The Central Valley is a vital agricultural region that dominates
the center of California, stretching 40-60 miles east to west and
about 450 miles from north to south. It covers 22,500
square miles, about 13.7% of California’s total land area.
Key watersheds are located here: The Sacramento Valley in the
north, San Joaquin Valley and Tulare Basin to the south. In
addition, the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers drain their
respective valleys and meet to form the Sacramento-San Joaquin
Bay Delta, which flows to the Pacific Ocean via the San Francisco
Bay.
In recent years, thick layers of cyanobacteria—commonly known
as blue-green algae—have closed popular local swimming spots
Lake Anza and Lake Temescal for weeks at a time. Last summer, a
toxic algae bloom in the San Francisco Bay killed thousands of
fish. Although algae is always present in some quantity in
lakes and the bay, higher temperatures, stagnant water, and
excessive nutrient levels can cause the algae to multiply. If
the particular species has toxins in it, such as blue-green
algae or the Heterosigma akashiwo species that bloomed in the
bay last summer, the water can become unsafe for humans and
animals. Algae blooms and cyanobacteria have become state and
nationwide problems. In the Bay Area, water managers were
beginning to wonder if the extreme drought conditions of recent
years had pushed the problem into a dangerous new phase in
local waters.
With California enduring record-breaking rain and snow and Gov.
Gavin Newsom recently easing restrictions on
groundwater recharge, interest in “managed aquifer recharge”
has never been higher. This process – by which floodwater is
routed to sites such as farm fields so that it percolates into
the aquifer – holds great promise as a tool to replenish
depleted groundwater stores across the state. But one concern,
in the agricultural context, is how recharge might push
nitrates from fertilizer into the groundwater supply.
Consumption of well water contaminated with nitrates has been
linked to increased risk of cancers, birth defects and other
health impacts.
Most of the country’s lettuce and other leafy greens come from
California’s Salinas Valley, where 13 atmospheric rivers this
winter have obliterated local drought conditions. Farmers have
welcomed the water and also sometimes struggled with the
deluge. Reporter Amy Mayer has this look at what it all means
for spring salads. AMY MAYER, BYLINE: Andrew Regalado and his
father trudge through sticky mud on the edge of a field at
World’s Finest Farm in Hollister, Calif. They’ve owned the
organic vegetable and herb farm for about 17 years. In a creek
bed just beyond the field, cloudy brown water leaps at the
banks, and that’s days after floodwaters have mostly receded.
Another storm is coming. ANDREW REGALADO: If this water’s still
here, there’s a good chance we might get flooded again. Yeah,
so it’ll be a tough year.
The series of storms that have hit California since the
beginning of the year is translating to additional water for
millions of Californians. The State Water Project is
proactively working to move and store as much of the surplus
water from these storms as possible. The State Water Project
(SWP) is making additional water available to its contractors
(public agencies and local water districts) that have the
ability to take delivery of the water in their own system,
including through groundwater recharge. Known as “Article 21
water,” this water does not count toward formal SWP allocation
amounts. This water is available only under certain conditions:
when there is no place to store this water in the SWP
reservoirs; when there is a demand for this water from the
south of Delta contractors above their allocated amount; and
when there is available pumping and conveyance capacity within
the SWP.
Our water managers have been investing in groundwater
infrastructure for the past two decades, and with consistent
investments, we’re now seeing the fruits of our labor. During
the recent severe weather conditions, we replenished the
groundwater basin and stored surface water for future use,
thanks to our Aquifer Storage and Recovery investments. In just
the first week of March, we banked 44 million gallons of water
and doubled that amount this week. With 88 million gallons of
banked water, it can supply about 732 homes annually. We’ve
been saving water like this for a while now. In fact, this past
January, we saved enough water to supply 1,000 homes annually.
And a year ago, we had surplus surface water and stored a
significant amount, equivalent to 160 Olympic-sized
pools.
California’s climate whiplash has been on full display in the
San Joaquin Valley this winter as the region has shifted from
managing three years of drought impacts to enduring
widespread flooding following a series of intense atmospheric
rivers. Our Central Valley Tour at
the end of April is your best opportunity to
understand both the challenges and opportunities of water
management in the region. The 3-day, 2-night tour tour
weaves around and across the entire valley to give you a
firsthand look at farms, wetlands and major
infrastructure such as Friant Dam in the Sierra Nevada
foothills near Fresno and San Luis Reservoir in the
Coastal Range near Los Banos, the nation’s largest off-stream
reservoir and a key water facility serving both the State Water
Project and the federal Central Valley Project.
New research experimentally confirms that nitrate can help
transport naturally occurring uranium from the underground to
groundwater, according to a press release from the
University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The new research backs a
2015 study led by Karrie Weber of the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln. The 2015 showed that aquifers contaminated
with high levels of nitrate — including the High Plains Aquifer
residing beneath Nebraska — also contain uranium concentrations
far exceeding a threshold set by the U.S. EPA. Uranium
concentrations above that EPA threshold have been shown to
cause kidney damage in humans, especially when regularly
consumed via drinking water.
The Bureau of Reclamation said Tuesday water allocations to the
Central Valley Project will increase thanks to the incredible
amount of rain and snow the state has received. The initial
allocation issued Feb. 22 was conservative due to below-average
precipitation in February, according to the Bureau of
Reclamation. The increase is due to the persistent wet
weather that dominated the end of February and almost all of
March. The atmospheric river events have greatly boosted
reservoir levels, including the two main reservoirs in the
state north and south of the delta – Shasta and San Luis,
respectively. … The latest allocations raised
irrigation water service to 80% from 35% of their contract
total, and municipal and industrial water service to 100% from
75% of their historic use.
[A]gricultural practices, especially in California, must be
updated to survive the future. One powerful change that is
growing momentum is strategic cropland repurposing. Doing
cropland repurposing right can benefit many, including
landowners. … Cropland retirement has direct
negative effects on agricultural revenues and farmworker
employment, with ripple effects in other sectors that depend on
agriculture (such as transportation and agricultural services).
But cropland retirement also means a decrease in pesticide,
synthetic fertilizers, and water use that can bring significant
environmental and local public health benefits. How do we
weigh these scenarios and decide if cropland repurposing makes
sense?
Tuesday, the House Committee on Natural Resources discussed the
increased need for water storage in California and the rest of
the western United States given the highly above average
precipitation after years of drought. The Subcommittee on
Water, Wildlife and Fisheries held a hearing on long-term
drought and the water storage issues throughout the reasons to
discuss the situation and possible solutions.
… Bourdeau, the Vice Chair of the San Luis and
Delta-Mendota Water Authority … [and] a director for
Westlands Water District … noted that farmers throughout
the Central Valley have spent billions of dollars to put drip
irrigation systems in place, among other water-saving measures,
to go along with the conservation efforts from municipal water
users. But without proper water storage solutions, the
nation’s future could be imperil if the Valley’s food
production wanes.
State officials were supposed to take a conservative approach
to approving salmon fishing season this year — and they did.
California’s fishing season had been scheduled to open April 1.
Instead, as a result of low salmon projections, the season has
been canceled. Salmon provides more to the state than meets the
eye. … According to the California Department of Fish
and Wildlife, salmon numbers are irregular during the three
year life cycle. Data has shown that in years following wetter
seasons fish stock has increased. Consequently there has been a
decline in stock for years following drier seasons.
Floods and droughts are not opposites and can occur
simultaneously. This occurs often in California and is
especially well-illustrated this year. Floods, droughts, and
water scarcity are different. Floods are too much water at a
place and time, and we would often pay to reduce the water
present at that location and moment. Droughts and water
scarcity represent too little water at a place and time,
meaning we would often pay to increase its availability. We
highlight these differences because people tend to view such
conditions through an unrealistic zero-sum lens. This essay
uses this year’s experience to examine how floods, drought, and
water scarcity differ, can occur in the same year, and how
droughts might end, but leave legacies.
Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday relaxed drought rules in California
amid a winter season filled with atmospheric river storms,
flooding and a massive Sierra Nevada snowpack — and officials
signaled that an end to the declared drought emergency in the
Bay Area and many other regions is coming soon. At an
appearance at a groundwater recharge project in Yolo County,
Newsom announced the end of state regulations he put in place
last March that required cities and water agencies to impose
water restrictions such as limits on the number of days a week
residents could water lawns and landscaping. … Due to
brimming reservoirs and the big snowpack, the state Department
of Water Resources also announced Friday that it will increase
water deliveries through the State Water Project, which serves
27 million people, from 35% of requested amounts to 75%,
a number that could still increase further in May and June.
With California enduring record-breaking rain and snow and Gov.
Gavin Newsom recently easing restrictions on groundwater
recharge, interest in “managed aquifer recharge” has never been
higher. This process – by which floodwater is routed to sites
such as farm fields so that it percolates into the aquifer –
holds great promise as a tool to replenish depleted groundwater
stores across the state. But one concern, in the agricultural
context, is how recharge might push nitrates from fertilizer
into the groundwater supply. Consumption of well water
contaminated with nitrates has been linked to increased risk of
cancers, birth defects and other health impacts.
The costs of California’s relentless winter storms keep rising.
And outside of the human toll — with at least 28 people killed
since January — the price will be measured in billions. The
“bomb cyclone” that lashed San Francisco on Tuesday was the
latest in an epic series of extreme weather events to hit
California since New Year’s Eve. It blew out windows from
skyscrapers, flung barges into a historic bridge, sent trees
tumbling across roads, knocked down power lines, and threatened
a major freeway as the waterlogged hillside beneath it started
to collapse….The price tag for all this
mayhem — road repairs, damaged homes, lost
crops — won’t become clear for months. But the early
estimates are sobering.
Join us May 4 for an open house and reception at our office
near the Sacramento River to meet our team and learn more about
what we do to educate and foster understanding of California’s
most precious natural resource — water. At the open house, you
can enjoy refreshments and chat with our team about our tours,
conferences, maps, publications and training programs for
teachers and up-and-coming water industry professionals. You’ll
also be able to learn more about how you can support our work –
and you’ll have a chance to win prizes! The open house will be
held in the late afternoon on May 4. More details and a
sign-up are coming soon!
For the first time in more than two years, much of the
southwest portion of California is free of both drought and
“abnormally dry” conditions. According to the U.S. Drought
Monitor, Santa Barbara, Ventura and Orange counties are
drought-free. San Diego and Los Angeles counties, although they
show improvement in the last seven days, haven’t completely
shaken “abnormal dry” and “moderate drought” statuses. The
bird’s eye view: Every week, California moves further away from
its once drought-stricken conditions. Most of the central
Sierra, foothills, Central Valley and the entire coast have
exited drought conditions. Roughly 64% of the state is
drought-free.
Floating solar panels placed on reservoirs around the world
could generate enough energy to power thousands of cities,
according to a study published last week in the journal Nature
Sustainability. Called floating photovoltaic systems, or
“floatovoltaics,” these solar arrays function the same way as
panels on land, capturing sunlight to generate electricity.
… The new research shows this buoyant technology has the
potential to create vast amounts of power and conserve
water—without taking up precious space on land. … A
handful of countries are already answering that question by
using floating solar panels in a limited capacity… California
plans to test a similar idea in which solar panels will
be placed above irrigation canals.
The feast or famine nature of California water has never been
more apparent than now. After three years of punishing drought,
the state has been slammed by a dozen atmospheric rivers. On
our Central
Valley Tour next month, you will see the
ramifications of this nature in action. Focusing on the San
Joaquin Valley, the tour will bring you up close to farmers,
cities and disadvantaged communities as well
as managers trying to capture flood waters to augment
overpumped groundwater basins while also protecting communities
from damaging flood impacts. Despite the recent rains, the San
Joaquin Valley most years deals with little to no water
deliveries for agricultural irrigation and wetland habitat
management.
During a winter of blizzards, floods and drought-ending
downpours, it’s easy to forget that California suffers
from chronic water scarcity — the long-term decline
of the state’s total available fresh water. This rainy season’s
inundation isn’t going to change that. … It’s all about
groundwater. It is the long-term disappearance of
groundwater that is the major driver behind the state’s steady
decline in total available fresh water, which hydrologists
define as snowpack, surface water, soil moisture and
groundwater combined. … The gains made during wet years
simply can’t offset the over-pumping during the dry years in
between. In fact, the state’s groundwater deficit is now so
large that it will never be fully replenished. -Written by Jay Famiglietti, a global futures
professor at Arizona State University.
The state has been deluged by storms this winter, hit by 12
atmospheric rivers that have led to evacuation orders, rising
rivers and broken levees. In some parts of the Sierra Nevada,
more than 55 feet of snow have fallen. With reservoirs filling
up, many Californians are eager to put the severe, 3-year
drought behind them. A major water supplier in Southern
California recently lifted mandatory conservation rules that
limited outdoor watering. Large parts of the state are now free
of drought, according to the federal government’s Drought
Monitor, which looks at rainfall and soil moisture. But in
California, water shortages aren’t just due to a lack of rain,
and the state’s chronic water problems are far from over.
You may have heard it repeatedly through local and national
news outlets or from organizations critical of California’s
agricultural water use. At the height of a historic drought in
2015, for example, The Washington Post published a report
titled “Agriculture is 80% of water use in California.” And a
2022 report by Food and Water Watch, titled “These industries
are sucking up California’s water and worsening drought,” again
noted that, “in California, 80% of our water goes toward
agriculture.” Really? Before we explain just how much that 80%
figure is taken out of context, this fact is worth noting:
Water for farmers in California produces by far America’s
largest food supply, including staples that are affordable,
safe, nutritious and essential for our daily lives.
A strong late-season Pacific storm that brought damaging winds
and more rain and snow to saturated California was blamed for
two deaths and forecasters said additional flooding was
possible Wednesday in parts of the state. Tuesday’s
storm focused most of its energy on central and southern
parts of the state, bringing threats of heavy runoff and
mountain snowfall. In the north, intense hail was reported in
Sacramento, the state capital. Locally heavy rain and
snowmelt may cause flooding Wednesday in southern California
and central Arizona, the National Weather Service warned.
With the discussions surrounding the modernization of our water
system in California for both wetter and drier years, including
the water rights system, we offer the following observations
from the Sacramento Valley to help bring some focus to the
conversations: California’s water rights system is foundational
to our state’s water management system for cities and rural
communities, farms, fish and wildlife, hydropower and
recreation—thus our economy and environment are dependent upon
the orderly exercise of the water rights system and we are all
invested in its success. … California’s existing water
rights structure and system are working in the Sacramento
Valley to serve water for multiple benefits, including cities
and rural communities, farms and ranches, fish and wildlife,
recreation, and hydropower.
Jay Lund, Vice Director of the Center for Watershed Sciences
and Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering, and his wife
Jean Lund have made a historic donation of $800,000 to the
Center for Watershed Sciences. This large and generous gift
will support graduate students to engage in interdisciplinary
water research, pursue their own interests, and think
creatively about how to tackle major water problems. Water
management is a critical part of any society, and UC Davis is
uniquely situated to address water challenges in California and
across the globe. UC Davis is also an ideal setting for
hands-on, collaborative learning, such that new generations of
water professionals are trained across multiple disciplines and
in novel ways.
California has experienced an exceptionally wet winter with 11
atmospheric rivers battering the state since late December. A
twelfth such storm is due to land on Tuesday, threatening to
cause even more flooding, landslides and road closures.
Atmospheric rivers are vast airborne currents of dense moisture
carried aloft for hundreds of miles from the Pacific and
funneled over land to fall as bouts of heavy rain and snow.
Here’s what such storms mean for the near and long
term. California has received 147% of average
rainfall so far this season, according to the state
Department of Water Resources.
Though California may be ending its winter with quenched
reservoirs and near record snowpack, meteorologists are warning
that the state will face increased flooding risk in the coming
months as Sierra Nevada snowmelt fills rivers and streams. On
Thursday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s
spring flood outlook reported that drought conditions will
continue to improve in much of the state, but the potential for
flooding will worsen in the face of heavy snowpack and elevated
soil moisture. … The severity of that flooding remains
to be seen, however, and depends on a variety of weather
factors, experts say. … Potential triggers for rapid
snowmelt could be an early season heat wave or another series
of warm storms, Swain said …
The State Water Resources Control Board has approved a request
by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to divert floodwaters from
the San Joaquin River so they can percolate down to aquifers.
The plan would divert 600,000 acre feet of water — or more than
the 191 billion gallons supplied to the city of Los Angeles
each year. … Newsom also has signed an executive
order temporarily lifting regulations and setting clear
conditions for diverting floodwater without permits to recharge
groundwater storage. Groundwater accounts for as much as
60% of California’s water supply during dry times. The aquifers
usually refill when rain and floodwater percolates through the
soil and into the basins. As California’s drought lingered, the
basins weren’t recharging.
On March 10, officials in California made the difficult yet
pragmatic decision to cancel … ocean salmon commercial or
sport fishing off California’s coast until April 2024. In the
Sacramento and Klamath rivers, Chinook salmon numbers have
approached record lows due to recent drought conditions.
… Right now, we believe that the commercial salmon
fishing ban is what our salmon need to ensure population
numbers do not dip to unrecoverable lows. As we look to future
population resiliency, there are so many other things these
fish need, and our teams are working hard to make them
happen. CalTrout works from ridge top to river mouth to
get salmon populations unassisted access to each link in the
chain of habitats that each of their life stages depends on.
The southern Sierra Nevada is covered with the deepest snowpack
in recorded history, and the rest of the range is not far
behind. When all that snow melts, where will it go? You
can read the answer in the landscape of the Central Valley. To
the eye it is nearly flat, covered by layers of gravel, silt
and clay washed from the mountains over the eons by rain and
melting snow. … The solution is shockingly simple,
relatively cheap — compared with the cost of cataclysmic floods
— and surprisingly non-controversial. We just haven’t yet done
it on the scale that’s needed. California needs to restore its
floodplains. Not the whole valley floors, and not as they were
in the pre-development era. But it needs to have many more
acres of land reserved for floodwater.
California’s latest atmospheric rivers are sending rainfall
higher into the mountains and onto the state’s crucial
snowpack. The rain alone is a problem for low-lying areas
already dealing with destructive flooding, but the prospect of
rain on the deep mountain snow has triggered widespread flood
warnings. When rain falls on snow, it creates complex flood
risks that are hard to forecast. Those risks are also rising
with climate change. For much of the United States, storms with
heavy rainfall can coincide with seasonal snow cover. When that
happens, the resulting runoff of water can be much greater than
what is produced from rain or snowmelt alone. The combination
has resulted in some of the nation’s most destructive and
costly floods, including the 1996 Midwest floods and the 2017
flood that damaged California’s Oroville Dam. -Written by Keith Musselman, an assistant professor in
geography, mountain hydrology and climate change at the
University of Colorado Boulder.
It was late Friday morning when muddy, brown water started
rushing onto Michelle Hackett’s Salinas Valley farms. On one
side of her family’s Riverview Farms cannabis business, a
county-mandated retention pond overflowed. Next door, a farm
abandoned by another grower — one of dozens of cannabis
businesses to shut down in Monterey County in recent years —
spawned another small river headed straight for Hackett and her
skeleton crew. … Cannabis businesses like Hackett’s —
along with thousands of undocumented farmworkers and the area’s
unhoused residents — fear they’ll be left to fend for
themselves as yet another winter storm batters California’s
Central Coast, local officials and advocates say.
California’s 11th atmospheric river storm of the season
barreled through a beleaguered state this week, dropping more
rain and snow, sending thousands scrambling for higher ground
and leaving more than 300,000 without power. The rain was
expected to continue into Wednesday across Southern California,
which saw rainfall records Tuesday. … The storm arrives amid
near-record snowpack and one of California’s wettest winters in
recent memory. Nine back-to-back atmospheric river storms hit
the state in late December and early January, and a 10th
deluged the state last week. Though conditions are
expected to clear after the storm, the relief will be
short-lived as yet another atmospheric river has set its sights
on California next week, forecasters said — just in time for
the first day of spring.
In response to crashing Chinook populations, a council of West
Coast fishery managers plans to cancel this year’s salmon
season in California, which will put hundreds of commercial
fishermen and women out of work in Northern California and turn
the summer into a bummer for thousands of recreational anglers.
…The Pacific Fishery Management Council announced March 10
that it is choosing between three fishing season
alternatives. Each would close the 2023 season, with the
possibility of a reopening in 2024. The final decision will
come during a session that begins April 1.
“Atmospheric river storm” is becoming part of Californians’
everyday vocabulary in 2023. Kicking off the year, these
systems have been unrelenting. Floods, broken levees and record
rain have berated communities across the state. There have been
not one, two or five of these storms this year — but at least
10, the National Weather Service told The Bee. A silver lining:
Drought conditions have improved dramatically. In Sacramento,
the most notorious of these storms hit in early January, with
the latest round the first two weeks of March.
Fresno County’s newest large-scale water storage project is
happening below ground. With California inundated by rain and
snow, state and federal water regulators hatched a plan to help
replenish underground aquifers further depleted by heavy
agriculture pumping during the recent drought. In an agreement
announced last week, more than 600,000 acre-feet of floodwater
from the San Joaquin River system will be diverted and allowed
to soak back into the earth in areas with permeable soils and
wildlife refuges. How much water is 600,000 acre-feet? Enough
to overflow Millerton Lake, which stores 520,000 acre-feet at
capacity. Or enough to meet the annual needs of more than 1
million average households.
California is no stranger to big swings between wet and dry
weather. The “atmospheric river” storms that have battered the
state this winter are part of a system that has long
interrupted periods of drought with huge bursts of rain —
indeed, they provide somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of all
precipitation on the West Coast. The parade of storms
that has struck California in recent months has dropped more
than 30 trillion gallons of water on the state, refilling
reservoirs that had sat empty for years and burying mountain
towns in snow. But climate change is making these storms
much wetter and more intense, ratcheting up the risk of
potential flooding in California and other states along the
West Coast.
The atmospheric rivers that flowed over California in January
dumped about a foot of rain — equal to an entire year’s average
— in many parts of the state’s parched Central Valley, which
encompasses only 1% of U.S. farmland but produces 40% of the
nation’s table fruits, vegetables, and nuts. With February,
ordinarily the second wettest month, still to be counted, talks
of all the land that will have to fallowed as a result of the
drought have quieted for now. But most Golden State growers
have come to realize that droughts will simply be a part of
farming going forward, and the safety net is gone. That
safety net was groundwater pumping. For more than a
half-century, farmers in the Central Valley, the multi-faceted
state’s chief production area, have been pumping more water
from aquifers than can be replenished, causing wells to be
drilled deeper and deeper.
Federal officials have proposed closing commercial chinook
salmon fishing off the coast of California over concerns for
expected low numbers of fall-run chinook salmon returning to
the Sacramento River this year. The Pacific Fishery Management
Council announced its three alternatives for recreational and
commercial fishing Friday. Ocean recreational fishing from the
Oregon-California border to the U.S.-Mexico border will be
closed in all three proposals, “given the low abundance
forecasts for both Klamath and Sacramento River fall chinook.”
the council said in a news release issued Friday. Commercial
salmon fishing off the coast of California also will be closed,
the council said. Ocean fishing restrictions were also
announced for Oregon and Washington.
California is once again bearing the brunt of inclement
weather, as a low-pressure system off the coast rapidly
intensifies and becomes a storm, tapping into another
atmospheric river that’s flowing between Hawaii and
California. The storm that started Monday night is
forecast to raise powerful winds along the coast that will
spread to all corners of the Bay Area, Central Coast and
Central Valley and peak just before sunrise on Tuesday. These
winds will ferry heavy rainfall, thunderstorms and the risk for
more flooding across most of the California coast and
eventually Southern California.
Before Californians built a network of levees and dams to keep
cities from flooding, the rivers that formed the Central Valley
each winter would spill out of their channels. In the wettest
years, they’d flood to form a massive inland sea that stretched
hundreds of miles from Redding to Bakersfield. In wet winters
such as this one, those rivers keep trying to form that massive
seasonal wetland again, testing the strength of the levees that
protect communities built on the state’s floodplains. Along two
of the state’s most flood-prone rivers, Ducks Unlimited has
been working to create wetlands that use those natural flood
patterns to create vital habitat for waterbirds and wildlife.
The projects highlight why Californians should look to wetland
expansion as one of the solutions to help reduce the risks from
future floods.
In another sign that the drought is ending across much of
California, state water officials opened the floodgates at
Oroville Dam on Friday to let water out of the state’s
second-largest reservoir to reduce the risk of flooding to
downstream communities. … At noon, water began
cascading down the huge concrete spillway for the first time in
four years. On Friday, Oroville reservoir was 75% full —
or 115% of its historical average for early March. It has risen
180 feet since Dec. 1, and continued to expand steadily with
millions of gallons of water pouring in from recent storms.
Still reeling from storms that inundated neighborhoods, forced
rescues and damaged roads, storm-battered California is bracing
for another atmospheric river that threatens even more flooding
Monday. More than 17 million people remain under flood watches
across California and Nevada early Monday as the storm makes
its menacing approach – the 11th atmospheric river to hit the
West this winter season. The new storm, arriving on the heels
of another atmospheric river, could exacerbate flooding and
damage in some places. Already, those in the central and
northern parts of California are crowding into shelters and
dealing with flooded neighborhoods, along with mudslides,
dangerous rushing rivers, collapsed bridges and unusable roads.
With heavy rain and snow comes flooding risks and all that
flood water could be harmful to people’s health. “They can
carry sewage and sewage runoff, they can carry chemicals. Those
are industrial and also household,” said Jason Wilken,
epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention and California Department of Public
Health. Flood waters carry the risk of damaging property
and impacting people’s health. “You could have things like
gasoline, paint thinners, other chemicals mixed in (the
waters),” said Wilken. Flood waters are typically muddy
and hard to see through. It could cause people to slip or fall.
Other things could also be lurking under the water as well.
Winter storms this year have created hope for many Californians
suffering from years of drought but for agriculture, it’s more
complicated. More water means crops will be well provided for,
but additional weather trends create new hazards for orchards,
especially during this year’s almond bloom which requires some
consistency in temperature and sunlight. Colleen Cecil,
executive director for the Butte County Farm Bureau, said
almonds have likely been impacted the most by the weather
events, especially since the trees are still in bloom.
A coalition of environmental groups – the California Water
Impact Network, the California Sportfishing Protection
Alliance, and AquAlliance – have submitted a notice of intent
to sue the State Water Resources Control Board unless it
rescinds an order to suspend water quality and fish protections
in California rivers and the Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta,
according to a coalition press release. The Board’s order was
issued following a decision by Governor Gavin Newsom to retain
water in state reservoirs to ensure future deliveries for
Central Valley agriculture. The order constituted an end-run
around state and federal legal requirements to maintain
adequate water quality and temperature conditions for salmon
below dams.
With back-to-back storms to hit California in the coming days,
state officials are scrambling to make strategic releases from
key reservoirs in hopes of preventing a repeat of the flooding
that killed nearly two dozen people in January. At least 10
rivers are forecast to overflow from the incoming “Pineapple
Express” storm, which is expected to drop warm, heavy,
snow-melting rain as it moves from the Central Coast toward the
southern Sierra beginning Thursday night into Saturday. Among
them are rivers that flooded at the start of the year, when
nine atmospheric river storms pummeled the state. The waterways
include the Cosumnes River near Sacramento, where more than a
dozen levee breaches sent floodwaters onto roadways and
low-lying areas, trapping drivers and contributing to at least
three deaths along Highway 99.
A powerful storm barreling toward California from the tropical
Pacific threatens to trigger widespread river flooding
throughout the state as warm rain melts a record accumulation
of snowpack and sends runoff surging down mountains and into
streams and reservoirs. Although state officials insist they
are prepared to manage runoff from what is now the 10th
atmospheric river of a deadly rainy season, at least one expert
described the combination of warm rain, epic snowpack and moist
soils as “bad news.” … Already, the National Weather
Service is warning residents that a number of rivers could
surge beyond their flood stage, inundating nearby roads and
properties. Likewise, some reservoir managers have already
begun releasing water in anticipation of heavy inflows through
the weekend.
Explore the epicenter of groundwater sustainability on
our Central Valley Tour
April 26-28 and engage directly with some of
the most important leaders and experts in water storage,
management and delivery, agriculture, habitat, land use policy
and water equity. The tour focuses on the San Joaquin Valley,
which has struggled with consistently little to no
surface water deliveries and increasing pressure to reduce
groundwater usage to sustainable levels while also facing water
quality and access challenges for disadvantaged
communities. Led by Foundation staff and
groundwater expert Thomas Harter, Chair for Water
Resources Management and Policy at the University of
California, Davis, the tour explores topics such as subsidence,
water supply and drought, flood management, groundwater
banking and recharge, surface water storage, agricultural
supply and drainage, wetlands and more. Register
here!
Another atmospheric river system has set its sights on
California, raising considerable concern about flooding and
structural damage as warm rain is expected to fall atop the
state’s near-record snowpack this week, forecasters say.
… Last week, the odds of such a system
developing were about 20%. By Monday, the chances had
increased to “7 or 8 out of 10, if not higher, for a warm
atmospheric river event of some magnitude,” [UCLA climate
scientist Daniel Swain] said. At least one more storm could
follow this month. … Officials said the bounty made a
dent in the state’s extreme drought conditions and
offered some hope for strained water supplies after three
bone-dry years. But heavy snowpack can also become a hazard if
it meets with warm rain that melts it too quickly.
It’s a familiar scenario: Rising rivers are pinched off from
the flood plains that could have spread, slowed and stored the
sudden abundance of water. Floodwaters break through levees and
leave destruction and heartbreaking loss in their wake. Renewed
frustration and fury enter the public dialogue about “wasted”
water. … River managers use the term “environmental
flows” to describe the water that’s allowed to stay in rivers
to nurture the ecosystem, as opposed to water diverted or
stored for farms, cities or hydropower. While I worked at the
UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, we dove in deep on
environmental flows, calculating an environmental flow
management strategy for every major tributary to the San
Joaquin River, which nourishes the valley that bears its
name. -Written by Ann Willis, California Regional Director
for American Rivers, a nonprofit organization dedicated to
restoring and protecting rivers across the country.
The Western United States is currently battling the most severe
drought in thousands of years. A mix of bad water management
policies and manmade climate change has created a situation
where water supplies in Western reservoirs are so low, states
are being forced to cut their water use. It’s not hard to
find media coverage that focuses on the excesses of residential
water use: long showers, swimming pools, lawn watering, at-home
car washes. Or in the business sector, like irrigating golf
courses or pumping water into hotel fountains in Las
Vegas. But when a team of researchers looked at water
use in the West, they uncovered a very different
story about where most Western water goes. Only 14 percent
of all water consumption in the Western US goes to residential,
commercial, and industrial water use.
In 1910, the Los Angeles real estate developer J. Harvey
McCarthy decided that this small agricultural town in the
Central Valley would be his “city beautiful,” a model community
and an automobile stop along the road to Yosemite. An infusion
of money brought Planada a bank, hotel, school, church and its
own newspaper, the Planada Enterprise, by the following year. A
celebration for the town’s first anniversary drew an estimated
10,000 people (though Planada had only several hundred
residents) as the city had become the best-known place in
Merced County. But McCarthy eventually abandoned the community,
located nine miles east of Merced, leaving its settlers to pick
up the pieces. It remained a farming town and is now home to
4,000 mostly low-income and Spanish-speaking residents who work
at nearby orchards.
Northern California could be in for a new atmospheric
river storm by the end of the week, potentially blasting the
Bay Area with substantial rain, and the Sierra with even more
heavy snow, but likely not as fierce as the wet storms that
wreaked damage across the region at the start of the year,
forecasters say…. Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at
UCLA and the Nature Conservancy, said Sunday
evening that an atmospheric river could be a concern
regarding the state’s snowpack, which on Friday reached
its highest level this century for the start of
March. Such rain-on-snow events — when heavy rain
falls on snow in higher elevations — could result in
snow melting faster, flooding downstream areas, overwhelming
rivers and overloading buildings with heavy
slush, weather experts say.
California Chinook salmon populations have fallen to their
lowest levels in years, according to new estimates released by
state and federal scientists — a decline that could trigger a
shutdown of the commercial and recreational fishing season
along the coast. … The department said scientists
estimated that the number of 3-year-old fall-run Chinook likely
to return to the Sacramento River this year to spawn would be
fewer than 170,000, one of the lowest forecasts in 15 years.
They also estimated that fewer than 104,000 are likely to
return to the Klamath River, the second-lowest estimate since
1997. In its announcement Wednesday, the department said
returning fall-run Chinook “fell well short of conservation
objectives” in the Sacramento River last year, and may now be
approaching a point of being declared overfished.
Tremendous rains and snowfall since late last year have freed
half of California from drought, but low groundwater levels
remain a persistent problem, U.S. Drought Monitor data showed
Thursday. The latest survey found that moderate
or severe drought covers about 49% of the state, nearly 17% of
the state is free of drought or a condition described as
abnormally dry. The remainder is still abnormally
dry. “Clearly the amount of water that’s fallen this year
has greatly alleviated the drought,” said Daniel Swain, a
climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“It has not ended the drought completely but we’re in a very
different place than we were a year ago.” California’s
latest drought began in 2020 and no relief appeared in sight
heading into this winter.
After another week of severe winter weather, levels in
California’s recovering water reservoirs have continued to
rise, signaling good news for the state’s summer water
supplies. This follows weeks of considerable rain and snowfall
in California since the start of 2023. … At the
beginning of this water year, which started on October 1, 2022,
the state’s largest water reservoir, Lake Shasta, was
a third full, at 33 percent. It was at 60 percent as of
March 1 and rising, according to the Bureau of Reclamation.
That puts it at 84 percent of where it would usually be usually
at this time of year.
As we approach next week’s National Groundwater Awareness Week,
we have several groundwater-related events, articles and tours
to share with you. Groundwater Awareness Event: Monday,
March 6 Join the California Department of Water
Resources, the Water Education Foundation and others on Monday
at a special event in Sacramento to kick
off next week’s National Groundwater Awareness
Week. The 9 a.m. to noon event will include
presentations, informational stations and demonstrations. For
those who are unable to attend in person at the California
Natural Resources Building’s Main Auditorium, 715
P St., the presentations will be
available to view remotely.
More state money is flowing to the valley to take land out of
production in an attempt to ease demand on groundwater. The
state Department of Water Resources (DWR) is starting a new
program called LandFlex which will pay up to $25 million in
incentives to farmers to fallow crops. On February 23,
DWR announced three grants from the program, all of which are
going to San Joaquin Valley groundwater agencies. Madera
County groundwater sustainability agency (GSA) will receive
$9.3 million, Greater Kaweah GSA will receive $7 million and
Eastern Tule GSA will receive $7 million.
By returning to spawn in the Sacramento River at different
ages, Chinook salmon lessen the potential impact of a bad year
and increase the stability of their population in the face of
climate variability, according to a new study by scientists at
UC Santa Cruz and NOAA Fisheries. Unfortunately, spawning
Chinook salmon are increasingly younger and concentrated within
fewer age groups, with the oldest age classes of spawners
rarely seen in recent years. The new study, published February
27 in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences,
suggests changes in hatchery practices and fishery management
could help restore the age structure of the salmon population
and make it more resilient to climate change.
Reports of at least 200 sick or dead band-tailed pigeons
throughout Northern California could be linked to an outbreak
of avian trichomonosis, according to the California Department
of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW). – Video above: Blizzard Conditions
force closure of Interstate 80 Since early February, reports
have been coming in from residents located along the Central
Coast, the Bay Area and the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The
band-tailed pigeon is native to California and during the
winter is often gathering acorns for the winter from central
California to Southern California.
A judge has extended a temporary settlement of a long-running
dispute over California water rights and how the Central Valley
Project and State Water Project manage the Sacramento River
flows. … The opinions address how the U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation and California Department of Water Resources’ plan
for operating the Central Valley and State Water Projects
affects fish species. The opinions make it possible to send
more water to 20 million farms, businesses and homes in
Southern and Central California via the massive federal and
state water diversion projects, and eliminate requirements such
as mandating extra flows to keep water temperatures from rising
high enough to damage salmon eggs. … A federal
judge approved plans to allow the biological opinions
to remain in effect over the next three years with added
safeguards.
To inform the “Adapting Water Rights to our 21st Century
Climate” hearing at the Assembly Committee on Water, Parks, and
Wildlife on Tuesday 2/28/23, Restore the Delta today is
releasing the results of a California water rights analysis by
race, completed by employees with the Department of Water
Resources, but deleted from the agency’s website soon after
posting. This analysis of public records shows
that the majority of water rights in California are held still
by white landowners and white officials who manage
special-interest water districts. … For the third annual
California Water Data Challenge contest, two DWR employees
chose to study control of water by race and ethnicity during
the summer of 2022. They concluded from their study that
of 1500 local and state officials that 86 percent were white,
and 79 percent were male.
Despite the storms that have deluged California this winter,
the state remains dogged by drought. And one of the simplest
solutions — collecting and storing rainfall — is far more
complicated than it seems. Much of California’s water
infrastructure hinges on storing precipitation during the late
fall and winter for use during the dry spring and summer. The
state’s groundwater aquifers can hold vast quantities of water
— far more than its major reservoirs. But those aquifers have
been significantly depleted in recent decades, especially in
the Central Valley, where farmers have increasingly pumped out
water for their crops. And as Raymond Zhong, a New York Times
climate journalist, recently reported, the state’s strict
regulations surrounding water rights limit the diversion of
floodwaters for storage as groundwater, even during fierce
storms …
California’s water authorities will spend $15 million in three
crucial water management zones within the drought-ravaged
southern Central Valley. The hub of agricultural
production in the Golden State, the Central Valley has also
faced the most dire impacts from another historic drought, as
thousands of wells went dry last year and many communities
faced a total lack of safe drinking water. The state’s
authorities say they are releasing funds to begin projects to
prevent such hardship in future droughts. The Department of
Water Resources along with California Natural Resources
Secretary Wade Crowfoot came to the small city of Parlier on
Thursday to announce three grants totaling $15 million to
improve water infrastructure in the region.
Climate change isn’t the only threat facing California’s birds.
Over the course of the 20th century, urban sprawl and
agricultural development have dramatically changed the
landscape of the state, forcing many native species to adapt to
new and unfamiliar habitats. In a new study, biologists at
the University of California, Berkeley, use current and
historical bird surveys to reveal how land use
change has amplified—and in some cases mitigated—the
impacts of climate change on bird populations in Los
Angeles and the Central Valley.
California’s reservoirs may be as full as they’ve been in years
thanks to recent rainfall, but it’s still not enough water to
meet the state’s demands — and it will never be if the state
doesn’t invest in new ways to capture all that precious water.
Not enough of the state’s heavy rainfall is draining into
California’s underground reservoirs to keep us sated, even
through the next summer. January saw torrential downpours.
February has been dry. This week, California will see a blanket
of snow across much of the state, and some forecasters predict
it will even reach coastal communities such as Eureka. -Written by Robin Epley, opinion writer for The
Sacramento Bee.
As salmon runs on the Sacramento and Klamath River systems
continue to plummet, the California Department of Fish and
Wildlife will hold its annual Salmon Information Meeting via
webinar next week. The session is schedule 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
next Wednesday, March 1. This meeting is one of the most
important meetings of the year for anglers to attend. It will
feature the outlook for this year’s sport and commercial ocean
salmon fisheries, in addition to a review of last year’s salmon
fisheries and spawning escapement, according to the CDFW.
Downpours or drought, California’s farm belt will need to
tighten up in the next two decades and grow fewer crops. There
simply won’t be enough water to sustain present irrigation in
the San Joaquin Valley. Groundwater is dangerously depleted.
Wells are drying up and the land is sinking in many places,
cracking canals. Surface water supplies have been cut back
because of drought, and future deliveries are uncertain due to
climate change and environmental
regulations. … Agriculture is water intensive. And
water is becoming increasingly worrisome in the West,
particularly with overuse of the Colorado River. There’s plenty
of water off our coast, but we’ve only begun to dip our toe
into desalination. -Written by columnist George Skelton.
It sounds like an obvious fix for California’s whipsawing
cycles of deluge and drought: Capture the water from downpours
so it can be used during dry spells. Pump it out of
flood-engorged rivers and spread it in fields or sandy basins,
where it can seep into the ground and replenish the region’s
huge, badly depleted aquifers. … Yet even this winter, when
the skies delivered bounties of water not seen in half a
decade, large amounts of it surged down rivers and out into the
ocean. Water agencies and experts say California
bureaucracy is increasingly to blame — the state tightly
regulates who gets to take water from streams and creeks to
protect the rights of people downriver, and its rules don’t
adjust nimbly even when storms are delivering a torrent of new
supply.
After three of the driest years in California history, recent
storms brought some of the wettest and snowiest weeks on record
to parts of the state. Snowpack accumulated during winter is
vital to the state’s water system because the natural form of
water storage melts during the spring and fills reservoirs that
can then distribute water downstream where needed. The
Sierra Nevada snowpack supplies about 30% of California’s water
needs when it melts. How fast that happens can greatly impact
the state’s water supply system.
Torrential rains and floods submerged whole towns and killed
more than 20 people in parts of California in January. They
also caused thousands of farmworkers to lose weeks of pay
because the flooded fields and orchards were surrounded by
treacherous, watery and muddy roads. The steep storm-related
losses — along with recent revelations that some farmworkers
are living in substandard conditions — are bolstering
advocates’ argument that California should expand its safety
net to help its agricultural workforce survive such setbacks.
Some lawmakers are listening to them. State Sen. María Elena
Durazo and Assemblymembers Wendy Carrillo and Miguel Santiago —
all Democrats from Los Angeles — introduced SB 227, which would
create an Excluded Workers Program to pay undocumented,
unemployed workers $300 per week for each week of unemployment,
up to 20 weeks.
It was exactly the sort of deluge California groundwater
agencies have been counting on to replenish their overworked
aquifers. The start of 2023 brought a parade of torrential
Pacific storms to bone dry California. Snow piled up across the
Sierra Nevada at a near-record pace while runoff from the
foothills gushed into the Central Valley, swelling rivers over
their banks and filling seasonal creeks for the first time in
half a decade. Suddenly, water managers and farmers toiling in
one of the state’s most groundwater-depleted regions had an
opportunity to capture stormwater and bank it underground.
… The barrage of water was in many ways the first real
test of groundwater sustainability agencies’ plans to bring
their basins into balance, as required by California’s landmark
Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). The run of
storms revealed an assortment of bright spots and hurdles the
state must overcome to fully take advantage of the bounty
brought by the next big atmospheric river storm.
Managers of California’s most
overdrawn aquifers were given a monumental task under the state’s
landmark Sustainable Groundwater Management Act: Craft viable,
detailed plans on a 20-year timeline to bring their beleaguered
basins into balance. It was a task that required more than 250
newly formed local groundwater agencies – many of them in the
drought-stressed San Joaquin Valley – to set up shop, gather
data, hear from the public and collaborate with neighbors on
multiple complex plans, often covering just portions of a
groundwater basin.
This tour ventured through California’s Central Valley, known as the nation’s breadbasket thanks to an imported supply of surface water and local groundwater. Covering about 20,000 square miles through the heart of the state, the valley provides 25 percent of the nation’s food, including 40 percent of all fruits, nuts and vegetables consumed throughout the country.
Land and waterway managers labored
hard over the course of a century to control California’s unruly
rivers by building dams and levees to slow and contain their
water. Now, farmers, environmentalists and agencies are undoing
some of that work as part of an accelerating campaign to restore
the state’s major floodplains.
Biologists have designed a variety
of unique experiments in the past decade to demonstrate the
benefits that floodplains provide for small fish. Tracking
studies have used acoustic tags to show that chinook salmon
smolts with access to inundated fields are more likely than their
river-bound cohorts to reach the Pacific Ocean. This is because
the richness of floodplains offers a vital buffet of nourishment
on which young salmon can capitalize, supercharging their growth
and leading to bigger, stronger smolts.
A government agency that controls much of California’s water
supply released its initial allocation for 2021, and the
numbers reinforced fears that the state is falling into another
drought. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said Tuesday that most
of the water agencies that rely on the Central Valley Project
will get just 5% of their contract supply, a dismally low
number. Although the figure could grow if California gets more
rain and snow, the allocation comes amid fresh weather
forecasts suggesting the dry winter is continuing. The National
Weather Service says the Sacramento Valley will be warm and
windy the next few days, with no rain in the forecast.
The bill is coming due, literally,
to protect and restore groundwater in California.
Local agencies in the most depleted groundwater basins in
California spent months putting together plans to show how they
will achieve balance in about 20 years.
Deep, throaty cadenced calls —
sounding like an off-key bassoon — echo over the grasslands,
farmers’ fields and wetlands starting in late September of each
year. They mark the annual return of sandhill cranes to the
Cosumnes River Preserve,
46,000 acres located 20 miles south of Sacramento on the edge of
the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
Shortly after taking office in 2019,
Gov. Gavin Newsom called on state agencies to deliver a Water
Resilience Portfolio to meet California’s urgent challenges —
unsafe drinking water, flood and drought risks from a changing
climate, severely depleted groundwater aquifers and native fish
populations threatened with extinction.
Within days, he appointed Nancy Vogel, a former journalist and
veteran water communicator, as director of the Governor’s Water
Portfolio Program to help shepherd the monumental task of
compiling all the information necessary for the portfolio. The
three state agencies tasked with preparing the document delivered
the draft Water Resilience Portfolio Jan. 3. The document, which
Vogel said will help guide policy and investment decisions
related to water resilience, is nearing the end of its comment
period, which goes through Friday, Feb. 7.
Innovative efforts to accelerate
restoration of headwater forests and to improve a river for the
benefit of both farmers and fish. Hard-earned lessons for water
agencies from a string of devastating California wildfires.
Efforts to drought-proof a chronically water-short region of
California. And a broad debate surrounding how best to address
persistent challenges facing the Colorado River.
These were among the issues Western Water explored in
2019, and are still worth taking a look at in case you missed
them.
To survive the next drought and meet
the looming demands of the state’s groundwater sustainability
law, California is going to have to put more water back in the
ground. But as other Western states have found, recharging
overpumped aquifers is no easy task.
Successfully recharging aquifers could bring multiple benefits
for farms and wildlife and help restore the vital interconnection
between groundwater and rivers or streams. As local areas around
California draft their groundwater sustainability plans, though,
landowners in the hardest hit regions of the state know they will
have to reduce pumping to address the chronic overdraft in which
millions of acre-feet more are withdrawn than are naturally
recharged.
One of California Gov. Gavin
Newsom’s first actions after taking office was to appoint Wade
Crowfoot as Natural Resources Agency secretary. Then, within
weeks, the governor laid out an ambitious water agenda that
Crowfoot, 45, is now charged with executing.
That agenda includes the governor’s desire for a “fresh approach”
on water, scaling back the conveyance plan in the Sacramento-San
Joaquin Delta and calling for more water recycling, expanded
floodplains in the Central Valley and more groundwater recharge.
Bruce Babbitt, the former Arizona
governor and secretary of the Interior, has been a thoughtful,
provocative and sometimes forceful voice in some of the most
high-profile water conflicts over the last 40 years, including
groundwater management in Arizona and the reduction of
California’s take of the Colorado River. In 2016, former
California Gov. Jerry Brown named Babbitt as a special adviser to
work on matters relating to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and
the Delta tunnels plan.
Groundwater helped make Kern County
the king of California agricultural production, with a $7 billion
annual array of crops that help feed the nation. That success has
come at a price, however. Decades of unchecked groundwater
pumping in the county and elsewhere across the state have left
some aquifers severely depleted. Now, the county’s water managers
have less than a year left to devise a plan that manages and
protects groundwater for the long term, yet ensures that Kern
County’s economy can continue to thrive, even with less water.
The San Joaquin Valley, known as the
nation’s breadbasket, grows a cornucopia of fruits, nuts and
other agricultural products.
During our three-day Central Valley Tour April
3-5, you will meet farmers who will explain how they prepare
the fields, irrigate their crops and harvest the produce that
helps feed the nation and beyond. We also will drive through
hundreds of miles of farmland and visit the rivers, dams,
reservoirs and groundwater wells that provide the water.
The whims of political fate decided
in 2018 that state bond money would not be forthcoming to help
repair the subsidence-damaged parts of Friant-Kern Canal, the
152-mile conduit that conveys water from the San Joaquin River to
farms that fuel a multibillion-dollar agricultural economy along
the east side of the fertile San Joaquin Valley.
There’s going to be a new governor
in California next year – and a host of challenges both old and
new involving the state’s most vital natural resource, water.
So what should be the next governor’s water priorities?
That was one of the questions put to more than 150 participants
during a wrap-up session at the end of the Water Education
Foundation’s Sept. 20 Water Summit in Sacramento.
The Colorado River Basin is more
than likely headed to unprecedented shortage in 2020 that could
force supply cuts to some states, but work is “furiously”
underway to reduce the risk and avert a crisis, Bureau of
Reclamation Commissioner Brenda Burman told an audience of
California water industry people.
During a keynote address at the Water Education Foundation’s
Sept. 20 Water Summit in Sacramento, Burman said there is
opportunity for Colorado River Basin states to control their
destiny, but acknowledged that in water, there are no guarantees
that agreement can be reached.
Farmers in the Central Valley are broiling about California’s plan to increase flows in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river systems to help struggling salmon runs avoid extinction. But in one corner of the fertile breadbasket, River Garden Farms is taking part in some extraordinary efforts to provide the embattled fish with refuge from predators and enough food to eat.
And while there is no direct benefit to one farm’s voluntary actions, the belief is what’s good for the fish is good for the farmers.
More than a decade in the making, an
ambitious plan to deal with the vexing problem of salt and
nitrates in the soils that seep into key groundwater basins of
the Central Valley is moving toward implementation. But its
authors are not who you might expect.
An unusual collaboration of agricultural interests, cities, water
agencies and environmental justice advocates collaborated for
years to find common ground to address a set of problems that
have rendered family wells undrinkable and some soil virtually
unusable for farming.
New water storage is the holy grail
primarily for agricultural interests in California, and in 2014
the door to achieving long-held ambitions opened with the passage
of Proposition
1, which included $2.7 billion for the public benefits
portion of new reservoirs and groundwater storage projects. The
statute stipulated that the money is specifically for the
benefits that a new storage project would offer to the ecosystem,
water quality, flood control, emergency response and recreation.
For more than 100 years, invasive
species have made the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta their home,
disrupting the ecosystem and costing millions of dollars annually
in remediation.
The latest invader is the nutria, a large rodent native to South
America that causes concern because of its propensity to devour
every bit of vegetation in sight and destabilize levees by
burrowing into them. Wildlife officials are trapping the animal
and trying to learn the extent of its infestation.
Deep, throaty cadenced calls —
sounding like an off-key bassoon — echo over the grasslands,
farmers’ fields and wetlands starting in late September of each
year. They mark the annual return of sandhill cranes to the
Cosumnes River Preserve,
46,000 acres located 20 miles south of Sacramento on the edge of
the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
Along the banks of the
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in Oakley, about 50 miles southwest
of Sacramento, is a park that harkens back to the days when the
Delta lured Native Americans, Spanish explorers, French fur
trappers, and later farmers to its abundant wildlife and rich
soil.
That historical Delta was an enormous marsh linked to the two
freshwater rivers entering from the north and south, and tidal
flows coming from the San Francisco Bay. After the Gold Rush,
settlers began building levees and farms, changing the landscape
and altering the habitat.
Despite the heat that often
accompanies debates over setting aside water for the environment,
there are instances where California stakeholders have forged
agreements to provide guaranteed water for fish. Here are two
examples cited by the Public Policy Institute of California in
its report arguing for an environmental water right.
Get a unique view of the San Joaquin Valley’s key dams and
reservoirs that store and transport water on our March Central
Valley Tour.
Our Central Valley
Tour, March 14-16, offers a broad view of water issues
in the San Joaquin Valley. In addition to the farms, orchards,
critical habitat for threatened bird populations, flood bypasses
and a national wildlife refuge, we visit some of California’s
major water infrastructure projects.
The 2-day, 1-night tour traveled along the river from Friant
Dam near Fresno to the confluence of the Merced River. As it
weaved across an historic farming region, participants learn
about the status of the river’s restoration and how the
challenges of the plan are being worked out.
Our tours are famous for not only being packed with diverse
educational opportunities about California water, but showcasing
local culture. Our Central Valley Tour on March
8-10 lets you unwind at a few San Joaquin Valley treasures and
hear stories that go back generations.
Our water tours give a behind-the-scenes look at major water
issues in California. On our Central Valley Tour, March
8-10, you will visit wildlife habitat areas – some of which are
closed to the public – and learn directly from the experts who
manage them, in addition to seeing farms, large dams and other
infrastructure.
The recent deluge has led to changes in drought conditions in
some areas of California and even public scrutiny of the
possibility that the drought is over. Many eyes are focused on
the San Joaquin Valley, one of the areas hardest hit by reduced
surface water supplies. On our Central Valley Tour, March
8-10, we will visit key water delivery and storage sites in the
San Joaquin Valley, including Friant Dam and Millerton Lake
on the San Joaquin River.
The San Joaquin Valley has been hit hard by the six-year drought
and related surface water cutbacks. Some land has been fallowed
and groundwater pumping has increased. What does this year hold?
Will these recent heavy storms provide enough surface water for
improved water deliveries?
Your best opportunity to see and understand this vital
agricultural region of California is to join us on our annual
Central Valley Tour,
March 8-10.
ARkStorm stands for an atmospheric
river (“AR”) that carries precipitation levels expected to occur
once every 1,000 years (“k”). The concept was presented in a 2011
report by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) intended to elevate
the visibility of the very real threats to human life, property
and ecosystems posed by extreme storms on the West Coast.
Excess salinity poses a growing
threat to food production, drinking water quality and public
health. Salts increase the cost of urban drinking water and
wastewater treatment, which are paid for by residents and
businesses. Increasing salinity is likely the largest long-term
chronic water quality impairment to surface and groundwater in California’s Central
Valley.
A new era of groundwater management
began in 2014 with the passage of the Sustainable Groundwater
Management Act (SGMA), which aims for local and regional agencies
to develop and implement sustainable groundwater management
plans with the state as the backstop.
SGMA defines “sustainable groundwater management” as the
“management and use of groundwater in a manner that can be
maintained during the planning and implementation horizon without
causing undesirable results.”
This 30-minute documentary, produced in 2011, explores the past,
present and future of flood management in California’s Central
Valley. It features stories from residents who have experienced
the devastating effects of a California flood firsthand.
Interviews with long-time Central Valley water experts from
California Department of Water Resources (FloodSAFE), U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Reclamation, Central Valley Flood
Management Program and environmental groups are featured as they
discuss current efforts to improve the state’s 150-year old flood
protection system and develop a sustainable, integrated, holistic
flood management plan for the Central Valley.
This 30-minute documentary-style DVD on the history and current
state of the San Joaquin River Restoration Program includes an
overview of the geography and history of the river, historical
and current water delivery and uses, the genesis and timeline of
the 1988 lawsuit, how the settlement was reached and what was
agreed to.
This 25-minute documentary-style DVD, developed in partnership
with the California Department of Water Resources, provides an
excellent overview of climate change and how it is already
affecting California. The DVD also explains what scientists
anticipate in the future related to sea level rise and
precipitation/runoff changes and explores the efforts that are
underway to plan and adapt to climate.
Salt. In a small amount, it’s a gift from nature. But any doctor
will tell you, if you take in too much salt, you’ll start to have
health problems. The same negative effect is happening to land in
the Central Valley. The problem scientists call “salinity” poses
a growing threat to our food supply, our drinking water quality
and our way of life. The problem of salt buildup and potential –
but costly – solutions are highlighted in this 2008 public
television documentary narrated by comedian Paul Rodriguez.
A 20-minute version of the 2008 public television documentary
Salt of the Earth: Salinity in California’s Central Valley. This
DVD is ideal for showing at community forums and speaking
engagements to help the public understand the complex issues
surrounding the problem of salt build up in the Central Valley
potential – but costly – solutions. Narrated by comedian Paul
Rodriquez.
This 3-day, 2-night tour travels the length of the San Joaquin
Valley, giving participants a clear understanding of the State
Water Project and Central Valley Project.
15-minute DVD that graphically portrays the potential disaster
should a major earthquake hit the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
“Delta Warning” depicts what would happen in the event of an
earthquake registering 6.5 on the Richter scale: 30 levee breaks,
16 flooded islands and a 300 billion gallon intrusion of salt
water from the Bay – the “big gulp” – which would shut down the
State Water Project and Central Valley Project pumping plants.
30-minute DVD that traces the history of the U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation and its role in the development of the West. Includes
extensive historic footage of farming and the construction of
dams and other water projects, and discusses historic and modern
day issues.
Water truly has shaped California into the great state it is
today. And if it is water that made California great, it’s the
fight over – and with – water that also makes it so critically
important. In efforts to remap California’s circulatory system,
there have been some critical events that had a profound impact
on California’s water history. These turning points not only
forced a re-evaluation of water, but continue to impact the lives
of every Californian. This 2005 PBS documentary offers a
historical and current look at the major water issues that shaped
the state we know today. Includes a 12-page viewer’s guide with
background information, historic timeline and a teacher’s lesson.
This beautiful 24×36 inch poster, suitable for framing, features
a map of the San Joaquin River. The map text focuses on the San
Joaquin River Restoration Program, which aims to restore flows
and populations of Chinook salmon to the river below Friant Dam
to its confluence with the Merced River. The text discusses the
history of the program, its goals and ongoing challenges with
implementation.
Fashioned after the popular California Water Map, this 24×36 inch
poster was extensively re-designed in 2017 to better illustrate
the value and use of groundwater in California, the main types of
aquifers, and the connection between groundwater and surface
water.
The 24-page Layperson’s Guide to Integrated Regional Water
Management (IRWM) is an in-depth, easy-to-understand publication
that provides background information on the principles of IRWM,
its funding history and how it differs from the traditional water
management approach.
The 24-page Layperson’s Guide to Flood Management explains the
physical flood control system, including levees; discusses
previous flood events (including the 1997 flooding); explores
issues of floodplain management and development; provides an
overview of flood forecasting; and outlines ongoing flood control
projects.
The 24-page Layperson’s Guide to California Water provides an
excellent overview of the history of water development and use in
California. It includes sections on flood management; the state,
federal and Colorado River delivery systems; Delta issues; water
rights; environmental issues; water quality; and options for
stretching the water supply such as water marketing and
conjunctive use. New in this 10th edition of the guide is a
section on the human need for water.
The 24-page Layperson’s Guide to the Central Valley Project
explores the history and development of the federal Central
Valley Project (CVP), California’s largest surface water delivery
system. In addition to the project’s history, the guide describes
the various CVP facilities, CVP operations, the benefits the CVP
brought to the state and the CVP Improvement Act (CVPIA).
The 24-page Layperson’s Guide to the Delta explores the competing
uses and demands on California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
Included in the guide are sections on the history of the Delta,
its role in the state’s water system, and its many complex issues
with sections on water quality, levees, salinity and agricultural
drainage, fish and wildlife, and water distribution.
A new look for our most popular product! And it’s the perfect
gift for the water wonk in your life.
Our 24×36 inch California Water Map is widely known for being the
definitive poster that shows the integral role water plays in the
state. On this updated version, it is easier to see California’s
natural waterways and man-made reservoirs and aqueducts
– including federally, state and locally funded
projects – the wild and scenic rivers system, and
natural lakes. The map features beautiful photos of
California’s natural environment, rivers, water projects,
wildlife, and urban and agricultural uses and the
text focuses on key issues: water supply, water use, water
projects, the Delta, wild and scenic rivers and the Colorado
River.
Travel across the state on Amtrak’s famed California
Zephyr, from the edge of sparkling San Francisco Bay,
through the meandering channels of the Delta, past rich Central
Valley farmland, growing cities, historic mining areas and into
the Sierra Nevada mountain range.
With the dual threats of obsolete levees and anticipated rising sea levels,
floodplains—low
areas adjacent to waterways that flood during wet years—are
increasingly at the forefront of many public policy and water
issues in California.
Adding to the challenges, many floodplains have been heavily
developed and are home to major cities such as Sacramento. Large
parts of California’s valleys are historic floodplains as well.
The Pacific Flyway is one of four
major North American migration routes for birds, especially
waterfowl, and extends from Alaska and Canada, through
California, to Mexico and South America. Each year, birds follow
ancestral patterns as they travel the flyway on their annual
north-south migration. Along the way, they need stopover sites
such as wetlands with suitable habitat and food supplies. In
California, 90 percent of historic wetlands have been lost.
The Mendota Pool, located at the confluence of the
San Joaquin River and Kings River in California’s Central
Valley, is the terminus of a long journey for water from the
Sacramento River.
After being diverted, the Sacramento River water heads south from
the Sacramento
San Joaquin Delta via the 117-mile long Delta-Mendota Canal.
Environmental concerns have closely followed California’s
development of water resources since its earliest days as a
state.
Early miners harnessed water to dislodge gold through hydraulic
mining. Debris resulting from these mining practices washed down
in rivers and streams, choking them and harming aquatic life and
causing flooding.
In the Central Valley, wetlands—partly or seasonally saturated
land that supports aquatic life and distinct ecosystems— provide
critical habitat for a variety of wildlife.
This issue of Western Water looks at the BDCP and the
Coalition to Support Delta Projects, issues that are aimed at
improving the health and safety of the Delta while solidifying
California’s long-term water supply reliability.
This printed issue of Western Water features a
roundtable discussion with Anthony Saracino, a water resources
consultant; Martha Davis, executive manager of policy development
with the Inland Empire Utilities Agency and senior policy advisor
to the Delta Stewardship Council; Stuart Leavenworth, editorial
page editor of The Sacramento Bee and Ellen Hanak, co-director of
research and senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of
California.
This printed issue of Western Water looks at hydraulic
fracturing, or “fracking,” in California. Much of the information
in the article was presented at a conference hosted by the
Groundwater Resources Association of California.
This printed copy of Western Water examines the challenges facing
small water systems, including drought preparedness, limited
operating expenses and the hurdles of complying with costlier
regulations. Much of the article is based on presentations at the
November 2007 Small Systems Conference sponsored by the Water
Education Foundation and the California Department of Water
Resources.
This issue of Western Water examines the extent to
which California faces a disaster equal to or greater than the
New Orleans floods and the steps being taken to recognize and
address the shortcomings of the flood control system in the
Central Valley and the Delta, which is of critical importance
because of its role in providing water to 22 million people.
Complicating matters are the state’s skyrocketing pace of growth
coupled with an inherently difficult process of obtaining secure,
long-term funds for levee repairs and continued maintenance.
This issue of Western Water analyzes northern California’s
extensive flood control system – it’ history, current concerns,
the Paterno decision and how experts are re-thinking the concept
of flood management.
