coachella Valley country club
on drought-resistant landscaping, and Thompson, who got to
talking with the groundskeeper, asked how much water it takes
to irrigate a golf course. “He proudly said they had just
computerized their system and they were down to 1.2 million
gallons a night,” recalls Thompson, an ecologist who leads
natural history expeditions. “I thought I didn’t hear him
correctly, so about 30 minutes later I asked again, and he said
the same thing.” -Written by LA Times columnist Steve Lopez.
Fog is a defining element of summer in Santa Cruz … Its
fingerprints are visible in the vast coastal forests, even when
it isn’t hanging in the air. The redwood trees towering in a
clear blue sky soak up moisture from the fog on gray days. It
is often their only source of water for months at a
time. Fog is essential for plants and animals, agriculture
and human health, not only in California but in coastal zones
around the world. But many scientists believe that fog is
declining, another casualty of global warming.
Despite recent rains, severe to extreme drought conditions
persist throughout Humboldt County. During the Humboldt County
Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday, the county drought task
force shared an update on local conditions and initiatives
aimed at mitigating drought impacts. One of the main concerns
brought up in previous drought-related discussions was
permitting standards for water wells.
After a crude oil sheen was detected on the waters off the
Southern California coast, environmentalists feared the worst:
A massive spill that would wreck the ecosystem. A week later,
the region and its signature beaches appear to have been spared
a potentially calamitous fate, though the long-term toll on
plant and animal life remains unknown. … But
environmental advocates said the situation remains serious, and
they fear the long-term effect on wetlands and ocean
life.
Tutor Perini Corporation (NYSE: TPC) (the “Company”), a leading
civil, building and specialty construction company, announced
today that a joint venture comprised of the Company and
Brosamer & Wall, Inc. has been awarded a contract valued at
approximately $178 million by the U.S. Department of the
Interior, Bureau of Reclamation, for the Friant-Kern Canal
Middle Reach Capacity Correction Phase I project in central
California, southeast of Visalia.
Deep in the Cameron Peak burn scar northwest of Fort Collins,
Colorado, nestled among charred hills, lies an oasis of green –
an idyllic patch of trickling streams that wind through a lush
grass meadow. Apart from a few scorched trees on the periphery,
it’s hard to tell this canyon wetland was surrounded by the
largest wildfire just more than a year ago. Credit the industry
of beavers.
The rainstorm that deluged San Diego County earlier this week
also pushed a massive amount of sewage tainted water through
the Tijuana River Valley. Federal officials estimate more than
563 million gallons of polluted water flowed across the
U.S.-Mexico border and into the Tijuana River Valley.
… South Bay residents have endured increasingly larger
cross border flows for the past few year. Daily flows regularly
topped 50 million gallons earlier this year …
It’s only October, and 2021 has already been a horrendous year
for wildfires in the American west. The Dixie fire leveled the
town of Greenville. The Caldor fire forced the evacuation of
tens of thousands in Lake Tahoe. Some fires sent plumes so high
into the atmosphere that the toxic air reached the east coast
thousands of miles away. Fire is an important part of life in
the American west and essential for the health of the
landscape, but as the climate has changed so have wildfires in
the region.
