Despite droughts, the recession and natural disasters,
California’s urban population continues to grow.
This population growth means increasing demand for water by urban
areas—home to most of California’s population [see also
Agricultural Conservation]. As of 2012, seven of the most
populated urbanized areas in the United States are in California.
Trekking along the shoreline of the Great Salt Lake — the
largest remaining saltwater lake in the western hemisphere —
can feel eerie and lonely. … [Carly Biedul, a biologist with
the Great Salt Lake Institute], is bundled up in an orange
puffy jacket, gloves and hat. Most important she’s wearing,
thick, sturdy, rubber boots. The mud with a frozen, slick layer
of ice on top gets treacherous. One thing that’s hard to
prepare for though, is the stench: A pungent odor like sulfur
and dead fish. But it’s actually a good thing, a sign of a
biologically healthy saline lake. “People have been saying that
they miss the lake stink because it just makes them feel like
home,” Biedul says. “It’s just not here [much] anymore, so
you’re lucky that it gets to smell so bad.” Lucky? Maybe one
small bright spot in an otherwise grim story of a looming
ecological disaster. The lake doesn’t really stink anymore
because it’s drying … and dying.
The Rio Verde Foothills look like any other slice of desert
suburbia, a smattering of roughly 2,000 stucco homes in a
cactus-studded neighborhood just outside of Scottsdale,
Arizona, one of Phoenix’s booming satellite cities. An affluent
community with a median home price of $825,000, it offered
homebuyers cheap land, good schools and mountain views — but
not, as many residents recently discovered, a stable water
supply. No municipal water pipes reach the Rio Verde
Foothills, so about 25% to 35% of the residents rely on a
longstanding arrangement in which private water trucks deliver
water supplied by Scottsdale. When the city began
threatening to cut off the community’s access to Scottsdale
water in 2015, saying it had to conserve for its own residents,
many Rio Verde Foothills residents did not believe it would
actually happen.
California is suffering from its worst drought in 1,200 years,
but that hasn’t prevented some of the state’s most powerful
corporate agricultural interests from flourishing. In a report
released Wednesday, Food & Water Watch found that agricultural
corporations have used an outdated water rights system to their
advantage and expanded their most water-intensive operations,
even as some rural communities have run out of water
completely. … The report urged Gov. Gavin Newsom to overhaul
the system before it’s too late. California is becoming hotter
and drier, and while a recent string of atmospheric rivers has
bolstered the state’s water supply, residents are still bracing
for a third year of drought; over 1 million Californians
already lack access to clean water, and that number is expected
to increase.
Our beloved Capital Region has been literally awash with rain,
snow, flooding and downed trees, and I’m sure many of us think
that California’s persistent drought has at last been rinsed
away. After all, we’ve received huge amounts of snow in the
Sierra, which will thaw and flow westward to fill our
reservoirs, basins and valleys as it makes its way to sea. Add
to that the atmospheric rivers of rain that have been pouring
into our towns, overflowing our riverbanks, curbs, basements
and canals, we’re tempted to assume that our state is no longer
destined to be a desert. But that’s probably not going to be
the case.
With the Colorado River crisis deepening and the warming
climate continuing to rob streams and rivers of their flows,
talk in Colorado has resumed about how to limit growing water
demand statewide for residential use. A new report commissioned
by the Common Sense Institute and written by Colorado water
veterans Jennifer Gimbel and Eric Kuhn, cites the need for
broader conservation measures such as removing non-functional
turf in new development, among other things. … “We have
to do more with less,” said Kuhn. He cited projected statewide
population growth of 1.6 to 1.8 million new residents by 2050,
most along the Front Range, but also the probability that the
warming climate will make less water available, particularly
from the Colorado River.
Waves of torrential rainfall drenched California into the new
year. Snowpacks in the Sierra Nevada Mountains have swelled to
more than 200% their normal size, and snowfall across the rest
of the Colorado River Basin is trending above average, too.
While the much-needed water has improved conditions in the
parched West, experts warn against claiming victory. About 60%
of the region remains in some form of drought, continuing a
decades-long spiral into water scarcity. … Over the
years, a proposed solution has come up again and again:
large-scale river diversions, including pumping Mississippi
River water to the parched west.
The Biden administration on Tuesday moved to protect one of the
world’s most valuable wild salmon fisheries, at Bristol Bay in
Alaska, by effectively blocking the development of a gold and
copper mine there. The Environmental Protection Agency issued a
final determination under the Clean Water Act that bans the
disposal of mine waste in part of the bay’s watershed, about
200 miles southwest of Anchorage. Streams in the watershed are
crucial breeding grounds for salmon, but the area also contains
deposits of precious-metal ores thought to be worth several
hundred billion dollars. A two-decades old proposal to mine
those ores, called the Pebble project, has been supported by
some Alaskan lawmakers and Native groups for the economic
benefits it would bring, but opposed by others, including
tribes around the bay and environmentalists who say
it would do irreparable harm to the salmon population.
Financial speculators are buying and selling rights to the
Colorado River’s dwindling water resources in a bid to profit
as historic drought conditions intensified by the fossil
fuel-driven climate crisis lead to worsening scarcity. Wall
Street investment firms “have identified the drought as an
opportunity to make money,” Andy Mueller, general manager of
the Colorado River Water Conservation District, toldCBS News on
Tuesday. “I view these drought profiteers as vultures. They’re
looking to make a lot of money off this public resource.”
Matthew Diserio, the co-founder and president of a
Manhattan-based hedge fund called Water Asset Management (WAM),
makes no secret of his intentions, having described water in
the United States as “the biggest emerging market on Earth” and
“a trillion-dollar market opportunity.”
California and other Western states that import water from the
parched Colorado River failed to reach an agreement today on
how to cut their use despite a deadline from federal officials.
Six states presented the federal government with a proposal to
slash the lower basin’s use by 2.9 million acre-feet from their
historic allotments— including more than 1 million acre-feet
from California, or 25% of its entitlements. But California,
the largest user of Colorado River water, refused to sign onto
the proposal and, instead, hours later issued its own — which
mirrors its offer last fall to cut imports by 9%, or 400,000
acre feet. The impasse is over water delivered to
Imperial Valley farmers and cities in six Southern California
counties.
The 23-year drought that’s parching the
Southwest is forcing Arizona to make a bitter choice. Unless
developers can find new sources of water, the state’s largest
master-planned housing development is going to remain a desert.
It’s not just an Arizona problem. Across the American West,
demand for housing is increasingly running into water
shortages. Surface waters like the Colorado River are drying
up, forcing cities and farmers to turn to groundwater.
Unfortunately, most groundwater is finite, and once depleted
it’s difficult or impossible to replenish. Written by Bloomberg opinion writer Adam Minter.
With the federal government poised to force Western states to
change how they manage the alarming shortfall in Colorado River
water, there is one constituency with a growing interest in the
river’s fate that’s little known to some: Wall Street
investors. Private investment firms are showing a growing
interest in an increasingly scarce natural resource in the
American West: water in the Colorado River, a joint
investigation by CBS News and The Weather Channel has found.
For some of the farmers and cities that depend on the river as
a lifeline, that interest is concerning. … Bernal’s
family came to the Grand Valley nearly 100 years ago, and he
has lived there his whole life. But now, he has a new
neighbor: a New York-based investment firm called Water Asset
Management, which he says bought a farm in the valley around
2017 that Bernal now rents and helps operate.
Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Lithium
Resource Research and Innovation Center and Energy Storage
Center are currently studying the Salton Sea Known Geothermal
Resource Area, or SS KGRA, in Southern California’s Imperial
Valley as a potential domestic source of lithium for the United
States. The lithium is located in hot, salty water thousands of
feet below the Salton Sea, according to Meg Slattery, a PhD
student at UC Davis. It is expected to offer the most
sustainable source of lithium on Earth, said Will Stringfellow,
research engineer at Berkeley Lab, in an email.
Golf courses. Ponds. Acres of grass. Cascading waterfalls.
Displays of water extravagance zip past each day when Sendy
Hernández Orellana Barrows drives to work. She said these views
seem like landscapes that have undergone “plastic surgery,”
transforming large parts of the Coachella Valley’s desert into
scenes of unnatural lushness. From La Quinta to Palm Springs,
the area’s gated communities, resorts and golf courses have
long been promoted with palm-studded images of green grass,
swimming pools and artificial lakes. The entrepreneurs and
boosters who decades ago built the Coachella Valley’s
reputation as a playground destination saw the appeal of
developments awash in water, made possible by wells drawing on
the aquifer and a steady stream of Colorado River water.
In the warmth of Arizona’s winter sun, 50 residents gathered in
front of neighborhood activist Cody Reim’s house last weekend,
eager to discuss a solution to their problem. Despite living a
few miles from a river, their community has no water supply
services. … In Rio Verde Foothills, an unincorporated
community with no municipal government, near Scottsdale, the
fashionable, wealthy desert city adjoining the state capital of
Phoenix, none of the homes are connected to a local water
district. There is only one paved road, no street lights, storm
gutters, or pipes in the ground. Instead residents have wells –
or water tanks outside their homes, which they used to fill at
a local pipe serviced by Scottsdale.
The demand for electric vehicles is surging in the U.S.,
sparked in part by the Biden administration’s Inflation
Reduction Act and the subsidies it offers. But a looming supply
shortage of lithium threatens to stall the EV transition.
Stephanie Sy traveled to California’s Salton Sea where lithium
deposits could help meet the country’s energy needs and support
an economically devastated region. … In the most
southeastern stretch of the Southern California desert sits a
most unusual piece of the planet. It’s like a Dr. Seuss book
with sound effects.
Arizona needs tens of thousands of new housing units to meet
demand, but first, developers will need to find enough water.
The state’s water woes have been on full display this month as
it lost 21% of its Colorado River supply to cuts, homes outside
Scottsdale, Arizona, had their water cut off by the city, and a
recently released model found planned housing units for more
than 800,000 people west of Phoenix will have to find new water
sources. Arizona is one of the fastest-growing states and short
100,000 housing units, a state Department of Housing report
released last year found, but depending on where they’re
located, some homes will be more easily built than others.
In an early-December morning in California’s Mojave Desert, the
Geoscience Support Services geohydrologist Logan Wicks squats
in the sand and fiddles with a broken white pipe. Here on a
sandy road off Route 66, past miles of scrubby creosote and
spiny mesquite, Wicks monitors the pumps and pipes of a
promising desert extraction project. But he’s not looking for
oil or gas. Crouching under the shade of a 10-foot lemon tree,
at the edge of a citrus orchard that spans hundreds of acres,
Wicks is here for water. A fine stream bursts from the
plastic pipe, forming a rainbow-crested arc before hitting the
hot sand. Wicks pushes his Oakley sunglasses on top of his
head, rubs the short dark bristles on his upper lip, and
smiles. “There’s a hell of a lot more where that came
from,” he says, nodding at the spray.
The atmospheric river that fueled a string of heavy downpours
in California this month brought much-needed water to the
parched Golden State. But those billions of gallons of rain
also swept a form of pollution off roads into streams, rivers
and the Pacific Ocean that’s of rising concern to scientists,
environmentalists and regulators: particle dust created by car
tires. A growing body of research indicates that in addition to
being a major source of microplastic pollution, the chemical
6PPD, an additive that’s used to keep tires from wearing out,
reacts with ozone in the atmosphere to form a toxic new
substance scientists call 6PPD-Quinone. It’s killing coho
salmon and likely harms other types of fish, which exhibit
symptoms resembling suffocation.
Utah’s Washington County is one of the fastest growing areas in
the country, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, made possible
by the Virgin River which supplies the region and its
multiplying suburbs with water. But drought and population
growth have long plagued the river, and the mayor of Ivins, a
small, bedroom community of nearby St. George, did not mince
words when addressing constituents this month. … Hart’s
message came in the wake of an upscale community near
Scottsdale, Arizona, having its water shut off on New Year’s
Day. Similar to the St. George area, the fast-growing
Scottsdale community received its drinking water from Arizona’s
allotment of the Colorado River, and the shutoffs were in
part due to shortages in the river’s basin, according to
a memo sent to residents of the Rio Verde Foothills
neighborhood.
When Governor Gavin Newsom announced that all new car sales in
California would be zero-emission vehicles by 2035, many
activists celebrated the move. … But there was a word few
people mentioned in response to the news: microplastics. One of
the potential unintended consequences of the transition to
electric vehicles could be more microplastics. When rubber
meets road, tires shed small synthetic polymers less than five
millimeters in diameter. … “We ended up estimating that
stormwater was discharging about seven trillion [microplastics]
into the [San Francisco] Bay annually,” said Rebecca Sutton, a
senior researcher at the San Francisco Estuary Institute
(SFEI). Half of those particles come from tires. … These
tire particles are already in the air we breathe as well as the
San Francisco Bay and the groundwater that empties into
it.
Underground storage may be a key for Western states navigating
water shortages and extreme weather. Aquifers under the ground
have served as a reliable source of water for years. During
rainy years, the aquifers would fill up naturally, helping
areas get by in the dry years. … But growing demand for
water coupled with climate change has resulted in shortages as
states pump out water from aquifers faster than they can be
replenished…. Municipalities and researchers across the
country are working on ways to more efficiently replenish
emptied-out aquifers… In California — where 85
percent of the population relies on groundwater for some
portion of their supply — more than 340 recharge projects have
already been proposed.
Developers planning to build homes in the desert west of
Phoenix don’t have enough groundwater supplies to move forward
with their plans, a state modeling report found. Plans to
construct homes west of the White Tank Mountains will require
alternative sources of water to proceed as the state grapples
with a historic megadrought and water shortages, according to
the report. Water sources are dwindling across the Western
United States and mounting restrictions on the Colorado River
are affecting all sectors of the economy, including
homebuilding. But amid a nationwide housing shortage,
developers are bombarding Arizona with plans to build homes
even as water shortages worsen.
The survival — or at least the basic sustenance — of hundreds
in a desert community amid the horse ranches and golf courses
outside Phoenix now rests on a 54-year-old man with a plastic
bucket of quarters. John Hornewer picked up a quarter and put
it in the slot. The lone water hose at a remote public filling
station sputtered to life and splashed 73 gallons into the
steel tank of … Some living here amid the cactus
and creosote bushes see themselves as the first domino to fall
as the Colorado River tips further into crisis. On
Jan. 1, the city of Scottsdale, which gets the majority of its
water from the Colorado River, cut off Rio Verde Foothills from
the municipal water supply that it has relied on for
decades. … [T]he federal government is now pressing
seven states to cut 2 to 4 million acre-feet more, up to 30
percent of the river’s annual average flow.
Water from the Colorado River covers more than a third of
Arizona’s total water usage, but the state is increasingly
losing access to that supply. The state is no longer in what
Terry Goddard, the president of the Central Arizona Water
Conservation District Board of Directors, called “a fool’s
paradise.” Arizona had maintained a surplus of water since the
mid-1980s, but that’s not the case today. Now, it’s losing
water, and it’s losing it fast. That loss, and potential future
loss, was the focal point of Arizona’s state legislature
Tuesday, starting with a presentation from the Central Arizona
Project on the status of the state’s water supply in which
legislators heard about the tensions between Arizona and other
Colorado River Basin states over access to groundwater.
When we think about the Colorado River water shortage, it’s
natural to blame it on the burgeoning population in desert
cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas and Los Angeles. … And as
more people move to these cities, their overall water
consumption increases proportionally … This pattern
held true for eight decades after the 1922 signing of the
Colorado River Compact: The number of people relying on the
river’s waters shot up from less than 1 million to nearly 40
million, and overall water consumption climbed consistently as
well, peaking at just under 20 billion cubic meters in
2000. But then, according to a new study in
the Journal of Water Resources Planning and
Management by Brian Richter, the pattern was broken. Even
as the population of the region continued to shoot up,
consumption of Colorado River water actually dropped and then
plateaued.
Colorado Springs will be making decisions this week that will
impact its growth and development for decades to come. The
following issues will be discussed by local leaders this week.
Check back here for updates on how they voted. Water supply The
city is considering an ordinance that would impact how and
where Colorado Springs extends its water service. The city
wants to make sure there’s enough water as it continues to
grow. Currently, Colorado Springs Utilities is required to
maintain a surplus water supply. But there’s no definition of
how much extra that actually is. So what they want to do is
define it as a 30 percent buffer between supply and demand,
calculated on a five-year rolling average. … Half the
city’s water comes from the Colorado River Basin, which is
threatened by drought and overuse.
When my son was younger, we often visited San Francisco’s
Baylands Preserve to bike, hike and pull up invasive weed
species that were crowding out native plants and animals — our
small way of helping to restore a massive wetland system in
California that only 150 years ago rivaled the splendor of
Africa’s world-famous Okavango Delta. Not anymore. More
than 90% of California’s coastal and inland wetlands have
vanished, replaced by cropland, airports, housing, highways and
industrial parks. Our state has reaped a great many short-term
economic benefits from this activity, but we’ve also undermined
long-term growth and security through the concomitant
destruction of nature. The loss of our wetlands
… mirrors the broader loss of nature happening around
the world. -Written by Rebecca Shaw, chief scientist at World
Wildlife Fund.
The Amazon is a labyrinth of a thousand rivers. They are born
at 21,000 feet, with seasonal melts from the Sajama ice cap in
Bolivia, and they are born in the dark rock of Peru’s Apacheta
cliff, as glacial seepage spraying white from its pores. …
Where these tributaries empty, just south of the Equator, they
form the aorta of the Amazon proper, more than 10 miles wide at
its widest point. … By creating the conditions for a
continental swath of evergreens, this process is crucial to the
Amazon’s role as a global “sink” for carbon. Many
scientists now fear, however, that this virtuous cycle is
breaking down. Just in the past half-century, 17 percent of the
Amazon — an area larger than Texas — has been converted to
croplands or cattle pasture.
Water supplies are shrinking throughout the Southwest, from the
Rocky Mountains to California, with the flow of the Colorado
River declining and groundwater levels dropping in many areas.
The mounting strains on the region’s water supplies are
bringing new questions about the unrestrained growth of
sprawling suburbs.[Kathleen] Ferris, a researcher at Arizona
State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy, is convinced
that growth is surpassing the water limits in parts of Arizona,
and she worries that the development boom is on a collision
course with the aridification of the Southwest and the finite
supply of groundwater that can be pumped from desert aquifers.
It’s been a year since two devastating wildfires on opposite ends
of California underscored the harsh new realities facing water
districts and cities serving communities in or adjacent to the
state’s fire-prone wildlands. Fire doesn’t just level homes, it
can contaminate water, scorch watersheds, damage delivery systems
and upend an agency’s finances.
We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls ride over the river, we know not. Ah, well! We may conjecture many things.
~John Wesley Powell
Powell scrawled those words in his journal as he and his expedition paddled their way into the deep walls of the Grand Canyon on a stretch of the Colorado River in August 1869. Three months earlier, the 10-man group had set out on their exploration of the iconic Southwest river by hauling their wooden boats into a major tributary of the Colorado, the Green River in Wyoming, for their trip into the “great unknown,” as Powell described it.
In the universe of California water, Tim Quinn is a professor emeritus. Quinn has seen — and been a key player in — a lot of major California water issues since he began his water career 40 years ago as a young economist with the Rand Corporation, then later as deputy general manager with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, and finally as executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies. In December, the 66-year-old will retire from ACWA.
Owens Lake is a dry lake at the terminus of the Owens River
just west of Death Valley and on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. For at least
800,000 years, the lake had a continuous flow of water, until
1913 when the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power
(LADWP) completed the 233-mile Los Angeles
Aqueduct to supplement the budding metropolis’
increasing water demands.
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.
Many Californians don’t realize that when they turn on the
faucet, the water that flows out could come from a source close
to home or one hundreds of miles away. Most people take their
water for granted; not thinking about the elaborate systems and
testing that go into delivering clean, plentiful water to
households throughout the state. Where drinking water comes from,
how it’s treated, and what people can do to protect its quality
are highlighted in this 2007 PBS documentary narrated by actress
Wendie Malick.
A 30-minute version of the 2007 PBS documentary Drinking Water:
Quenching the Public Thirst. This DVD is ideal for showing at
community forums and speaking engagements to help the public
understand the complex issues surrounding the elaborate systems
and testing that go into delivering clean, plentiful water to
households throughout the state.
A companion to the Truckee River Basin Map poster, this 24×36
inch poster, suitable for framing, explores the Carson River, and
its link to the Truckee River. The map includes Lahontan Dam and
Reservoir, the Carson Sink, and the farming areas in the basin.
Map text discusses the region’s hydrology and geography, the
Newlands Project, land and water use within the basin and
wetlands. Development of the map was funded by a grant from the
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Mid-Pacific Region, Lahontan Basin
Area Office.
As the state’s population continues to grow and traditional water
supplies grow tighter, there is increased interest in reusing
treated wastewater for a variety of activities, including
irrigation of crops, parks and golf courses, groundwater recharge
and industrial uses.
The 20-page Layperson’s Guide to Water Marketing provides
background information on water rights, types of transfers and
critical policy issues surrounding this topic. First published in
1996, the 2005 version offers expanded information on
groundwater banking and conjunctive use, Colorado River
transfers and the role of private companies in California’s
developing water market.
Order in bulk (25 or more copies of the same guide) for a reduced
fee. Contact the Foundation, 916-444-6240, for details.
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.
Despite droughts, recession and natural disasters, California’s
urban population continues to grow.
This population growth means increasing demand for water by urban
areas—home to most of California’s population [see also Agricultural
Conservation]. As of 2021, three of the nation’s 10 most
populated cities are in California.
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 discusses low
impact development and stormwater capture – two areas of emerging
interest that are viewed as important components of California’s
future water supply and management scenario.
This printed issue of Western Water examines the
changed nature of the California Water Plan, some aspects of the
2009 update (including the recommendation for a water finance
plan) and the reaction by certain stakeholders.
This printed issue of Western Water explores some of the major
challenges facing Colorado River stakeholders: preparing for
climate change, forging U.S.-Mexico water supply solutions and
dealing with continued growth in the basins states. Much of the
content for this issue of Western Water came from the in-depth
panel discussions at the September 2009 Colorado River Symposium.
This issue of Western Water asks whether a groundwater
compact is needed to manage this shared resource today. In the
water-stressed West, there will need to be a recognition of
sharing water resources or a line will need to be drawn in the
sand against future growth.
This issue of Western Water examines the continuing practice of
smart water use in the urban sector and its many facets, from
improved consumer appliances to improved agency planning to the
improvements in water recycling and desalination. Many in the
water community say conserving water is not merely a response to
drought conditions, but a permanent ethic in an era in which
every drop of water is a valuable commodity not to be wasted.
When water and growth was featured in the May/June 1995 Western
Water, the debate in the California Legislature was about whether
a local water district should have any say when it came to
providing water to new developments. Of the four bills before
state lawmakers, it was Sen. Jim Costa’s SB 901 that cleared the
Legislature and was signed into law. The bill established a
voluntary link between water and land-use planning by requiring
planning departments to consult with local water purveyors about
the availability of new supplies.
