Over the last four decades, the area covered by lakes globally
has grown by close to 18,000 square miles, an expanse nearly
twice the size of Lake Erie. Scientists used satellite imagery
and artificial intelligence to map 3.4 million lakes around the
world between 1984 and 2019, finding that lake area grew as
reservoirs expanded and rising temperatures melted glaciers and
permafrost, particularly in Greenland, the Rocky Mountains, and
the Tibetan Plateau. Growth in these regions offset losses in
central Asia, northern China, southern Australia, and the more
arid parts of the U.S. West, where drought and water drawdowns
sapped lakes. The findings were published in Nature
Communications.
In a warming and drying California, water agencies across the
state are looking for new water sources and trying to better
utilize the ones they have. Pacifica has a potential source of
water not available to many communities: the drippy gray
moisture that blows ashore in the form of fog. Fog is composed
of tiny water droplets; together, a cubic mile of fog can carry
some 56,000 gallons of water. The North Coast County Water
District … installed experimental fog-catchers over the
summer at three district sites … The fog-catching
devices are simple: a 1-meter square of polyethylene mesh
stretched over a frame and installed facing into the prevailing
wind. When the fog blows in, the mesh collects droplets of
water like a giant spider web. The drops fall into a collecting
trough below and flow through a gauge that measures the amount
of water.
California’s Governor Newsom signed into law two bills
prohibiting PFAS in cosmetics (AB 2771) and in textiles (AB
1817), respectively. The bills define PFAS broadly as “a class
of fluorinated organic chemicals containing at least one fully
fluorinated carbon atom.” The cosmetics bill is specifically
limited to intentionally-added PFAS: “Beginning January 1,
2025, no person or entity shall manufacture, sell, deliver,
hold, or offer for sale in commerce any cosmetic product that
contains intentionally added perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl
substances (PFAS).” The textile bill, however, contains more
exceptions and complexity.
Four small Bay Area drinking water systems will receive
millions of dollars as part of California’s effort to protect
water deliveries as the drought drags into its fourth year. On
Tuesday, the California Department of Water Resources announced
$44 million in statewide Small Community Drought Relief Program
grants about $6.5 million of which is earmarked for four water
systems in Santa Clara, Solano and Sonoma counties. The
program is aimed at small systems with fewer than 3,000 service
connections that are most likely to suffer from aging
infrastructure and often rely on a single source of water.
“Small communities are the most vulnerable to the impacts of
our new hotter, drier climate and lack the resources to
immediately deal with these challenges,” DWR Director Karla
Nemeth said in a news release.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti is backing a new salary package
for the Department of Water and Power that includes a
significant hike in pay for hundreds of workers. The Los
Angeles City Council approved the labor deal Tuesday in a vote
of 11-0. Under the agreement with the International Brotherhood
of Electrical Workers Local 18, roughly 10,000 workers will
receive four “cost of living” pay increases totaling at least
10% and as much as 24% by October 2025, depending on inflation.
All workers will also get a one-time cash bonus of 3% of their
salary in December.
It’s not easy enforcing water regulations in the West. Just ask
the officials in California who have been trying for almost a
decade to penalize a man who took water from the river system
that feeds San Francisco and bottled it for sale to stores like
Starbucks. It sounds like a tall tale, but it’s
illustrative of just how hard it is to stop scofflaws from
using water the rest of the state needs during a water crisis.
In 2015, at the height of a severe drought, California’s state
water agency received a series of complaints about water theft
on a small tributary of the Tuolumne River, the source of the
Hetch Hetchy reservoir that supplies most of San Francisco’s
water. G. Scott Fahey, the owner of a water bottling
company called Sugar Pine Spring Water, was siphoning water
from the spring and loading it on trucks, the complainants
said.
The intersection of freshwater and climate is a frequently
ignored but critical element of the climate problem, according
to a new study from Sweden that explores the link and offers
solutions that will help lower emissions. Two years in
the making, the study, “The Essential Drop to Reach Net-Zero:
Unpacking Freshwater’s Role in Climate Change Mitigation,”
published by the Stockholm Resilience Centre, identifies
forests and freshwater wetlands as a crucial depository of
carbon. More than 30 percent of estimated global carbon
emissions are sequestered in wetlands. So the need to protect
and restore them is urgent.
Today on Giving Tuesday, a global day of philanthropy, you can
support impartial education and informed decision-making on
water resources in California and the West by making a tax-deductible donation to the
Water Education Foundation. Your support ensures that our
45-year legacy of producing in-depth news, educational
workshops and accessible information on water reaches new
heights in 2023.
As directed by 2018 legislation, the Department of Water
Resources (DWR) today submitted a first report to the State
Water Resources Control Board summarizing how urban water
districts assess the adequacy of their supplies over the next
seven months. Broadly, the assessments show the
importance of conservation by individual Californians to help
suppliers meet demands through June 30, 2023. In this
year’s assessments, urban water suppliers indicate that they
will rely on either continued conservation or more aggressive
actions to meet demand through June 30, 2023, if dry conditions
persist. They report that they can ensure adequate water
supplies through water-saving strategies, such as requiring
customers to limit outdoor water and providing leak detection
and repair services.
After three years of virtual events, the PPIC Water Policy
Center’s annual fall conference made a welcome return to an
in-person format in Sacramento on Friday, November 18. The
half-day event began with a welcome from PPIC Water Policy
Center assistant director Caity Peterson and a presentation by
senior fellow Jeffrey Mount. “The elephant in the room is that
conditions have changed,” said Mount. “We’re no longer talking
about some future existential threat….we have now moved into
the era of the hot drought.” Hotter droughts, he said, coupled
with a thirstier atmosphere, are testing California’s water
system as never before.
Drought, human-caused climate change, invasive species and a
“legacy” of environmental issues are permanently altering
California’s landscape and placing some communities and
ecosystems at increasing risk, a panel of experts told water
officials recently. Invasive species and decades of disruptions
from massive land and water developments are partly responsible
for a continuous decline in native California species, experts
told the California Water Commission on Nov. 16. Also, rural
communities, many of whom are lower income and rely on
privately owned wells, are disproportionately contending with
water contamination and scarcity amid recurring cycles of
drought, experts said.
“The sewage is killing us.” Imperial Beach Mayor Serge Dedina
did not mince words in 2017 after yet another spill from
Tijuana’s broken wastewater system contaminated local beaches.
He also did not waste time. Dedina pushed for answers from U.S.
and Mexico officials, and got none that were satisfying. So he
sued the federal government in 2018 and was later joined in the
lawsuit by Chula Vista and the Port of San Diego.
… Imperial Beach has long been a beach town beset by
water contamination due to sewage spilling from Mexico. The
battle for clean water has sometimes turned neighbor against
neighbor, such as when Imperial Beach officials criticized
their more affluent neighbor Coronado for not joining the 2018
lawsuit.
California already has one of the most variable climates in the
United States, and it’s getting more extreme. Our “weather
whiplash,” as it’s becoming known, is increasingly marked by
long periods of warm, dry conditions punctuated by stronger and
wetter atmospheric river storms. … Recognizing the
influence of atmospheric rivers on California’s changing
climate, Yuba Water is working with the Scripps Institution of
Oceanography’s Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at
UC San Diego, the California Department of Water Resources, the
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and others to
implement Forecast-Informed Reservoir Operations in the
Yuba and Feather river watersheds. FIRO is a flexible water
management strategy that uses improved weather and water
forecasts …
Thomas Birmingham, general manager of the massive Westlands
Water District since 2000, Wednesday announced plans to step
down at the end of 2022. His announcement follows the election
of four new members to the Westlands Board of Directors on Nov.
8 who would give a so-called “change coalition” a solid
majority of six seats on the nine-member board. The top
priority for the coalition is “a change in leadership,”
according to Sarah Woolf, who along with Jon Reiter helped
coordinate a group of increasingly frustrated Westlands farmers
to run the slate of change candidates, SJV Water
reported.
The promise of job security and work-life balance drew Fernando
Gonzalez to become a water operator. Now that he’s worked as
one for a few years, he sees his job as much more than fining
people for using too much water. On a given day, he’s
patrolling neighborhoods spanning from farmland to Malibu
mansions, looking for evidence that residents are wasting
water. He hands out notices of leaky sprinklers or when
residents run sprinklers right after a rainstorm, sure, but the
most rewarding part of his job is interacting with customers
about how they can save water, and why it’s so
important. … Here’s how Gonzalez earns $70,000 a
year, or nearly $100,000 with overtime, as a water operator in
Calabasas, Calif.
On November 24, 1922, representatives of the seven Colorado
River basin states—Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico,
Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming—gathered in Santa Fe, N.M., to sign
the Colorado River Compact, cementing into law a regime for
dividing the river’s water. Without exception, these men were
newcomers to a region inhabited since time immemorial by Native
American Tribes. Two of them represented states just a decade
old, none represented states more than 75-years-old, and their
purpose was to enable colonial settlers to establish a foothold
through irrigation-driven economic development.
A research team has found that the Andean region of Chile could
face noticeable snow loss and roughly 10% less mountain water
runoff with a global warming of approximately 2.5 degrees
Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels over the next three
decades. The study also shows that what happens in the Andes
could be a harbinger of what is to come for the California
Sierra Nevada mountain range, and highlights the importance of
carbon-mitigation strategies to prevent this from occurring.
… Last year, a study co-led by Alan Rhoades and Erica
Siirila-Woodburn, research scientists in the Earth and
Environmental Sciences Area of Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), found that if global warming
continues along the high-emissions scenario, low-to-no-snow
winters will become a regular occurrence in the mountain ranges
of the western U.S. in 35 to 60 years.
When an irrigation canal was breached in the early 1900s, the
resulting flood created Southern California’s Salton Sea. It
was a rare event that quickly created a beneficial presence in
the Imperial Valley, as the lake provided recreation
opportunities, tamped down dust, and became a stopover for
birds on the Pacific Flyway. But now, with inflows declining,
this hundred-year-old sea is drying up, and that’s having a
host of negative consequences for wildlife and air quality in
the region. We spoke with Kurt Schwabe—professor of public
policy at the University of California, Riverside and adjunct
fellow at the PPIC Water Policy Center—about some of the
biggest issues facing the sea, as well as potential solutions.
Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District board of directors and
staff were saddened by the death of Board Director Phil
Williams. Director Phil Williams served on EVMWD’s board of
director since 2001, representing EVMWD’s Division 4, which
includes areas of Corona and western Lake Elsinore, as well as
the unincorporated communities of Horsethief Canyon and
Alberhill. “We have lost an admired and respected member of the
EVMWD family” said Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District
General Manager Greg Thomas. … Williams, a local real estate
broker and licensed general contractor, was a lifelong resident
of Lake Elsinore. As a board member for EVMWD, Williams served
as board president seven times over his 21 year tenure on the
board.
The final regular meeting for two members of the Board of
Directors of Tehachapi-Cummings County Water District was a
quick one, with little business conducted. Director James Pack
served eight years on the board and Director Kathy Cassil
served four years. Both opted not to run for reelection. At the
Nov. 16 meeting, board President Robert Schultz and the
district’s General Manager Tom Neisler both thanked the two for
their service on the board. Neisler said he hopes they will
attend the December meeting at which the district will
transition to a new board.
