A collection of top water news from around California and the West compiled each weekday by veteran journalist Matt Weiser.
Subscribe to our weekday emails to have news delivered to your inbox about 9 a.m. Monday through Friday except for holidays. Or subscribe via RSS feed.
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.
The San Diego County Board of Supervisors last week voted unanimously to move ahead with a $7.5 million improvement project for the park’s two popular lakes. … Lindo Lake is thought to be the only natural freshwater lake in San Diego County, according to the Lakeside Historical Society.
Elkhorn Slough has received a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of the Interior, which will be used to help restore approximately 63 acres—about 83 football fields—of tidal wetlands at the Slough. … Additional funds — equaling a $26.7 million — have been pledged by state and local governments, private landholders, and conservation groups.
In his February State of the State address, Gov. Gavin Newsom called the safe drinking water crisis — which is centered in lower-income communities ranging from the coasts to the Central Valley — “a moral disgrace and a medical emergency.” He’s right.
We have learned over the last six years that the water need for Santa Cruz to meet its own annual demand is 1.1 billion gallons less than thought in 2014, when the two districts were pursuing the desalination plant.
Up a remote canyon in the towering eastern Sierra, a Southern California company has an ambitious plan to dam the area’s cold, rushing waters and build one of the state’s first big hydroelectric facilities in decades. The project, southeast of Yosemite near the town of Bishop (Inyo County), faces long regulatory odds as well as daunting costs. But residents of the Owens Valley downstream and state environmentalists are not taking it lightly.
After sunshine and pleasant weather grace California early this week, a powerful storm system will barrel into the state during the middle to latter part of the week. … By the time the storm moves into the Four Corners region later on Friday, the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and parts of Northern and coastal California will receive between 1 to 3 inches of rain. The hardest-hit locations may receive as much as 4 or 5 inches of rain.
State officials tasked with debris cleanup say they have been directed not to enter an estimated 800 burned Butte County home sites within 100 feet of a waterway. They’ve been told to wait for representatives of several state and federal agencies to reach an agreement on environmental assessment guidelines.
The plan by PG&E Corp. comes after the bankrupt utility said a transmission line that snapped in windy weather probably started last year’s Camp Fire, the deadliest in state history. While the plan may end one problem, it creates another as Californians seek ways to deal with what some fear could be days and days of blackouts.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has made repairing hundreds of failing drinking-water systems in California a big priority since taking office, giving fresh momentum to an entrenched problem the state’s leaders have long struggled to resolve. But his proposed solution — a $140 million yearly tax raised in part through fees on urban water districts — has raised eyebrows in a state where residents already feel overtaxed.
The water that irrigates Santa Clara Valley’s last farms comes dirt cheap for growers who pump it out of the ground. They pay just a fraction — 6 percent — of the amount residents and businesses in the valley must pony up for their well water. The rest of the cost for farmers’ water is subsidized, mostly from revenue the Santa Clara Valley Water District receives through property taxes.
The West is still in the midst of a long-term water shortage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, primary reservoirs that serve 40 million people. For that reason, the Upper Basin states — Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico — have to also come up with their own drought contingency plans. That means Colorado might be heading into choppy waters as one of the requirements of a drought contingency plan — demand management — could pit communities and regions against each other …
There’s three roads that go up to the hill. Because of flooding and mudslides, all three of them were blocked. So here we were, an island. There was no way to get supplies. No way to get medication. No way to get propane deliveries for heat. People who work on and off the hill couldn’t go to their jobs. The whole town was impacted, especially the businesses and restaurants who depend on the tourism.
Three hundred and sixty miles. That’s how much pipe it takes for the City of Napa to distribute water throughout the valley. The public had a chance to learn all about where its water comes from at the city’s second annual Tap Water Day open house on Saturday at the scenic Edward I. Barwick Jamieson Canyon Water Treatment Plant in American Canyon.
In Ukiah Thursday, at least two dozen people who depend on the Potter Valley Project for their farming operations gathered at the Redwood Empire Fairgrounds to hear an update on the facility’s future. “New information to come shortly, and a lot of work still to do,” said Janet Pauli, chairwoman of the Mendocino County Inland Water and Power Commission, a Joint Powers Authority that is exploring the possibility of acquiring the facility that Pacific Gas and Electric owns, but has essentially abandoned.
In response to a story that aired Thursday night on CBS13, the City of Sacramento is now responding and creating a task force to combat a growing public safety concern. Homeless campers are carving into levees that protect Sacramento from flooding, a break in the levee could be devastating.
Armed with test tubes and trash bags, a team of environmental advocates are looking at homeless camps in Riverside as part of a broad effort to clean up the 2,840-square-mile Santa Ana River Watershed. The long-term goal is to protect the water and revive enjoyment of a 96-mile river that once was a center of life in Southern California.
State water regulators gave local sanitation officials three more years to carry out their plan to reduce the amount of chloride that ends up in the Santa Clara River. … The sanitation district … was mandated to reduce the amount of chloride, or salt, that discharges from wastewater treatment plants into the Santa Clara River, largely due to concerns by downstream farmers that chloride was damaging salt-sensitive crops such as strawberries and avocados.
The California Energy Commission is offering the city of San Luis Obispo a $3 million loan to build a 261-kilowatt solar photovoltaic system as well as a 264-kilowatt hydroelectric generation system — both located at the city water treatment plant on Stenner Creek Road behind Cal Poly. By generating its own power at the treatment facility, SLO could earn savings of $266,863 annually compared to its current power bill.
Volunteers and government employees hauled water to two tanks for desert bighorn sheep in the Old Dad Peak area of Mojave National Preserve April 30. … Four groups of storage tanks with drinker boxes in the Old Dad Peak area support close to 100 desert bighorn sheep, according to the NPS. There are no springs or natural water sources in the area, so the sheep depend on humans who provide water.
According to an engineering investigation released by the San Bernardino Valley Water Conservation District on March 7, the Bunker Hill Basin, which stores the groundwater used by the San Bernardino Valley, remains 570,718 acre-feet below full water storage following the 2017-18 water year. … The water year brought a reported 56 percent of average annual precipitation and 161,708 acre-feet of groundwater production.
