An aquifer is a geologic formation that stores, transmits, and
yields significant quantities of water to wells or springs.
Aquifers come in two types. Some are formed in the space between
porous materials such as sand, gravel, silt or clay and are known
as alluvial aquifers or unconfined aquifers. However, in many
places in California, there are aquifers beneath a rock layer
that does not allow water to permeate in measurable amounts.
These are known as confined aquifers.
Confined aquifers under pressure are known as artesian aquifers.
This pressure can push water to the surface, which when drilled
are called artesian wells.
In an effort to expand Corning’s water services, the city is
applying for a Small Community Drought Relief of $22,322,250
through the Department of Water Resources. Corning is applying
for this grant to fund three wells and extend water mains and
laterals within the municipality’s sphere of influence, which
is to Viola Road west across Interstate 5, north to Finnell
Avenue and east across Interstate 5.
The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) made the
County of Madera responsible for groundwater management for the
more than 200,000 acres that are not part of an irrigation or
water district (the “white areas”) in Madera County. Like many
regions in the Central Valley, Madera County is heavily
groundwater dependent. … [T]he Madera County Groundwater
Sustainability Agency (GSA) has been implementing a range of
aggressive management actions to reduce water use, implement
projects to increase supply, and take additional measures to
track groundwater use … -Written by Rob Poythress, chair of the Madera
County Board of Supervisors. Supervisors Leticia Gonzalez,
David Rogers, Brett Frazier and Tom Wheeler contributed to this
story.
A new study by the energy science and policy research
institute, Physicians, Scientists, and Engineers (PSE) for
Healthy Energy shows that the disposal of over 16 billion
barrels of oil and gas wastewater into unlined pits over a
50-year period has introduced salts, carcinogens, and other
toxins into regional aquifers. For decades, California law has
allowed the use of unlined ponds to dispose of water extracted
during oil and gas production.
Subsidence by groundwater extraction has all but led to a
conveyance failure for parts of the Friant-Kern Canal. After
years of vying for funding to fix its most impacted 33-mile
stretch, the Friant Water Authority announced they have awarded
a contract to Brosamer & Wall/Tutor Perini Joint Venture for
phase one of the project. Brosamer & Waller, based in Walnut
Creek, was awarded a $177 million contract to perform the
construction aspects of the first phase of work to repair the
Friant-Kern Canal along the significant stretch.
As California plans for continued climate change, including the
need to manage agricultural water use to comply with the
Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), a new report
finds the intersection of energy with water and climate may not
be getting as much attention as it deserves, especially in farm
country.
The national advocacy organization Food & Water Watch released
“Big Ag, Big Oil and California’s Big Water Problem,” a report
detailing for the first time California’s most egregious
corporate water misuses. The piece pinpoints industrial
agriculture as among the worst offenders, swallowing large
portions of California’s water resources and exporting billions
of gallons of water overseas through heavily irrigated crops
like almond and alfalfa as well as dairy.
Phones were ringing practically non-stop at Self-Help
Enterprises toward the end of this summer with valley residents
all calling about the same problem: Their wells had gone dry.
Employees were fielding 100s of calls a month from people whose
wells had dried up, Marliez Diaz wrote in an email. Diaz is a
water sustainability manager for Self-Help a community
organization based in Visalia that works on housing and water
issues in the San Joaquin Valley. The number of calls has
slowed so far in October, but the organization is still getting
six or seven calls a day.
Bringing the San Joaquin Valley’s groundwater basins into
balance by the early 2040s is going to be challenging, but two
neighboring groundwater sustainability agencies (GSAs) in
Madera County are collaborating to move the process forward. We
spoke with one engineering consultant and one general
manager—Joe Hopkins of Aliso Water District Groundwater
Sustainability Agency and Sarah Woolf of the Triangle T Water
District—to hear about their agencies’ efforts to comply with
the 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA).
Today, the Bureau of Reclamation and Friant Water Authority
announces the selection of a construction contractor to begin
work on the Friant-Kern Canal Middle Reach Capacity Correction
Project. Brosamer & Wall/Tutor Perini Joint Venture, based in
Walnut Creek, was awarded a $177 million contract to perform
the construction aspects of the first phase of work to repair
the Friant-Kern Canal along a portion of the 33-mile stretch.
This portion of the canal has lost more than half of its
capacity due to subsidence—a sinking of the earth from
groundwater extraction.
Three settlement agreements were recently approved by the U.S.
District Court for the Central District of California. Under
the agreements, Montrose Chemical Corporation of California,
Bayer CropScience Inc., TFCF America Inc., and Stauffer
Management Company LLC have agreed to pay $77.6 million for
cleanup of contaminated groundwater at the Montrose Chemical
Corp. Superfund and the Del Amo Superfund Sites in Los Angeles
County, California.
California’s agricultural empire is facing a shakeup, as a
state law comes into effect that will limit many farmers’
access to water. The seven-year-old law is supposed to stop the
over-pumping from depleted aquifers, and some farmers — the
largest users of that water — concede the limits are overdue.
… The limits on that water use will force many farmers
to scrap practices that relied on unfettered access to that
shrinking underground reservoir.
On September 30, three settlement agreements through the
Central District of California’s courts will require three
companies to pay $77.6 million for contaminated groundwater
cleanup. The companies — Montrose Chemical Corporation of
California, Bayer CropScience Inc, TFCF America Inc and
Stauffer management Company LLC — agreed to pay for the cleanup
of contaminated groundwater at the Montrose Superfund and the
Del Amo Superfund sites in Los Angeles County.
The San Joaquin Valley is home to some 4 million residents and
growing rapidly: another 1 million residents are expected by
2040. Groundwater is the primary water source for these
communities, yet decades of overpumping have stressed the
region’s groundwater basins, resulting in land subsidence, dry
wells, and falling groundwater reserves. The 2014 Sustainable
Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) seeks to solve this issue by
mandating that water users bring their groundwater basins back
into balance by the 2040s.
Aaron Fukuda admits that the 15-acre sunken field behind his
office doesn’t look like much. It’s basically a big, wide hole
in the ground behind the headquarters of the Tulare Irrigation
District, in the southern part of California’s fertile Central
Valley. But “for a water resources nerd like myself, it’s a
sexy, sexy piece of infrastructure,” says Fukuda, the
district’s general manager. This earthen basin could be the key
to survival for an agricultural community that delivers huge
quantities of vegetables, fruit and nuts to the rest of the
country — but is running short of water. The basin just needs
California’s rivers to rise and flood it.
Sonoma County’s three Groundwater Sustainability Agencies – in
Petaluma Valley, Sonoma Valley and Santa Rosa Plain – released
their Final Draft Groundwater Sustainability Plans (GSPs) on
October 1, and now they’re hoping the public pays attention.
… The draft groundwater Sustainability Plan that was
issued this week presents findings that are concerning: “the
amount of groundwater stored in the aquifers is declining on
average by about 900 acre-feet per year … ”
As California officials brace for a possible third year of
drought — Karla Nemeth, director of the state Department of
Water Resources, recently warned of “a worst-case scenario” for
2022 — the drought disaster is already in full force for many
Californians. With underground water tables plummeting, more
than 700 residents have notified the state that their wells
have gone dry this year — a 700% increase from 2020. They’re
being forced to use bottled water, install storage tanks in
their yards and wait for new wells to get drilled. They’re
learning, the hard way, to be patient.
Development for new housing in the City of Corcoran has
received a sizable boost in the form of $1.5 million in State
funding for clean drinking water. On Wednesday morning, State
Assemblymember Rudy Salas (D-Bakersfield) presented a check for
$1.5 million to the City at the Corcoran Water Treatment Plant.
The money will go toward the creation of a new well north of
Corcoran.
Amid historic drought and changing rainfall patterns, a
groundwater market in the California desert could serve as a
template for the future of water management. When landowners
overlying the Mojave groundwater system switched from
open-access management to a cap-and-trade system, it helped
stabilize their groundwater resources.
The 2021 water year ends on Sept. 30, and it was another hot,
dry year in the western U.S., with almost the entire region in
drought. Reservoirs vital for farms, communities and hydropower
have fallen to dangerous lows. … More than 7,000 miles
away, Iran is grappling with water problems that are similar to
the U.S. Southwest’s but more severe. One of the driest years
in the past five decades, on the back of several decades of
mismanaged water resources, brought warnings of water conflicts
between Iranian provinces this year.
Public input requested on elements of the Groundwater
Sustainability Plan for the Owens Valley Groundwater Basin The
Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) of 2014 empowers
local agencies to ensure groundwater resources are managed
sustainably. The Owens Valley Groundwater Authority (OVGA) was
created to develop a Groundwater Sustainability Plans (GSP) for
the Owens Valley Groundwater Basin which includes the Owens,
Round, Chalfant, Hammil, and Benton Valleys as well as Fish
Slough and the area around Owens Lake.
Water trading and banking are important tools that can help
California bring its groundwater basins into balance by the
early 2040s, as mandated by the 2014 Sustainable Water
Management Act (SGMA). But the expansion of the state’s water
market still faces some bottlenecks, including aging
infrastructure and complex regulations. The stakes for
preserving California’s groundwater are rising, however, as is
interest in improving the state’s water market.
For a year I have been tracking the progress of a Butte County
proposal to form a new water district. Named “Tuscan,” a name
that brims with ripe fruit and Italian luxury, the form of the
proposed district promises a bountiful harvest to two large
landowners—absentee corporations, in fact. It also promises to
leave Butte County’s water coffers empty and its aquifers dry.
Trona, a town in California’s Mojave Desert, is at risk of
being left dry amid an ongoing water war that erupted after
legislation was passed in 2016 to sustain groundwater sources.
The town, which lacks its own clean source of water, has been
getting its water from wells located 30 miles away in the
Indian Wells Valley for decades, The Los Angeles Times
reported. The water is delivered through two pipelines to
Searles Valley Minerals, a mining company that uses the water
to produce soda ash, boron, and salt.
For over three decades, Donald Sherman has been a local farmer
growing vegetable crops. It’s no secret California has been
dealing with the impact of the drought for several years, and
Sherman says he saw this coming about 20 years ago. … He says
that as small farmers, they don’t always have the resources to
keep up when wells begin running dry, and they have to be
mindful of how they use every drop of water.
There isn’t much in Cal-Nev-Ari besides a cluster of homes,
some businesses and an unpaved airstrip. But the town’s
new dominant property owner believes the desert outpost might
have something else: an underground river of sorts that doesn’t
run dry. Jerry Tyler, president of mining firm Heart of
Nature, told the Review-Journal last month that there appears
to be something like a river flowing beneath the remote
community south of Las Vegas and that it replenishes when water
is pumped out.
Water prices are soaring in California’s Central Valley, where
a quarter of the nation’s food is grown. As the West Coast’s
megadrought worsens, one farming company has long been
scrutinized for its outsized role in the arid region’s water
supply. Wonderful, the closely held company owned by
billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick, can buy up huge amounts
of water whenever it needs more. Most of the Resnicks’ water
comes from long-term contracts and other water from land rights
they have from the farms they own.
Napa County continues working on a state-required plan to
manage groundwater beneath world-famous wine country, but it’s
not easy and a Jan. 31 deadline looms. Stakes are high, given
groundwater is used to irrigate vineyards, run wineries, and
serve homes, as well as sustain the environment. The goal is to
make certain the vast underground reservoir is never pumped
dry. Napa County must do more than satisfy local
interests that it’s a good steward for the Napa Valley
subbasin.
The San Joaquin Valley town of Corcoran is sinking. It’s
fallen as much as 11.5 feet in some places, damaging drinking
wells, changing the town’s flood zones and undermining critical
infrastructure. The story is so dramatic that the New York
Times covered it recently. The culprit here, though, is
no ordinary villain – it’s the overpumping of
groundwater. Corcoran’s story, while extreme, is not
unique. Groundwater is an increasingly important – and
threatened – resource in California. -Written by Andrew Ayres, an economist and research fellow
at the Public Policy Institute of California’s Water Policy
Center, and Ellen Hanak, director of the PPIC’s Water Policy
Center.
A month after the Visalia City Council threw out a policy
designed to prevent urban sprawl, the Sierra Club is
threatening to sue the city over the change … requesting
an injunction against implementation of the new policy, which
does not include an ag mitigation policy (AMP). … The
city attorney advised the General Plan could be “modified” due
to changes in case law since 2014, such as the Sustainable
Groundwater Management Act which could affect the availability
of water to some farmland within the city’s growth boundaries.
New groundwater agencies in the Sacramento Valley are currently
finalizing plans to manage their groundwater basins for
long-term balance, as required by the Sustainable Groundwater
Management Act (SGMA). Successful stewardship demands good
information not only about groundwater conditions, but also
about surface water availability. To help build shared
understanding of surface water for agriculture—the valley’s
main water-using sector—we produced a new dataset showing how
access to this vital resource varies across irrigated farmland
in the Sacramento Valley and the Delta.
About 2,700 wells across the state are projected to go dry this
year. If the drought continues, 1,000 more will go dry next
year. In 2014, the California Legislature enacted a package of
new laws that aimed to stop groundwater over-pumping, but as
CalMatters’ Rachel Becker reports seven years later, little has
changed for Californians relying on drinking water wells.
Depletion of their groundwater continues. Pumping is largely
unrestricted, and there are few, if any, protections in place.
To fill the post of chief agricultural negotiator at the United
States Trade Representative’s office, the Biden administration
dipped into California’s hot, dusty, drought-plagued San
Joaquin Valley and plucked out an almond-industry lobbyist.
… Biden is favoring the $6 billion almond industry at a
particularly fraught time in its history. The ever-expanding
groves of California’s Central Valley churn out nearly 80
percent of the globe’s almonds. -Written by Mother Jones reporter Tom
Philpott.
A federal jury awarded the city of Pomona $48 million in
damages to be paid by a foreign corporation for contaminating
its groundwater with a toxic chemical mixed with fertilizer and
sold to citrus farmers for decades. On Sept. 7, the city won
its case against the American subsidiary of a multi-billion
dollar Chilean company, Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile,
known as SQM. The case, which began in 2011, bounced between
courts until the city won after presenting its full argument
recently in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.
Environmental groups failed to justify blocking the federal
government from funding groundwater pumping in the Sacramento
River Valley pending a preliminary injunction hearing, a
federal court in California ruled. There’s no evidence that
pumping will immediately occur without injunctive relief,
according to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District
of California. And even if it did happen, there’s no evidence
irreparable harm would occur between that time and the
preliminary injunction hearing, Judge William B. Shubb said
Tuesday.
The Department of Water Resources and the State Water Resources
Control Board have developed draft groundwater management
principles and strategies to better anticipate and minimize the
impacts of drought on drinking water wells. Developed in
response to Governor Gavin Newsom’s April Executive Drought
Proclamation, the principles and strategies provide a framework
for State actions to proactively address impacts on
groundwater-dependent communities as droughts become more
frequent and intense as a result of climate change.
Some San Joaquin Valley farmers could someday have a new “crop”
to sell — their groundwater. In the face of looming
groundwater pumping restrictions, some groundwater agencies are
looking at internal markets to give growers a way to save water
and still earn a profit.
San Francisco, along with a handful of Central Valley
irrigation districts, is suing the state for enacting drought
restrictions that are keeping thousands of landowners and
suppliers from drawing water from rivers and creeks. The
lawsuit, filed late last week in Fresno County Superior Court,
claims that the State Water Resources Control Board — drought
or no drought — does not have the authority to suspend the
draws of those with the most senior claims to California’s
water.
First came the asparagus field. Then came the melons. And now
Joe Del Bosque is considering the unthinkable: tearing out a
sprawling almond orchard bursting with healthy, nut-producing
trees. … Two decades of almost unrelenting growth
vaulted almonds into the upper ranks of California agriculture.
Now, though, the state’s $6 billion-a-year industry is
being humbled by a devastating drought. Farmers have
slowed the pace of new orchard plantings and, in a few cases,
have plowed up trees still capable of bearing almonds.
Record dry conditions once again in the West have led the
federal and state governments to declare water supply
shortages. California’s governor has declared that 50 counties,
in which approximately 41% of the state’s population exists,
are now under a drought state of emergency. This prompted the
adoption of emergency regulations ordering water rights holders
to curtail their water diversions on numerous northern
California rivers.
Researchers have suspected for years that drought conditions
worsen groundwater quality, but a study published this week
provides strong evidence proving the long-held assumption.
While previous studies have focused on the risk of wells being
overdrawn and run dry during drought, the study from the United
States Geological Survey and the California State Water
Resources Control Board is the first to directly link drought
to deteriorating water quality on a regional scale. The study
looked at 30 years of data from California’s Central Valley.
Nicole Horseherder lives in Hard Rock, Ariz., population 53.
Hard Rock sits on the Black Mesa, which takes its name from the
numerous coal seams running through the plateau in western
Arizona. Horseherder’s home has no running water, as it
is prohibitively expensive to drill down to the nearest aquifer
that has potable water. Twice a week, she drives her
20-year-old, three-quarter-ton GMC pickup—towing a 500-gal.
tank mounted on a flatbed trailer—to a community well 25 miles
away. Coal and water have dominated
Horseherder’s life and work for the past decade.
Madera County is running out of time as groundwater levels
plummet to new depths. Wells are going dry everywhere. Drillers
have months-long waitlists. Residents are scrambling for water
tanks. And farmers will soon face a reckoning after
agriculture’s footprint, particularly nut trees, has more than
doubled in the past 50 years — far outpacing irrigation
supplies.
The San Joaquin Valley is quickly become home to another
ignominious superlative: greatest number of water outages per
community. The state’s ever-worsening drought conditions are
pushing Valley communities to the brink on the precipice of a
statewide recall election. As the Sept. 14 election nears,
former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer returned to the San
Joaquin Valley on Friday for a briefing with members of the
Latino Water Coalition, Fresno County Supervisors, and an
assemblage of some of the top water experts in the region.
Tucked between two mountain ranges in Northern California’s
Siskiyou County, the Shasta Valley is as complex as it is
impressive. … The dearth of knowledge is perhaps most
pronounced when it comes to what scientists call the
hydrogeology of the groundwater basin –– how exactly water
moves through the volcanic rock below the ground. The movement
of that water is the economic linchpin of the valley, with
cattle ranchers, alfalfa farmers, cannabis growers, and others
all depending on it. And thousands of residents also depend on
the groundwater for their homes.
The California State Water Resources Board (SWRCB) has given
the city of Needles $3 million for drinking water
infrastructure, according to a press release. The funding will
support a new drinking well and booster station. The City of
Needles worst fears were realized In July when the only well
that supplies the community with portable drinking water
failed. The city was able to identify the replacement
part and repaired the well within 24 hours.
Water wells in the Edna Valley used to be shallow: “You could
put a well to 30 or 40 feet. Well that’s just kind of
unrealistic [now],” Edna Valley Growers Mutual Company
President Bob Schiebelhut said. Some of those shallow wells
didn’t make it through the last drought, drying up and forcing
landowners to drill a little deeper. Now in a new drought, Edna
Valley farmers and residents are once again praying for rain,
Schiebelhut said. But they’re also moving forward with SLO
County and the city of SLO on a plan to make their groundwater
more drought resilient.
Maria Olivera’s house sits on a dirt road that dead-ends at the
Friant Kern Canal, the 152-mile aqueduct quenching the endless
thirst of the San Joaquin Valley crops that feed the country.
She’s called Tooleville home since 1974, where residents have
been fighting to attain the basic human right to clean drinking
water for the better part of two decades.
The Santa Clarita Valley Groundwater Sustainability Agency
announced it will hold its final in-person workshop on Aug. 25
for residents to provide their input on a draft plan for
long-term management of the local groundwater basin. The
workshop is the last in-person opportunity for the public to
ask questions and weigh in on issues and proposed projects and
management actions designed to protect the basin from overuse.
Nearly 200 people in the Klamath Basin this summer reported
their wells going dry. In response, local and federal emergency
officials have delivered hundreds of the 2,500-gallon,
igloo-shaped storage tanks that can hook up to people’s homes
to get some water flowing through their pipes again. When
someone’s well runs dry, they can first try and drop their pump
deeper into their well. That’s the equipment that pumps water
from the well into pipes that run into a building.
Resources are available to help San Joaquin Valley residents
affected by drought maintain access to drinking water. A
group of organizations in the San Joaquin Valley coordinated by
the California Partnership for the San Joaquin Valley Water
Workgroup have developed an outreach plan and a list of
resources available to private well owners or part of a small
community who have lost or are concerned about losing access to
drinking water due to groundwater level.
In the wake of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) declaring
a federal water shortage of the Colorado River Basin, NGWA is
again stressing the need for increased funding for aquifer
recharge and water reuse projects in the western United States.
On August 16, the USBR declared its first-ever water shortage
of the Colorado River Basin, which will trigger a smaller
amount of water distributed from Lake Mead and cuts to
individual state water allocations.
Fourteen years ago, Heriberto Sevilla came across a ranch on
the outskirts of Madera set among fields of stalk grass and
bright wildflowers. Pepper trees dotted the meadow, and
children played in the natural lakes created by heavy rains. It
was the perfect place to raise a big family. … But then
a darkness came over the little Eden the Sevillas had
created. Amid two years of relentless drought, the well’s
output slowly tapered off. The family was forced to buy gallons
of precious water from the grocery store to take showers, clean
dishes and cook.
It was just before sunrise in July when the botanists Naomi
Fraga and Maria Jesus threw on backpacks and crunched their way
across a brittle alkaline flat in the hottest corner of the
Mojave Desert. Their mission: to rescue a tiny plant teetering
on the brink of extinction. … Today, the species [Nitrophila
mohavensis] has dwindled to fewer than 150,000, and most of the
plants that still sprout from this salt-white playa have
stopped producing viable seeds — stressed victims of decreasing
rainfall, rising temperatures and the loss of groundwater due
to pumping.
Kelly O’Brien’s drinking water well had been in its death
throes for days before its pump finally gave out over Memorial
Day weekend. … Soon O’Brien learned that other wells
were failing around her. She heard about one neighbor to the
north, another to the east. The list kept growing: She started
a Facebook group for owners of dry wells to share their woes
and resources, and it grew to more than 665 members.
Signs of drought proliferate across the American
West. California is rationing water for farmers in the state’s
Central Valley. Salmon are dying en masse in the
Pacific Northwest as river temperatures climb. Lake Mead,
on the border of Nevada and Arizona, is drying up. …
Groundwater is the source of drinking water for half of
Americans, and nearly all of the country’s rural communities.
… But groundwater has become dangerously depleted in places
where pumping has exceeded the rate at which aquifers are
naturally replenished.
The well fixer and I were standing at the edge of an almond
orchard in the exhausted middle of California. It was late
July, and so many wells on the farms of Madera County were
coming up dry that he was running out of parts to fix them. In
this latest round of western drought, desperate voices were
calling him at six in the morning and again at midnight. They
were puzzled why their pumps were coughing up sand, the water’s
flow to their orchards now a trickle.
The City of Roseville is going underground to tap into drinking
water as its primary source dries up during the drought. They
have a plan to supply water to more than 50,000 homes. For
years, Roseville relied almost exclusively on surface water
from Folsom Lake for drinking water. But that can be tricky and
near impossible, considering previous and current droughts —
plus studies showing the impacts of climate change.
Two motions to block the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater
Authority’s groundwater replenishment fee were shot down in
court this week. Judge Kirk H. Nakamura of Orange County
Superior Court granted motions filed by the Indian Wells Valley
Groundwater Authority to dismiss two separate actions filed by
Searles Valley Minerals and Mojave Pistachios. The actions were
aimed at stopping the collection of the groundwater
replenishment fee, which was imposed last January to fund the
cost of securing rights to water to bring to the Indian Wells
Valley Groundwater Basin.
For the second time, State Oil and Gas Supervisor Uduak-Joe
Ntuk has used his discretionary authority, as opposed to
technical standards, to reject a series of permit applications
to use the controversial oilfield technique known as fracking.
Ntuk sent a letter Monday to Bakersfield-based oil producer
Aera Energy LLC saying he has reviewed and denied applications
filed by the company to hydraulically fracture 14 wells in the
South Belridge oil field in western Kern County.
With the drought rapidly drying up reservoirs, farmers are
desperately searching for new sources of water and some of them
are turning to a mysterious method, thousands of years old. …
[Rob] Thompson, who owns Thompson Well Location in Sonoma
County, practices the mysterious art of dowsing, locating
underground water with nothing more than a pair of bent steel
rods. He touches his rods to the ground to reset them, then
begins to move them. When they point toward water, the rods
magically cross each other, almost like they become magnetized.
In July, the number of dry wells registered in Klamath County
was at 84. A month later, that number has climbed to 185 as
wells from the California state line all the way to Crescent
and La Pine are getting low and going dry. There are likely
more unregistered dry wells in Klamath County. The county
watermaster’s office said they receive daily calls from well
owners asking how to register. And the Modoc County Sheriff
shared a PSA on Facebook explaining what to do if someone in
that county is without well water.
[S]igns of this subsidence are nearly invisible to the human
eye. There are no cracks in the walls of the typical American
shops in the town’s center, nor crevices opening up in the
streets or fields: to measure subsidence, Californian
authorities had to turn to NASA, which used satellites to
analyze the geological change. And yet, over the past 100
years, Corcoran has sunken “the equivalent of a two-story
house,” Jeanine Jones, a manager with the California Department
of Water Resources, told AFP.
Another hurdle has been cleared in the pending and much needed
repairs of a 33-mile stretch of the Friant-Kern Canal. Known as
the Friant-Kern Canal Middle Reach Capacity Project, repairs
will be done on the 33-mile stretch of the canal form between
Lindsay and Strathmore to North Kern County. When the federal
government provided $206 million in funding for the project
last year that meant the project would finally become a
reality.
Monterey Peninsula water officials are breathing a sigh of
relief after a monitoring well in the Seaside Basin picked up
increased salt levels, prompting concerns that an underground
reservoir of potable water was being infiltrated by seawater.
But it turned out the salts were from a failed well casing that
allowed saltier shallow water from the Dune Sands to enter into
the well and cross-contaminate the deeper body of water called
the Paso Robles Aquifer that is tapped for drinking
water.
The Bureau of Reclamation and the Friant Water Authority
announced today a 30-day public comment period for a repayment
contract related to costs of extraordinary operation and
maintenance work on the Friant-Kern Canal Middle Reach Capacity
Correction Project. This project will restore a 33-mile stretch
of the canal that has lost over half of its original capacity
to subsidence.
The San Benito County Water District, which manages groundwater
around Hollister, has released for public review a draft plan
that will set out ways to ensure healthy, equitable supplies of
the local resource. District officials on July 29 made their
draft of the North San Benito Basin Groundwater Sustainability
Plan available for a 90-day public review as required by state
law. The periodically updated 357-page document assesses water
levels and land use conditions. It proposes ways the district
can manage water for long-term groundwater sustainability.
In Spanish, Sierra Nevada means “snowy mountain range.” While
the term “snowy” has generally been true for most of U.S.
history, those mountains have seen less snow accumulation in
recent years. This decline plays a role in water management and
response to drought in California and other western states.
Each spring and summer, meltwater runoff from Sierra Nevada
snowpack helps replenish rivers and reservoirs, while also
recharging the groundwater. In fact, snowpack accounts for
about 30 percent of California’s water supply in a typical
year, according to the California Department of Water
Resources.
When it comes to water witches — also known as dowsers,
diviners, doodlebuggers and various other names — in our
so-called enlightened times, though, we’re faced with two
distinct possibilities. One, they’re either really good, and
have been for a long time, at pulling a fast one on desperate
landowners looking for groundwater. Or, two, they actually
know what they’re doing …
As drought conditions worsen in the western U.S., it is there
that water is becoming more and more scarce. As for that which
is at the surface and below, you know, the subsurface supply,
is everything being done that can be done to get the most out
of this extremely valuable resource? In California’s San
Joaquin Valley, according to information imparted on the Jul.
20, 2021 edition of the PBS “News Hour,” agriculture drinks up
half of the groundwater supply. In some Valley locations, water
availability is extremely limited.
California’s courts routinely impose punitive damages awards
against polluters that knowingly release hazardous substances
which contaminate groundwater. But California has been slow to
follow the nationwide trend favoring punitive damages awards
against polluters that knowingly fail to remediate their past
hazardous releases before those releases spread and cause
greater harm.
The small, rural community of Tooleville is on the brink of
going dry after one of its two wells went down Friday morning.
It’s the second community in Tulare County to suffer water
problems in the last two months as California struggles through
the grip of a devastating drought. The only well in the town of
Teviston, also in rural Tulare County, broke down June 9
leaving residents there dry until the pump was fixed July 16.
With temperatures in Dubai regularly surpassing 115 degrees
Fahrenheit, the government has decided to take control of the
scorching weather. Scientists in the United Arab Emirates
are making it rain — artificially — using electrical charges
from drones to manipulate the weather and force rainfall across
the desert nation. Meteorological officials released video
footage this week showing a downpour over Ras al Khaimah, as
well as several other regions. The new method
of cloud seeding shows promise in helping to mitigate
drought conditions worldwide …
After some negotiation, the Friant Water Authority Board of
Directors will vote on a repayment contract with the Bureau of
Reclamation regarding the repair of a portion of the
Friant-Kern Canal. The Friant Water Authority and the
Bureau of Reclamation held its second round of negotiations
Thursday morning, which was a two-hour process hammering out
contract language in the repayment deal. … At the center
of the issue is a 33-mile stretch of the Friant-Kern Canal that
has lost over half of its original capacity to
subsidence.
A lot of the fruits, vegetables and nuts that you see in
grocery stores come from California. Growing them takes a huge
amount of water, which is a huge problem when the state is in
the middle of a drought. California’s farmers are pumping most
of that water from underground aquifers. They can’t keep doing
that, though, especially as the climate changes. NPR’s Dan
Charles has the story.
Has double-digit growth within the California almond industry
ended? Will last year’s 3.1-billion-pound crop be the largest
on record? Is the industry ready to open a new chapter centered
around something other than year-over-year record crops? Every
year the news was pretty much the same from the Almond Board of
California – predictions of double-digit annual growth as
industry insiders talked up new markets and pointed to
impressive numbers from the monthly position reports.
As water resources managers work hard this summer to deliver
limited water supplies to cities, rural communities, farms,
refuges and fisheries–while also providing essential
hydropower for the state’s energy grid–there is increasing
attention to prepare for the next water year. … As we think
about water management opportunities for next year, there is an
increasing focus on groundwater recharge …
One day last month, water in the community of Teviston, about
66 miles south of Fresno, suddenly stopped flowing. The
town’s services office fielded calls from residents who said
their taps ran dry, and when city leaders opened their own
faucets, nothing came out. Soon, officials realized that
the town’s main well had stopped working. … [T]he water
level below the community has been dropping for the last 14
years, and two different wells had already failed.
After over a month of transporting water from nearby towns and
delivering bottled water to residents, the rural Tulare County
community of Teviston had running water again Monday.
Teviston’s only well broke down in early June, leaving hundreds
of residents without running water. Teviston Community Services
District board member, Frank Galaviz, said that the well is
“back online” in an interview on Monday with The Bee. … In
total, Teviston residents went without running water for two to
three weeks, said board President Martin Correa.
In a vineyard flanked by scorched hills and charcoal trees, Rob
Thompson gripped two stainless steel rods, began rotating in a
circle and counted under his breath. Then he said he had
found it — water, hundreds of feet beneath the parched
ground. “This is really good,” said Mr. Thompson, 53,
scratching an ‘X’ into the ashen soil with his shoe. “This is a
deep one: 750 feet, 55 to 60 gallons a minute.” He added, “This
one I can feel.” Mr. Thompson is a water witch.
In June 2021, the Department of Water Resources released the
first groundwater sustainability plan decisions ahead of the
statutory deadline identified in the Sustainable Groundwater
Management Act – commonly called SGMA. The long-term
planning required for SGMA will provide a buffer against
drought and climate change and over time will contribute to
reliable water supplies regardless of weather patterns in the
State.
The Tehama County Board of Supervisors approved an emergency
resolution Tuesday that would allow residents with dry wells to
purchase water directly from the county. Though not in the
original agenda for the meeting, Chief Administrative Officer
Bill Goodwin added the item as an addendum, which consisted of
a presentation on why the resolution would be necessary. County
administration has been looking at different wells within its
jurisdiction to obtain the water from. Initially, the county
looked toward the well at Ridgeway Park but discovered the
water was non-potable and for irrigation only.
The California Department of Water Resources (DWR) is using an
innovative, helicopter-based technology to gather information
about the state’s groundwater aquifer structure to support
drought response and the implementation of the Sustainable
Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). DWR’s use of airborne
electromagnetic (AEM) surveys advances Governor Newsom’s Water
Resilience Portfolio goal of using technology to support
the State’s understanding of groundwater resources.
City of Santa Cruz water rights — that were established more
than 50 years ago — are up for revision and will be discussed
at two forthcoming public meetings. The rights, allocated by
the California State Water Resources Control Board, dictate
where and how water suppliers can use and move water.
… The revision to the rights, could open up doors for
the city to store winter water in aquifers such as the Mid
County Groundwater Basin, by which Soquel Creek and Central
Water Districts both pull water from.
A prominent oil and gas lobbying group seeks to strip
environmental protections from groundwater sources designated
by the state for agricultural use and which may grow
increasingly important to California’s water-scarce future,
according to a memo obtained through a records request. The
proposal, which hasn’t been publicly announced, suggests
removing protections for groundwater reserves underneath 1,500
square surface miles in western Kern County, where the
upper groundwater zone alone can extend down thousands of feet.
Groundwater, a subject of growing concern, will be discussed
Tuesday during the Tehama County Board of Supervisors meeting.
Clay Parker, the groundwater commissioner and Red Bluff
councilman, will be delivering a report to the board with an
update on the Groundwater Sustainability Plan and the Domestic
and Agricultural Well Ad Hoc Committee. … The committee is
still in early development, although the agenda report said an
ordinance is expected to be brought before the board by the end
of the year.
An environmental group dedicated to promoting healthy waterways
around California is taking Sonoma County to court over
permitting policies it says too liberally allow people to drill
groundwater wells, potentially endangering Russian River stream
flows. California Coastkeeper, an affiliate of the locally
based Russian Riverkeeper and a dozen or so other organizations
around the state, filed the first-of-its-kind lawsuit late last
month amid the intensifying drought and a surge in well
drilling around the region.
The water spigots on California farms will soon be twisted
tighter. As the state faces a growing threat from drought, an
increasing number of water agencies are planning to require
flow meters on agricultural wells, part of a landmark effort to
measure and constrain pumping that used to be free and
unlimited. It’s a controversial step aimed at protecting water
supplies that could change cultivation practices in the Golden
State’s thirsty fields.
The California Department of Water Resources (DWR) published
its first reviews of local groundwater sustainability plans as
part of a 2014 state law regulating groundwater—and two Central
Coast aquifers are included in the initial wave of feedback.
DWR reviewed and found “deficiencies” in the Paso Robles
Groundwater Basin and Cuyama Valley Groundwater Basin
sustainability plans—declining to give final approval to
either.
As drought settles over the San Joaquin Valley, a new report
warns of other circumstances that could result in entire
communities losing drinking water. More than a million Valley
residents could lose their public water in coming decades under
the sweeping groundwater legislation known as the Sustainable
Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), according to the paper
published earlier this month by the non-profit Pacific
Institute. Signed into law in 2014, SGMA aims over the next two
decades to reduce California’s groundwater deficit by balancing
water pumped out of the ground with the amount replenished.
California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), a
landmark piece of legislation in the quest for comprehensive
management of California’s groundwater, required the creation
of Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs), and authorized
local governments either to form GSAs separately or join with
other local governments in the same groundwater basin. This was
the genesis of 74 interorganizational agreements now examined
in a new report, which focuses on whether, given the high
stakes and history of conflict in water resources management in
California, participants were prepared for disagreements with
dispute resolution clauses in their planning.
The Glenn County Board of Supervisors approved an interim
ordinance Tuesday that puts a temporary stoppage on the
drilling of new agriculture water well permits in Glenn County.
The moratorium, which took place immediately Tuesday, lasts for
45 days. County staff stated in the public hearing Tuesday that
California is going through a drought and Glenn County and
other areas of California are seeing the effect on water
wells.
The drought is intensifying efforts to conserve all of Sonoma
County’s water resources, including a supply that has eluded
oversight until recently: groundwater. But even as plans for
groundwater monitoring and sustainable use proceed, tensions
are building over its management. The authority to evaluate and
regulate groundwater comes from a 2014 law crafted in the
middle of the state’s last drought.
A recent report from Arizona State University warns the state
is mining groundwater faster than it can be replaced. The
report focuses on five areas around the state including
Prescott and Phoenix that fall under the rules of the 1980
Groundwater Management Act. KNAU’s Melissa Sevigny spoke with
water expert Sarah Porter about the report’s conclusions.
Forty two percent of shallow wells supplying water to community
water systems in California’s San Joaquin Valley are vulnerable
to going partially or fully dry under the state’s minimum
thresholds, finds a new report from the Pacific Institute. Most
impacted wells are shallower, and tend to be in disadvantaged
communities.
On Sunday evening, a well motor failed in a Madera Ranchos
community water system that serves around 1,000
homes. Last week, another well pump stopped working in
Parksdale, southeast of Madera. Neither community has lost
water service. Both are experiencing low pressure. Madera
County Public Works runs both water systems. From Madera
Acres to the Bonadelle Ranchos, private wells are running
dry at an alarming rate. Self-Help Enterprises, an
organization that supports communities with water challenges,
has been tracking the problem.
In this blistering year in California, drinking water wells are
going dry in increasing numbers, rekindling memories of the
historic drought of 2012 to 2016, when more than 2,600 wells
across the state stopped producing water. So many wells went
dry in 2014 in the town of East Porterville that Tulare County
supplied portable public showers. California is not yet to that
level of emergency…. But because the trend lines do not look
promising, government agencies and nonprofit groups are
preparing for a difficult summer in which thousands of wells
could fail.
Central Valley cattle ranchers are gearing up for a fight
against what they see as groundwater rustling. Their fear is
that newly formed groundwater agencies in some areas could
devalue their land by not giving them a fair share of their own
groundwater. Ranchers believe those fears were realized on June
8 when the Madera County Board of Supervisors approved a
groundwater allocation that will partially exclude rangeland.
Ranchers who own rangeland that has never been irrigated won’t
receive a share of the county’s “transitional water” allotment.
Instead of turning on the faucet to fill her pots to cook
dinner, Maria Olivera turns to her drums of state issued water
sitting next to the stove at her home in Tooleville.
… Tooleville spans all of two dusty dirt roads at the
edge of the Friant-Kern Canal, where the blue hue of flowing
water is just out of sight over raised levees. Along with it,
the basic human right of having clean drinking water. Nitrates
from farming fertilizers have rendered the water undrinkable in
Tooleville, and the community is dependent on biweekly water
deliveries.
As California suffers from a major drought and enters a climate
change fueled wildfire season, oil and gas operators continue
to use hundreds of millions of gallons of freshwater for
drilling operations annually. It’s a vicious symbiotic cycle:
fracking and drilling contribute to climate change and suck up
finite water resources, then drought and wildfires worsen from
climate change.
The drought facing the Western United States is
bad. Really bad. It’s become worse faster than the last
one. As more of the United States suffers from drought
conditions and water supplies are diminishing, water
demands are rising. Smaller water supplies combined with
increasingly unpredictable weather patterns and other effects
of climate change pose an enormous threat by creating a
feedback loop that exacerbates drought conditions and
increases wildfire risk across the United States.
[Scientists] are setting out to test an alternative path to
protecting coastlines — one that involves using the ecosystems
that already exist or once existed along the coast, instead of
squeezing them out. [Katie] Nichols oversees Coastkeeper’s
living shorelines program, a project in partnership with
California State University, Long Beach, and California State
University, Fullerton, that restores ecosystem structures like
oyster beds and eelgrass meadows, which protect shorelines from
waves, erosion, and sea-level rise.
As California plunges into another “historic” drought, people
across the state are worried about water shortages. But the
last drought never really ended for some Californians, like
residents of East Porterville that still have emergency water
storage tanks in their front yards. With the state’s current
financial surplus, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity
to fund drought preparedness and water safety in communities
that have lived for decades with shallow and contaminated
drinking water wells, inadequate water treatment, and other
infrastructure failures… -Written by Carolina Garcia, a resident of Tombstone
Territory, and Sandra Chavez, a member of the
Safe and Affordable Funding for Equity and Resilience (SAFER)
Advisory Group.
Much of California’s $50 billion agricultural industry depends
on groundwater. We typically see only what this water makes
possible above the soil: almond and pistachio groves, citrus
orchards, rows of lettuce and grapevines and cattle herds in a
valley that supplies a quarter of the nation’s food even when
surface water is scarce. But a lot is happening below the
surface. Deep underground, intricate channels of sand and
gravel weave through tightly packed clays and silts, allowing
Earth to hold water like a sponge.
Severe drought is gripping most of California, but its misery
isn’t spread equally. While most of the state compares today’s
extreme conditions to previous droughts, people in Tulare
County speak of drought — in the singular, as in a continuous
state of being. … Tulare County’s never-ending drought
brings dried up wells and plenty of misery The entire West is
suffering from extreme dryness, heat and fire risk, and the
small, rural towns of northern Tulare County, outside of
Visalia, are caught in its vortex.
A large oilfield wastewater disposal pond near Buttonwillow
will likely close this summer, and its operator and last
remaining customer will together pay $645,000 in penalties and
fees, under a recent court settlement that further restricts a
decades-old practice that has become a focus of regional water
quality regulators. The accord concludes a 2019 lawsuit that
accused facility owner Valley Water Management Co. and
Colorado-based oil producer Sentinel Peak Resources of dumping
fluid containing harmful chemicals above a reservoir that
provides local drinking and irrigation water.
During the budget hearings on June 8, the Mendocino County
Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a proposal for a
standalone water agency to combat water insecurity in Mendocino
County. This water agency will immediately focus on the local
drought emergency and work on other water-related projects,
such as water curtailment and groundwater management, in the
future.
The first assessments of groundwater sustainability
plans have been released by the California Department of
Water Resources (DWR). In lieu of waiting until the end of the
two-year review period, DWR has decided to release assessments
as they are completed. Assessments have been completed for the
Santa Cruz Mid-County Basin in Santa Cruz County and 180/400
Foot Aquifer Subbasin in Monterey County. Assessments
for the Cuyama Valley Basin and Paso Robles Subbasin have also
been completed.
We’re moving later this summer to new quarters closer to the
Sacramento River, and we don’t want to haul all of our water
maps, Layperson’s Guides, DVDs and more to the new home. So
we’re making you a limited-time offer we hope you can’t refuse:
Take 30 percent off the price of all of our maps, guides
and more.
California’s drought highlights the importance of an
appointment sitting on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk – filling the
final seat on the State Water Resources Control
Board. This is a critical agency appointment at a
critical time. The drought highlights many inequities in
California water policy. Disadvantaged communities in Stockton
face the prospect of a drought summer plagued by harmful algae
blooms in Delta rivers. Those algae outbreaks, which can
harm children and kill pets, are caused by excessive nutrients
and inadequate freshwater flow. -Written by Belinda Faustina, a strategic advisor
with Los Angeles Waterkeeper, and Barbara
Barrigan-Parilla, the executive director of Restore the
Delta.
At the Kern County Water Summit held last week, hosted by the
Water Association of Kern County, Acting Deputy Director of the
Department of Water Resources Statewide Groundwater Management
Program Steven Springhorn provided an update on the
Department’s progress on SGMA implementation, including the
Department’s review of the submitted Groundwater Sustainability
Plans and the existing and proposed SGMA-related assistance.
Against the backdrop of what’s shaping up as a devastating
drought year, the California Department of Water Resources has
released its first assessments of groundwater sustainability
plans developed by local agencies to meet the requirements of
the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. The department
released reviews of four local plans, approving two but sending
the other two back to local groundwater sustainability
agencies, saying the plans need more work.
[During the last drought], small rural communities reliant on
shallow wells — many of them communities of color — were among
the most affected. More than 2,600 households reported losing
access to water because their wells went dry between 2012–16.
(That number is likely an undercount as reporting was
voluntary.) Much has changed however since the 2012–16 drought.
Drought reporting systems such as MyDryWaterSupply are
available today, and better data on domestic well depths and
locations, as well as groundwater levels, aid our understanding
of drought risk. -Written by Rich Pauloo, co-founder of the Water Data
Lab; and Alvar Escriva-Bou, a research fellow at the
Public Policy Institute of California Water.
For decades, large red-hot furnaces cooked the lead from
smashed batteries at the Exide plant, just seven miles from
Downtown Los Angeles, spouting plumes of toxic air that settled
on and contaminated thousands of homes. … In the years
since, the facility has been cited repeatedly for serious
compliance problems. According to a former DTSC senior
scientist’s review of public records, at least four are
responsible for soil and groundwater contamination that the
department has or should have known about for years or even
decades.
Among the nearly one hundred development projects pending on
the county of Napa Current Projects website comes a sleeper of
a project likely to go unnoticed by Napa city residents and
businesses who will be most negatively impacted. The remote
vineyard development project, proposed deep in the
headwaters above Lake Hennessey, seeks to clear 156.8 acres of
existing vegetation including oak woodlands, foothill pine
communities, and grasslands in order to construct a vineyard in
the Conn Creek/Lake Hennessey watershed. -Written by Kellie Anderson, resident of Angwin.
Not all farmland in the San Joaquin Valley will survive in a
post-SGMA world. Estimates are that the Sustainable Groundwater
Management Act will force between 500,000 to one million acres
of land that’s currently farmed to be taken out of production
to save groundwater. Which lands and what will become of those
lands are major question marks at this point. If Gov. Newsom’s
revised budget is approved as is, those questions could have an
extra $500 million to help find answers.
The wait is over for some Groundwater Sustainability Agencies
(GSAs). The California Department of Water Resources (DWR)
released the first Groundwater Sustainability Plan (GSP)
assessments for four basins yesterday, June 3, 2021. DWR
approved the 180/400 Foot Aquifer Subbasin in Salinas Valley
and the Santa Cruz Mid-County Basin. DWR determined both GSPs
“satisf[y] the objectives of the Sustainable Groundwater
Management Act (SGMA) and substantially compl[y] with the GSP
Regulations.”
Recent research from the US Geological Survey (USGS) suggests
that droughts, particularly the prolonged kind happening in
parts of the US, could increase the risk of harmful arsenic
exposure for people that rely on well water. Hundreds of
millions of years ago, the baseline quality of your drinking
water may have been set in stone, literally. Arsenic is a
common groundwater contaminant, largely because of local
geology. In Maine, for instance, the formation of the
Appalachian Mountains and volcanic activity came together to
concentrate arsenic and other metals into cracks inside the
bedrock…
The California Department of Water Resources (DWR) released its
first assessments of groundwater sustainability plans developed
by local agencies to meet the requirements of the Sustainable
Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). DWR has completed its
assessment and approved plans for the Santa Cruz Mid-County
Basin in Santa Cruz County and 180/400 Foot Aquifer Subbasin in
Monterey County.
Water Audit California is suing to make Napa County increase
oversight of groundwater pumping for vineyards, wineries, and
other uses, claiming that the pumping affects the Napa River.
The lawsuit said the county has a “public trust” duty to care
for the river. The idea is that too much groundwater pumping
from wells can keep groundwater from seeping into the river
during dry months, to the detriment of fish and other aquatic
life.
Groundwater is one of the hottest ticket items in California’s
water world these days. But much about it is a mystery. Where
is it? How does it move? Which are the best spots to percolate
water into the ground for storage? At least two technologies
hope to answer some of those questions: airborne
electromagnetic surveys and interferometric synthetic aperture
radar. That’s AEM and InSAR for short.
Cynthia Beltran moved to Sunizona with her seven-year-old son
last autumn even though the area lacks functional drinking
water wells, because it was all she could afford. She cannot
afford the $15,000 cost of deepening her well, which dried
up last year, and had been paying for a local firm to deliver
water in a tanker. But at $100 a week it became too expensive,
so now she will be relying on a friend to help her fetch water
from her mother’s well. … Nearly 20 wells in Sunizona
alone were deepened between 2015 and 2019, after they dried
up.
Free bottled water has begun to arrive at homes
with nitrate-tainted wells in parts of Stanislaus and
Merced counties. The ambitious effort, funded by farmers
and other parties, launched the week of May 10 with free
testing of residential wells. Those that exceeded the nitrate
threshold can start getting the 5-gallon jugs about 17 to 21
days later.
Can California regions regulate groundwater without destroying
their businesses and communities? That’s the question being
posed as regions and localities implement the Sustainable
Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), the historic 2014 state law
that brought regulation to California’s diminishing groundwater
supplies. –Written by columnist Joe Matthews
Can California regulate groundwater without destroying its own
communities? That’s the question being posed as regions
implement the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA),
the historic 2014 state law regulating California’s diminishing
groundwater supplies. Groundwater is buried in aquifers,
underground spaces between rocks, soils, and sand. Layers of
aquifers are called groundwater basins. California has hundreds
of them. Eight-five percent of Californians depend on
groundwater …
-Written by Joe Mathews, who writes the Connecting
California column for Zócalo Public Square.
Back in 1977, President Jimmy Carter wanted to put the Central
Arizona Project on a hit list of 17 water projects he found too
expensive and environmentally destructive. … [N]ow, as CAP’s
first water shortages draw near, a more subtle, long-term
threat to the Tucson area’s water future is emerging because of
climate change.
Two large reservoirs in our backyard are capable of holding
40,000 acre feet of water to recharge the underground table.
But federal rules prevent them from reaching capacity and it
will take an act of Congress to change the rules. Big Dry
Creek Reservoir in Clovis and Fancher Creek Reservoir east of
Clovis together can hold 40,000 acre feet of storm water.
That’s water that can eventually stream into the underground
water table.
Over the past decade, the farming town of Corcoran, California,
has been sinking two feet every year as agriculture firms pump
underground water to irrigate crops. The 7.47 square-mile area
in California’s San Joaquin Valley has 21,960 people and has
sunk 11.5 feet in the last 14 years. According to
the USGS California Water Science Center, the sinking is
the product of agriculture industries pumping underground water
to irrigate their crops for decades.
In California’s San Joaquin Valley, the farming town of
Corcoran has a multimillion-dollar problem. It is almost
impossible to see, yet so vast it takes NASA scientists using
satellite technology to fully grasp. Corcoran is sinking. Over
the past 14 years, the town has sunk as much as 11.5 feet in
some places — enough to swallow the entire first floor of a
two-story house and to at times make Corcoran one of the
fastest-sinking areas in the country, according to experts with
the United States Geological Survey.
Beavers, known for their work ethic, tenacity and sometimes
destructive instincts, are making a comeback in the worlds of
science and water as researchers look for natural ways to
restore rivers and wetlands and improve the health of
drought-stressed aquifers. … This fall, Colorado
Headwaters, a nonprofit that advocates for protecting and
restoring headwater regions in the state, is sponsoring
a beaver summit, a conference designed to unveil some of
the latest ecological research on creatures once valued only
for their glossy fur.
Growers in the Central Coast region of California produce most
of the cool-season vegetables for the U.S. from March to
mid-November. After several years of multi-cropping vegetables,
the groundwater in many of the coastal valleys has become
contaminated with nitrate. Some wells have concentrations of
nitrate several times the federal drinking water standard of 10
ppm (parts per million) nitrate-N. Rural communities that rely
on groundwater as their sole source of drinking water must
purchase bottled water or install small reverse osmosis
systems.
The Estrella-El Pomar-Creston Water District (EPCWD) has begun
creating a groundwater level monitoring network. Initially, the
district has begun work to add 30 new groundwater level
monitoring sites, using existing wells, throughout the
37,000-acre district. The campaign marks a significant
effort in the basin to move toward groundwater sustainability
in the Paso Robles Subbasin, according to the EPCWD.
Last week, the Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA)
held their spring conference virtually. Keynote speakers
included Wade Crowfoot, Secretary of Natural Resources, and
Karla Nemeth, Director of the Department of Water
Resources. In his speech, [Crowfoot] discussed the Newsom
Administration’s priorities, calling this the ‘decade of
resilience’, and giving three principles for going
forward. He also discussed the Voluntary
Agreements. Director Karla Nemeth gave the Thursday
morning keynote speech, touching on the Department’s response
to drought, SGMA implementation, the Delta Conveyance Project,
and the water use efficiency regulations.
Crystal Geyser bought the nearly 145,000 square foot bottling
plant in 2013. Since then, it’s been the target of protests by
local activists and members of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe.
Opponents say if it ever started operating, it would draw down
too much water, and cause air and noise pollution. … They are
in the midst of suing the beverage company in an effort to get
a new environmental impact report.
More wildfires. Hotter days. Drought. Sea-level rise. Those
conditions are an increasing reality in California, which is
steadily becoming an altered state. But if the grimmest
predictions of experts about our state and climate change
become true, the conditions will become far worse.
Current and future climate change effects are intensifying the
hydrological cycle, leading to increased variability of both
precipitation and runoff. This heightened pattern results in
more frequent and severe droughts and floods, as well as more
recurrent swings between these two extremes. Harvesting
floodwaters using managed aquifer recharge to replenish
depleted groundwater aquifers can simultaneously reduce flood
and drought risks.
A state appeals court has upheld California’s cleanup standards
for a cancer-causing chemical that was added to pesticides and
has polluted groundwater in the Central Valley, rejecting
challenges by manufacturers that may have to pay the costs. The
State Water Resources Control Board’s 2017 mandate for removing
nearly all TCP (1,2,3-trichloropropane) from drinking water was
contested by the California Manufacturers and Technology
Association, representing Dow Chemical Co. and Shell Oil, which
included the chemical in worm-killing fumigants widely used by
farmers through the 1980s.
Millions of people are betting on Arizona. They’re buying
homes, starting businesses, and families. The future of how we
use our water resources may dictate the future of their
success. … That question was addressed four decades earlier
with the Groundwater Management Act of 1980. The idea was the
law would ensure when water was taken out, just as much was put
back in, creating what they called a safe yield goal by
2025. Unfortunately, a new study released by ASU
researchers with the Kyl Center shows the law is not living up
to its promise as deep, thousands of years old aquifers
continue to be over-pumped.
California Governor Gavin Newsom on May 14 unveiled
his May budget revision that allocates $200
million to plug abandoned and orphaned oil and gas wells, many
located near low-income residential areas where the majority of
residents are Latino and Black. In January
2020, a report by the California Council on
Science & Technology revealed that California taxpayers could
be on the hook for more than $500 million to plug thousands of
“orphan” wells drilled and abandoned by oil and gas companies.
.. Plugging all 107,000 oil and wells in California when
they become idle would cost more than $9 billion, the
report also found.
Construction on 8 miles of water pipeline that will be serve as
life-blood for the Pure Water Soquel Project, is set to begin
on May 24 in Santa Cruz. Three distinct components of building
are set to take place during the next several months. From late
May until June 15 crews will work around California Street,
from the Santa Cruz Wastewater Treatment Facility to Laurel
Street. After that, and until around July 6, construction will
take place on Laurel Street to Chestnut Street. The third
scheduled construction phase will run from July 6 through Aug.
12 on Chestnut to the west end of the Laurel Street Bridge.
California — already in the clutches of another drought
emergency — is looking over its shoulder at what happened
last time, anticipating the worst and evaluating the strategies
that worked and those that failed. So is California in a
better position to weather this drought? Some things are
worse, some better: Groundwater is still being pumped with no
statewide limits, siphoning up drinking water that rural
communities rely on. In northern counties, residents are
reliving the last disaster as water restrictions kick in again,
but in the south, enough water is stored to avoid them for now.
… The upshot is California isn’t ready — again.
San Diego’s vulnerability to water shortages and drought is
shrinking significantly because residents and businesses are
using less water and city officials are boosting the local
supply. A new city analysis shows local water use dropped
sharply from 81.5 billion gallons in 2007 to about 57 billion
gallons in 2020, even though the city’s population has grown
about 1 percent per year over that time. The new data has
prompted city officials to revise downward long-term
projections of local water use by about 20 percent compared to
their estimates from 2015, the last time the city conducted
such an analysis.
Earth’s surface is ever changing. Sinkholes swallow
neighborhoods, river deltas slowly slide beneath the waves, and
fertile fields lose elevation as farmers draw large amounts of
water for irrigation from underlying aquifers. [T]hese
phenomena are known as subsidence … Building heavy
structures such as homes, skyscrapers, and even entire cities
also can trigger subsidence, explains Tom Parsons, a
geophysicist at the US Geological Survey in Moffett Field, CA.
Recently, he used computer simulations to estimate the effect
of San Francisco and its metropolitan area—where he and 7.75
million other people reside—on Earth’s crust.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Agricultural
Statistics Service (NASS) is forecasting another record almond
crop for California. The 2021 California Almond Subjective
Forecast estimates a three percent increase from last year’s
3.12-billion-pound crop. According to USDA-NASS, California
growers could be looking at a 2021 crop of 3.2 billion pounds.
If that number comes to fruition, it would be the largest
almond crop on record.
Less than a week after Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a drought
emergency for Northern California, Folsom Lake is standing at
one of its lowest levels ever. … Ryan Ojakian is
with the Regional Water Authority (RWA). Now, there’s a push
from the RWA for its 20 water providers that serve about 2
million people in the Sacramento region to shift to using more
groundwater than surface water to reduce reliance on Folsom
Lake and the Lower American River.
A permit has been granted by Tehama County for the
establishment of a new groundwater monitoring station located
at the Corning Public Works maintenance yard on Gallagher
Avenue near Highway 99W. During a presentation on the project
to the Tehama County Board of Supervisors, county Public Works
Flood Control Manager Ryan Teubert said there will be no cost
to the county as the yard is owned by Tehama County, and
drilling, installation and construction costs will be paid for,
and performed, by the California Department of Water Resources.
Rural, low-income Latino communities across California were
hardest hit by the last drought and could see drinking water
shortages again this year as extreme drought spreads across the
state, according to a report released Thursday by non-partisan
advisors to California’s lawmakers. The report from the
Legislative Analyst’s Office warns state officials to prepare
by ramping up monitoring of wells in vulnerable communities and
lining up emergency drinking water supplies to send
there.
In 1980, Arizona began regulating groundwater in the state’s
largest cities and suburbs under a landmark law that
called for most of these areas to achieve an overarching
goal by 2025: a long-term balance between the amount of
water pumped from the ground and the amount seeping back
underground to replenish aquifers. Forty-one years
later … [g]roundwater is still overpumped in most of the
state’s “active-management areas,” or AMAs. And in many places,
aquifer levels continue to decline.
Beavers, known for their work ethic, tenacity and sometimes
destructive instincts, are making a comeback in the worlds of
science and water as researchers look for natural ways to
restore rivers and wetlands and improve the health of
drought-stressed aquifers. … This fall, Colorado Headwaters,
a nonprofit that advocates for protecting and restoring
headwater regions in the state, is sponsoring a beaver summit,
a conference designed to unveil some of the latest ecological
research on creatures once valued only for their glossy fur.
On its surface, the idea of banking water to bridge the
certainty of future rain-deficient periods seems like an
innovative and non-controversial planning procedure. In the
end, however, it all depends on who holds the keys to the bank.
The notion of water banking has grabbed local attention lately
following a controversial and divided 3-2 vote March 3 by San
Luis Obispo County supervisors, a vote which numerous North
County entities view as opening the door to selling and
exporting county water resources to the highest outside bidder.
A federal agency Wednesday forecast a record harvest of 3.2
billion pounds of almonds in California. That would be a 3%
increase over 2020 for the nuts, the highest-grossing crop in
Stanislaus and several other counties. The report will set the
tone for the global almond trade, since California accounts for
about 80% of the supply. Several thousand people work on farms
and in processing plants in the Central Valley.
Ben Tobin has questions about the Grand Canyon’s caves. The
University of Kentucky geologist started learning about caves
as a young man, in part because his mother was a geologist, and
a childhood fascination grew over time. … When he was in
college, an internship in Arkansas doing cave tours got him
hooked, and eventually his work brought him out West, to Grand
Canyon National Park. Tobin specializes in what’s known as
karst hydrology. These are underground systems made up of
soluble rock such as limestone. To Tobin, caves are like
another world, with blind animals, fossils and archeological
finds.
When Sandra Chavez’ mother discovered she had stage four cancer
last year, one of Sandra’s first thoughts was about their
water. Her family’s private well is contaminated with nitrates
and Chavez wondered if years of drinking the water could have
caused her mother’s sickness. Chavez and her family have relied
on bottled water since they found out their well water was
unsafe in 2015. But sometimes they don’t have enough and are
forced to drink the contaminated water. So when Chavez
found out about a new program providing free bottled water
delivery for families with nitrate-contaminated wells, she was
frustrated she hadn’t been contacted.
A riverbed that has been parched since the end of the
19th century — a portion of the historic lifeblood of the
Gila River Indian Community — is now coursing again with water,
luring things like cattails and birds back to its
shores. … The revival of this small segment of the
649-mile (1045-kilometer) Gila River, which has served the
tribes that make up the Gila River Indian Community — the
Akimel O’odham (Pima) and the Pee-Posh (Maricopa) — for roughly
2,000 years, was an added benefit of a grassroots
infrastructure overhaul, known as “managed aquifer recharge,”
or MAR, which aimed to restore the local groundwater
basin.
Well owners in Santa Rosa Plain, Petaluma Valley and Sonoma
Valley are invited to join community meetings on groundwater
conditions and sustainable management of this critical water
source. The Santa Rosa Plain, Petaluma Valley and Sonoma
Valley groundwater sustainability agencies (GSAs) are nearing
completion of major plans that identify issues with current and
future groundwater resources and that describe how these
challenges will be addressed.
At the April meeting of the California Water Commission, the
Commission continued examining the state’s role in conveyance
projects by hearing from two experts on flood-managed aquifer
recharge, or Flood MAR. First, Dr. Graham Fogg, UC David
professor emeritus of Hydrogeology, discussed scaling up Flood
MAR and how that will likely present new conveyance
needs. Then, Jenny Marr, Supervising Engineer at the
Department of Water Resources, outlined the state’s approach to
flood Mar.
Governor Gavin Newsom announced an expansion of the drought
emergency to 41 of the state’s 58 counties, dedicating $5.1
billion to boost water infrastructure and an additional $1
billion to paying off nearly the entirety of Californian
household water debt. Yet, while the governor’s plan includes
$150 million for groundwater cleanup and water recycling
measures, it does nothing to speed up the process to bring
overdrafted water basins into full and sustainable operation.
The deadline is currently 2040 for critically overdrafted
basins and 2042 for remaining high and medium priority basins.
Spring is generally a time of renewal for the watersheds of the
western United States. Warmed by the lengthening days, the
region’s towering mountain ranges shed their mantle of snow,
releasing freshets of water into welcoming streams and
reservoirs. This year, though, the cycle is in disarray.
Outside of the Olympic and Cascade ranges of Washington state,
winter snows were subpar. The spring melt has been a dud. From
the Klamath to the Colorado and Rio Grande, watersheds are
under stress once again, and water managers face difficult
tradeoffs between farms, fisheries, and at-home uses.
State water agencies, the California Water Data Consortium
(Consortium) and Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) announced a
new partnership today to make an open-source groundwater
accounting platform freely available to help groundwater
sustainability agencies manage the transition to sustainable
supplies.
The state is facing major water impacts, but for those reliant
on water wells — in mobile home parks, rural communities, and
areas where water district access is limited — the concern is
growing. The Department of Water Resources has created
a website that can help those who rely on well water
to figure out just how much at-risk they are of a water
shortage. The site was created after the last drought, but
with California’s drought only recently worsening, it had not
been widely used or needed until now. The interactive map
allows users to explore their area and keep tabs on their well
water situation.
Many dryland cities like Los Angeles, Cairo and Tehran have
already outstripped natural water recharge, but are expected to
continue growing, resulting in a deepening arid urban water
crisis. … The situations in arid and semi-arid cities
like Phoenix, Arizona; Bamako, Mali; or Dubai, UAE, differ in
their particulars, but rhyme in their impending disastrous
trajectory. These, and other arid-region cities, are
approaching the edge of an ecological cliff: dependent on
sustaining growth, which itself requires a growth in water
supplied by faraway and finite sources, and delivered by aging
infrastructure. But water in dryland regions is
getting scarcer and supplies
more unpredictable.
In water-stressed farming areas of California, farmers removed
productive trees and idled other land to divert what little
water they have to other crops, as the reality of the 2021
drought became ever more apparent. “We’re removing 15-year-old,
prime-production almond trees,” said Daniel Hartwig of Woolf
Farming in Fresno County. “We’re pulling out almost 400 acres,
simply because there’s not enough water in the system to
irrigate them, and long term, we have no confidence that there
would be water in the future.”
California is now in its second year of drought, hard on the
heels of the last one in 2012-16. But drought is not an
equal-opportunity crisis; it can be more or less disruptive
depending on geography, storage, how water supplies are
managed—and, of course, precipitation. And some sectors—notably
rural water water systems and the environment—are more
vulnerable.
As California enters what could be a record-breaking drought, a
just-completed nine-year floodplain restoration project at the
confluence of the San Joaquin and Tuolumne rivers offers an
ambitious attempt at one mitigation solution. At a 1,600-acre
former dairy ranch called Dos Rios, the conservation
organization River Partners removed berms that farmers had
originally constructed to protect their alfalfa and wheat crops
from the river. It turned fields into seasonal pools where
endangered baby salmon and migratory birds can rest, and water
can trickle down to refill aquifers.
A water district locked in a long-running legal battle over
residential rates with the city of Ventura recently agreed
to pay $1 million, but the fight does not appear to
be over. City Attorney Gregory Diaz said Friday he
expected the United Water Conservation District to
exercise its option to appeal. Ventura has filed lawsuits every
year against the water district since the agency implemented
increased charges in 2011-12. This settlement is for fiscal
year 2019-20. The district charged residential customers
three times more than agricultural customers for groundwater,
and the city challenged its methodology.
As California slowly emerges from the depths of the COVID-19
pandemic, one remnant left behind by the statewide lockdown
offers a sobering reminder of the economic challenges still
ahead for millions of the state’s residents and the water
agencies that serve them – a mountain of water debt.
… Our latest article in Western Water explores the
hurdles to helping consumers, how some water agencies have
devised workarounds and how far more lasting solutions remain
out of reach.Western Water is just one of the publications
produced by our journalism team…
In scale and ambition, California’s Sustainable Groundwater
Management Act (SGMA) has few parallels. And the work becomes
increasingly urgent as the climate crisis makes water shortages
increasingly severe. … This emphasis on local expertise
points to SGMA’s possibilities — and its potential pitfalls —
especially when it comes to deciding what “sustainable” water
management means. Each management body has wide discretion to
define “sustainability” — and the path to
sustainability by 2040 — for its particular basin.
San Diego takes droughts very seriously. That’s why the region
is well-positioned to weather an extended dry spell with enough
water. Local officials don’t shrug at the drought
conditions across the state that have triggered emergencies in
a couple of northern counties. For one thing, the wildfire
threat can be as dangerous here as anywhere. San Diego may
be more drought-tolerant than in the past when it comes to
water…
A new groundwater monitoring station is coming to Corning’s
public works yard on Gallagher Avenue just across from a
warehouse that stores various road signs and equipment. Public
Works Flood Control Manager Ryan Teubert presented the project
Tuesday to the Tehama County Board of Supervisors. It consists
of construction at the yard, which will be funded and performed
by the California Department of Water Resources.
The San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors sent a letter
to the California Water Resources Control Board on May 4
formally opposing the Shandon-San Juan Water District’s (SSJWD)
two recent applications for water from Lake Nacimiento and
Santa Margarita Lake—a move that puts two partners on the Paso
Robles Groundwater Basin at odds with one another.
A big change in drought conditions came out Thursday
morning for all of California. With an update from
the US Drought Monitor, 73% of California is now listed in
Extreme Drought, the second most severe classification the US
Drought Monitor utilizes. So far, 5% of California is
listed as being in Exceptional Drought, which is the US Drought
Monitor’s top-level drought designation. The increase to
73% is a significant jump from 53% in Extreme Drought from last
week. This news comes on the heels of other drought changes,
such as water restrictions for agriculture north of the
Delta.
Gov. Doug Ducey has asked the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD)
to address groundwater contamination near military
installations in Arizona. In an Apr. 27 letter to Secretary of
Defense Lloyd Austin, Gov. Ducey requested DOD to identify and
treat water in Arizona contaminated in the areas surrounding
four DOD installations and to prevent additional human exposure
to per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from other DOD
facilities in Arizona, which impact the groundwater. … These
bases are located in the two most populous metropolitan areas
in Arizona and each is surrounded by thousands of Arizonans who
rely on clean groundwater for drinking water purposes.
The fate of Searles Valley Minerals may hinge on a special
virtual meeting of the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater
Authority later this week, at least according to SVM’s Camille
Anderson. The meeting is scheduled for 10 a.m. Thursday. At it,
the IWVGA will discuss how to respond to SVM’s non-payment of
the authority’s groundwater replenishment fee. … The
groundwater authority was formed in response to the Sustainable
Groundwater Management Act of 2014, which requires all
California basins to eventually achieve
sustainability. The replenishment fee is part of the
IWVGA’s long-term plan to reach sustainability, but has proven
wildly controversial for some.
When Ramona Hernandez turns on her kitchen faucet in El Adobe,
an unincorporated town just a few miles southeast of
Bakersfield, the water that splashes out looks clean and
inviting. But she doesn’t dare drink it. … Drinking the
tap water in this tiny community of dusty ranches and unpaved
roads could expose Hernandez to arsenic. So, for years, she and
her husband, Gerardo, have shuttled twice a week to the nearby
town of Lamont to load up on bottled water. At a cost of about
$80 a month, it’s enough for drinking and cooking.
California’s current drought is already off to a strong start,
with some major challenges already looming just two years in.
Compared to the drought of 2012‒16, the normally wetter
Sacramento and North Coast regions have been hit much harder
than the rest of the state. Beyond the local challenges this
poses, drought in the Sacramento region is already having
statewide implications, given its key role in supplying water
to farms and cities further south.
With drought conditions returning to California, the Department
of Water Resources (DWR) has finalized a tool and
recommendations to support those communities most at risk
during drought. Historically, small water systems and rural
communities that rely on private domestic wells have
been hit the hardest by prolonged periods of dry
conditions. To provide increased state support, DWR led a
two-year process learning from stakeholder experiences about
what puts small water systems and rural communities at higher
risk of water shortages and what is needed to build their
resilience to drought.
Increasingly ominous signs suggest that we are entering another
multiyear drought in California. The State Water Project
recently reduced projected water deliveries for 2021 from 10
percent of requested supplies to 5 percent, and on April 21,
Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a regional drought emergency in the
Russian River watershed in Northern California. But it’s a
different story in San Diego County.
-Written by Gary Croucher, chair of the San Diego County
Water Authority’s Board of Directors.
A little more than a week ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that
not only would California effectively ban hydraulic fracturing,
or fracking, by 2024, but the state also would work to phase
out oil extraction entirely by 2045. … It was — like the
governor’s promise last year that the state would ban the sale
of new gas-powered cars by 2035 — a sweeping pronouncement
meant to show urgency in addressing climate change while the
state he leads struggles with many of its most dire effects.
But meeting those goals requires complex regulatory
maneuvering.
Climate change and water scarcity are front and center in the
western U.S. The region’s climate is warming, a severe
multi-year drought is underway and groundwater supplies are
being overpumped in many locations. … About 4,000
miles of canals transport water to some 35 million
Californians and 5.7 million acres of farmland across the
state. Covering these canals with solar panels would reduce
evaporation of precious water – one of California’s most
critical resources – and help meet the state’s renewable energy
goals, while also saving money.
On March 24, 2021, the Groundwater Resources Association of
California and California Groundwater Coalition hosted the
virtual 2021 Groundwater Law & Legislation Forum, featuring a
keynote address from California’s Natural Resources Secretary
Wade Crowfoot and updates on pending groundwater legislation,
DWR’s SGMA implementation, and ACWA’s position on potential
bond measures. One panel focused on the intersection of
environmental justice, groundwater management and the role the
legislative process can play…
Water talk will be a big part of Tuesday’s Tehama County Board
of Supervisors meeting as plans for a new groundwater
monitoring site in Corning are coming to fruition. Tehama
County Public Works plans to sign a Permit to Use Land
Agreement for a groundwater station in the Corning Public Works
yard on Gallagher Avenue, should the board approve the request.
Creating and maintaining the station will be a combined effort
of Tehama County Public Works, the Flood Control and Water
Conservation District and the California Department of Water
Resources. According to the related agenda report, the station
is expected to be in use for a minimum of 20 years.
British journalist James Bartholomew is widely credited with
creating the phrase “virtue signaling” to describe positioning
oneself on the popular side of an issue without actually doing
anything about it. Politicians are particularly prone to
uttering words or making token efforts on difficult issues to
stave off criticism about their failure to act meaningfully.
Gov. Gavin Newsom is California’s champion virtue-signaler as
he faces a recall election later this year. … There’s no
better example than Newsom’s ever-shifting attitude toward
hydraulic fracturing to increase petroleum production. -Written by Dan Walters
This weekend’s rain in Northern California, while welcome, did
little to address the dry conditions across our state. As the
state’s recent dismal snow survey showed, we are in for tough
times ahead. Less snow means lower reservoirs, less water in
our rivers and streams, and more groundwater pumping. And that
spells trouble, particularly for disadvantaged communities and
sensitive ecosystems, which have historically borne the brunt
of California drought in consequences like dry wells and salmon
die-offs.
Monterey One Water officials on Monday moved closer to its goal
of providing additional water for the Monterey Peninsula when
it unanimously approved a key environmental report for its
expansion project. The 10 members of the board of Monterey One
Water all voted to approve an environmental document called a
supplemental environmental impact report, or SEIR, that
advances closer to the expansion of its regional treatment
plant. … Monday’s action allows Monterey One to move
closer to expanding its treatment facility — Pure Water
Monterey — to increase the amount of treated water reintroduced
to groundwater and consequently dramatically increase the
Peninsula’s supply.
Millions of drinking wells around the world may soon be at risk
of running dry. Overpumping, drought and the steady influence
of climate change are depleting groundwater resources all over
the globe, according to new research. As much as 20% of the
world’s groundwater wells may be facing imminent failure,
potentially depriving billions of people of fresh water.
… Residents of California’s Central Valley are preparing
for another arid summer and the rising risk of dry
wells, The Fresno Bee reported yesterday. It’s a
recurring pattern there.
Hydraulic fracturing has occurred in California and nationwide
for decades; however, recent advancements in horizontal
drilling technologies and “well stimulation” techniques have
been instrumental in triggering an oil and gas boom, making the
U.S. the world’s largest producer of oil and gas
reserves. California produces more oil than all but three
other states (Texas, North Dakota and Alaska), and Kern County
is responsible for more than 70 percent of the state’s oil
production. Environmentalists and other members of the
public became concerned that the hydraulic fracturing process
may contaminate groundwater aquifers …
On Friday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) unveiled a new
initiative to ban new and future permits for hydraulic fracking
beginning in 2024. The ban is part of California’s effort to
move away from oil extraction to source fuel, focusing on
developing renewable sources such as wind and solar. Fracking,
or hydraulic fracturing, is the sourcing of oil from deep
subterranean rocks, using a high-pressured water mixture
drilled into the earth that releases natural gas and oil.
With a snowpack at 20-percent of normal, as of April 1, Inyo
County and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power begin
a month of discussion over the proposed pumping plan for the
2021-22 run-off year. LADWP intends to pump from 64,600 to
78,980 acre-feet of water from well fields in the Owens Valley.
Inyo’s Water Commission will meet this evening at 6 p.m. for
its initial discussion of the plan, laid out with proposed
volumes from Laws to Lone Pine.
For years it’s been relatively easy to measure pollution from,
say, a factory. At a factory, there might be just one pipe of
waste to measure. Easy enough. But what about a farm? We
might not typically think of farms as sources of pollution. But
they can have big impacts on the land over time. Unlike at a
factory, the waste filters slowly through soil across
the whole plot of land. This waste—excess nutrients from
fertilizer—can eventually reach groundwater.
As drought realities set in, money is flowing to water
authorities to fix wells and watersheds. Fresno and Madera
water sources will get their piece of $26 million in grants
from the State of California’s Department of Water Resources,
according to a press release from the agency. The money is
intended to go toward overdrafted groundwater basins that
communities rely on during times of drought. … Sixteen
individual construction projects will be funded in the Central
Valley.
California is in the second year of a drought. Governor Newsom
this week made his first drought declaration. Just how dry is
this drought, so far? What are some likely
implications? And what might State and local governments
do about it?
News of drought and climate change impacts on Arizona’s water
supplies has become more alarming with the release of each new
study. To prepare for a drier future, Arizona will need an
informed public. For help in understanding the state’s water
management situation, a brief new reference work is now
available from the University of Arizona Water Resources
Research Center.
It has taken until the end of the second straight historically
dry winter, but California and its vast network of urban and
agricultural water suppliers, including those on the parched
North Coast, are now ramping up to confront the drought that is
tightening its grip on the state. Sonoma County
supervisors are set on Tuesday to proclaim a drought emergency,
becoming the first local government to take formal action on a
burgeoning water crisis that Gov. Gavin Newsom highlighted
Wednesday.
