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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A warming climate has left a fifth of the conifer forests that
blanket California’s Sierra Nevada stranded in habitats that no
longer suit them, according to a study published last week by
researchers at Stanford University. In these “zombie forests,”
older, well-established trees — including ponderosa pines,
Douglas firs and sugar pines — still tower overhead, but few
young trees have been able to take root because the climate has
become too warm and dry for them to thrive.
One of biggest meetings of the year for ocean fishermen in the
northwest states is underway at the Doubletree Hotel in Seattle
today. The Pacific Fishery Management Council’s deliberations
started Sunday and will continue through March 10.
Salmon issues are on the agenda every day. Several leading
fishing organizations have called for salmon seasons to be
closed in California, based on low numbers in predicted
California salmon returns. The forecast is far less bleak
in Oregon and Washington, the PFMC heard on Sunday. On
Sunday, discussions of the halibut and salmon fisheries were
underway. The commission will make recommendations for
fishing seasons and take input on fish that are commonly taken
for recreation or commercial use.
Though recent snow and rainfall have certainly improved drought
conditions, California water officials still want to make every
drop of water count. That means cutting out the watering
of decorative grass — also known as non-functional turf –
frequently landscaped at traffic medians or office parking
lots. Decorative grass is becoming a bigger problem for
Western water agencies to address as policymakers look to cut
back its water usage in statewide bans, proposed legislation
and local ordinances. Right before last summer’s
sweltering heat, the California Water Resources Control Board
set a statewide ban on irrigating non-functional turf with
potable water in commercial, institutional and industrial
sectors, also known as CII sites.
After more than two months of atmospheric rivers and bomb
cyclones, amid a supersized Sierra snowcap, and with more
precipitation forecast for the rest of the month, isn’t
California’s drought over? The U.S. Drought Monitor reports
that yes, 17% of California is now out of drought. Most of the
rest of the state is quite wet as well, although it remains in
some level of “drought” as the term is defined by the Drought
Monitor. Only 17%? How is that possible? …. Drought was
never the right word to apply to this state’s dry streaks.
Californians need a term that describes not just how much water
is coming in, but how much we use every day and how much we
save for later.
Last year, around two-thirds of Pakistan was affected by
widespread flash flooding, with more than 1,500 people killed
and around 33 million made homeless. Almost 2,000 people died
in flash floods across Africa, and parts of the United Arab
Emirates, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and Yemen were
inundated with water. Flash floods are a growing threat in some
of the world’s driest regions. Deluges can trigger sudden and
rapid torrents of run-off that flow down dry river beds and
rocky channels. Because parched soils repel water rather than
allowing it to soak in, flash floods can be more devastating in
drylands than in wetter areas. Surges can result from
relatively small amounts of rain, as little as 10 millimetres
in one hour. By comparison, floods in wetter regions typically
follow more prolonged bouts of rainfall.
The Western United States is currently battling the most severe
drought in thousands of years. A mix of bad water management
policies and manmade climate change has created a situation
where water supplies in Western reservoirs are so low, states
are being forced to cut their water use. It’s not hard to
find media coverage that focuses on the excesses of residential
water use: long showers, swimming pools, lawn watering, at-home
car washes. Or in the business sector, like irrigating golf
courses or pumping water into hotel fountains in Las
Vegas. But when a team of researchers looked at water
use in the West, they uncovered a very different
story about where most Western water goes. Only 14 percent
of all water consumption in the Western US goes to residential,
commercial, and industrial water use.
In 1910, the Los Angeles real estate developer J. Harvey
McCarthy decided that this small agricultural town in the
Central Valley would be his “city beautiful,” a model community
and an automobile stop along the road to Yosemite. An infusion
of money brought Planada a bank, hotel, school, church and its
own newspaper, the Planada Enterprise, by the following year. A
celebration for the town’s first anniversary drew an estimated
10,000 people (though Planada had only several hundred
residents) as the city had become the best-known place in
Merced County. But McCarthy eventually abandoned the community,
located nine miles east of Merced, leaving its settlers to pick
up the pieces. It remained a farming town and is now home to
4,000 mostly low-income and Spanish-speaking residents who work
at nearby orchards.
As 5-year-old Stella Penn and her sister, Maxine, 3,
enthusiastically play hide-and-seek in the backyard of their
Eagle Rock home, the girls are accompanied by a merry band of
lizards, butterflies and birds drawn to the yard’s low-water
California natives, abundant fruit trees and the fragrance of
Cleveland sage and Champaca trees. Oblivious to the rainfall on
an overcast morning in Los Angeles, the sisters move to a
chunky wood stump in the front yard where, unprovoked, they
assemble a “pizza” with a large sycamore leaf and locally
sourced bits of gravel, California buckwheat and blue bush
acacia as toppings. … Soon after the two bought the
property, Claire’s father came and laid sod in the backyard so
that his granddaughters would have a place to run around.
Although his heart was in the right place, the couple felt that
it was “ridiculous” to try to keep the lawn alive in the face
of California’s ongoing drought and
eventual water restrictions.
This winter will be one for the record-books in California. It
looks like the winter I spent playing on 40-feet of snow in
Mammoth Lakes in the mid-1990s will be topped by this year’s
epic snowfall. So where will all that water go when it melts?
Living in Bishop at the time, we had flooding in August as the
runoff came off the mountains and made it to the Owens River –
or as some might call it: the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Here’s my
thought on this. Follow along. Los Angeles gets much of its
water from the Sierra Nevada and runoff in various places in
California. Yes, it gets water too from the State Water
Project, but the mismanagement of that system tends to push
more water out to sea than for human use.
An invasive fish species could begin swarming more areas of the
Colorado River, officials have warned. In a report released in
February by the Bureau of Reclamation, concerns are raised that
smallmouth bass—an invasive species established in Colorado
River reservoir Lake Powell—could escape into other reaches of
the river, below the dam. Lake Powell, formed by the Glen
Canyon Dam, is seeing some of its lowest water levels ever.
Officials are concerned that the low water levels will cause
the smallmouth bass to escape past the dam, which has so far
served as a barrier for the fish. When water levels are high,
the report said it prevents the fish passing through.
Thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency complex (TDC) has become a
widespread affliction in fisheries around the world. During the
2022 annual meeting of the American Fisheries Society, a
special symposium on TDC included presentations from
researchers describing findings addressing the root causes of
thiamine deficiency. TDC is not isolated to California’s
Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) it also occurs in
lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush) in the Great Lakes, and
Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) in Europe and in the northeastern
United States, among other important fisheries. However, this
symposium was not the first time scientists came together to
understand TDC, as Dr. Dale Honeyfield – professor emeritus at
the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) – spoke about meetings
sponsored by the Great Lakes Fishery Commission during the
mid-1990s.
Over the past 10 years, California has seen two of the most
severe droughts in a millennium separated by two of the wettest
years on record. This erratic weather, volatile even by
California standards, shattered heat records, killed millions
of trees, fueled explosive wildfires and caused significant
flooding. As California’s changing climate pushes us deeper
into uncharted climate waters, past records are becoming a less
reliable tool for predicting current and future weather
patterns. That’s why Gov. Gavin Newsom’s recent decision to
delay the release of 700,000 acre-feet of water, enough to
supply nearly 7 million people for a year, from state
reservoirs into the Sacramento-San Joaquin-River Delta was the
right call. Snowpack from early storms can be lost to dry, hot
weather later this spring. -Written by Jim Wunderman, president and CEO of
the Bay Area Council.
Israeli firm IDE Technologies’ proposal to build a US$5.5bn
desalination plant in Puerto Peñasco in northern Mexico’s
Sonora state and then sell the water to Arizona is not a new
idea and was previously rejected due to several problems.
In December, IDE presented Arizona’s Water Infrastructure
Finance Authority (WIFA) with a proposal to supply treated 1
billion cubic meters per year of seawater from the Sea of
Cortez through a 328km system of pumps and pipes. WIFA was
reported to have been analyzing the initiative, but no further
updates have been announced. The project would also
provide water to Sonora state “without impacting the amount of
water committed to Arizona,” according to the proposal.
However, IDE needs a purchasing commitment from the US state’s
authorities before moving forward with the project.
A remarkably wet winter has resulted in some of the deepest
snowpack California has ever recorded, providing considerable
drought relief and a glimmer of hope for the state’s strained
water supply. Statewide snowpack Friday measured 190% of
normal, hovering just below a record set in the winter of
1982-83, officials with the Department of Water Resources said
during the third snow survey of the season…. In the
Southern Sierra, snowpack reached 231% of average for the date,
nearing the region’s benchmark of 263% set in 1969 and trending
ahead of the winter of 1983. With just one month remaining in
the state’s traditional rainy season, officials are now voicing
cautious optimism over the state’s hydrologic prospects.
Northern California could be in for a new atmospheric
river storm by the end of the week, potentially blasting the
Bay Area with substantial rain, and the Sierra with even more
heavy snow, but likely not as fierce as the wet storms that
wreaked damage across the region at the start of the year,
forecasters say…. Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at
UCLA and the Nature Conservancy, said Sunday
evening that an atmospheric river could be a concern
regarding the state’s snowpack, which on Friday reached
its highest level this century for the start of
March. Such rain-on-snow events — when heavy rain
falls on snow in higher elevations — could result in
snow melting faster, flooding downstream areas, overwhelming
rivers and overloading buildings with heavy
slush, weather experts say.
It’s an arcane system of water law that dates back to the birth
of California — an era when 49ers used sluice boxes and water
cannons to scour gold from Sierra Nevada foothills and when the
state government promoted the extermination of Native people to
make way for white settlers. Today, this antiquated system of
water rights still governs the use of the state’s supplies, but
it is now drawing scrutiny like never before. In the face of
global warming and worsening cycles of drought, a growing
number of water experts, lawmakers, environmental groups and
tribes say the time has finally come for change. Some are
pushing for a variety of reforms, while others are calling for
the outright dismantling of California’s contentious water
rights system.
Jennifer Peters signed on to have her Madera ranch become the
site of an experiment in replenishing groundwater in
California’s Central Valley. Though this pilot program led by a
subdivision of the United States Department of Agriculture is
far from the first effort to address the depletion of
groundwater stores, it offers farmers like Peters hope for the
future of agriculture in the region. … Peters is a
fourth-generation farmer who operates Markarian Family LP with
her father and son. They cultivate wine grapes and almonds,
crops that require irrigation to grow in the Central Valley.
… The search for water has led growers to dig deep into
underground water supplies. Many aquifers, geological
structures that hold groundwater, are so depleted in the
Central Valley that they are considered at an “all time low” or
“much below normal,” …
The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to propose
restrictions on harmful “forever chemicals” in drinking water
after finding they are dangerous in amounts so small as to be
undetectable. But experts say removing them will cost billions,
a burden that will fall hardest on small communities with few
resources. Concerned about the chemicals’ ability to weaken
children’s immune systems, the EPA said last year that PFAS
could cause harm at levels “much lower than previously
understood.”
Tom Brundy, an alfalfa grower in California’s Imperial Valley,
thinks farmers reliant on the shrinking Colorado River can do
more to save water and use it more efficiently. That’s why he’s
installed water sensors and monitors to prevent waste on nearly
two-thirds of his 3,000 acres. But one practice that’s
off-limits for Brundy is fallowing — leaving fields unplanted
to spare the water that would otherwise irrigate crops. It
would save plenty of water, Brundy said, but threatens both
farmers and rural communities economically. … Many Western
farmers feel the same, even as a growing sense is emerging that
some fallowing will have to be part of the solution to the
increasingly desperate drought in the West, where the Colorado
River serves 40 million people.
The last time the Colorado River Basin agreed to a set of
reductions to address drought conditions and dropping levels at
Lake Mead was in 2019. … Now, states are looking to cut far
more water than the 2019 agreement yielded, and on a much
shorter negotiation timeline. After the seven states that rely
on the Colorado River to provide water to roughly 40 million
Americans missed two deadlines from the federal government to
work out a consensus plan, there are two proposals from the
basin states on the table that offer different paths for how to
meet the target. The two proposals arrive at a similar number
of potential new cuts to water use across the basin, but draw a
clear line in the sand between California’s desire to protect
its senior water rights, much of which are tied up in the
agriculture sector, and the desire of the other six states to
have California, Nevada and Arizona share the cuts more
equitably.
