Upper Lake’s levees, the community’s concerns about their
condition and the county’s ongoing work to find the best
solution to fix them was the focus of a Wednesday evening
workshop. The Western Region Town Hall, or WRTH, held the
workshop at the Habematolel community center on Main Street in
Upper Lake. The workshop, in the planning for months, drew more
than 40 community members, primarily Upper Lake area residents,
for an hour-and-a-half-long discussion and question and answer
session with county officials and Lake County Water Resources’
consulting company, Peterson Brustad Inc.
Concerns about grave health impacts from exposure to radio
waves has prompted one Sonoma County city to back off, up to a
point. The Sebastopol city council unanimously approved a
measure last week allowing residential customers to keep their
old water meters, if they insist. Like other cities and towns
around California, Sebastopol has been preparing to roll out
new, digital water meters. Supposedly more accurate, the new
ones have a big advantage for a utilities: they no longer have
to pay meter readers.
Three counties across state lines are proposing that their
counties and other stakeholders in the Klamath Watershed form a
new alliance to address the broad needs of its limited water
supply. It also wants to coordinate watershed projects’
funding that it calls a “piecemeal approach (that) does not
require results or require any accountability.” … The
Klamath Basin Watershed is a water source for Native American
tribal interests, private farms and ranches, endangered
species, environmentalists and recreationists who rely on the
water from more than 12,000 square miles in south central
Oregon and northern California that supplies the Klamath River.
As California’s 2022 water year ends this week, the parched
state is bracing for another dry year — its fourth in a row. So
far, in California’s recorded history, six previous droughts
have lasted four or more years, two of them in the past
35 years. Despite some rain in September, weather
watchers expect a hot and dry fall, and warn that this winter
could bring warm temperatures and below-average
precipitation. Conditions are shaping up to be a “recipe
for drought”: a La Niña climate pattern plus warm temperatures
in the Western Tropical Pacific that could mean critical rain
and snowstorms miss California, according to Daniel Swain, a
climate scientist with UCLA and The Nature Conservancy.
The same unprecedented drying of California’s climate that has
pushed the Colorado River and Lake Mead to the
brink of depletion, forcing Angelenos to conserve water in
a bid to stave off further disaster, has helped create the
perfect conditions for massive wildfires in our forests.
…With every wildfire that happens in the Sierra, vegetation
burns, weakening slopes and sending sediment into streams and
rivers and, eventually, reservoirs, affecting water quality.
Greenville, we should note, is near the top of a watershed
that’s used by some 25 million people, including in thirsty
Southern California. -Written by Erica D. Smith and Anita Chabria, Los Angeles
Times columnists.
For workers with the Yurok Tribe Construction Corporation,
creating new fish habitat as part of the restoration of Prairie
Creek in their ancestral territory is more than just a job. …
This is the second year the construction corporation and the
Yurok Fisheries Department have been working on restoring the
ecological integrity of Prairie Creek. The five-year $25
million restoration project includes redirecting the creek away
from U.S. Highway 101 and getting as close as possible to
recreating its original condition after being used as a lumber
mill for decades.
Many Bay Area wine drinkers might not be able to point out
Redwood Valley on a map, but they’ve probably tasted Redwood
Valley wine. This little-known slice of inland Mendocino County
has become the go-to vineyard region for some of California’s
most popular young wine producers … But the last
three years have dealt Redwood Valley one devastating blow
after another. Drought, frost and fires have decimated the
crops, particularly in older vineyards. Many grapevines last
year yielded less than 10% of the output of an average harvest.
… When rain is plentiful, dry farming isn’t a problem —
and, some argue, leads to higher-quality wines. But during this
period of extended drought, the vines struggle, and it shows.
As of Thursday, 99.77% of California is experiencing drought,
according to tracking by the U.S. Drought Monitor. Just one
(very small) corner of the state is left out. The drought
map of California shows shades of orange, red, and even dark
burgundy for the driest parts of the state. But if you look to
the far northwest, where the state borders Oregon and the
Pacific Ocean, there’s a tiny patch of yellow to be found in
Del Norte County. Del Norte County, with a population
around 28,000, is perhaps best known for its lush coastal
redwood forest. About two-thirds of the county is experiencing
drought, but one-third – the furthest northwest sliver of the
county – is not. That small area accounts for the entirety of
California’s 0.23% of drought-free territory.
Beavers are famous for gnawing on wood and building giant dams
in rivers and streams. Those dams help fight climate change —
as they store water, increase biodiversity, and curb fires. Now
California scientists are urging the state to reestablish the
rodents’ dwindling population, and a new statewide “beaver
restoration unit” just might do the trick. “When the
beaver builds its dam, it starts to create a pond and slow the
water down. And that gives it time to really seep out into the
soil around it,” says Emily Fairfax, assistant professor
of environmental science and resource management at Cal State
Channel Islands. “And that is water storage.”
A summer of drought, extreme heat and deadly wildfires will end
with much-needed rain this week in parts of California, but it
is unlikely to douse the threat of wind-driven fires this fall
in a state scarred by record-setting heat waves and bone-dry
landscapes. Although recent rains helped tame some of the
state’s most active blazes — including the Mosquito fire in El
Dorado and Placer counties and the Fairview fire in Riverside —
it’s too soon to declare fire season over, experts say. In
California, occasional bouts of heavy precipitation are proving
outmatched by rising temperatures and worsening drought, which
can leave vegetation nearly as brittle and fire-prone as it was
before the rain.
In Portugal’s Douro Valley, the team at the Quinta do Vesuvio
winery was stomping picked grapes in ancient stone lagares
(troughs) in August. “Never in the history of this great
estate, which dates to 1565, have grapes been trodden this
early,” says Harry Symington, whose family has been producing
premium ports in the Douro for five generations. The
nail-biting tale of the 2022 harvest—scorching heat and
record-breaking drought that sped up ripening in vineyards from
Germany to Paso Robles, Calif.—is another reminder of the power
of climate change to upend the wine world. … With a
sudden heat dome over Bay Area vineyards on Labor Day weekend
and the days following, the rush was on to grab grapes before
they turned into juiceless raisins.
While coastal fog isn’t unique to the California coast, few
places in the world are so deeply associated with the ethereal
movements and cooling spritz of fog’s peek-a-boo routine. Fog
pours through the Golden Gate and crawls up and down the
wrinkled hills of the city and the nearby coast. It cloaks and
chills…. Fog is … partly why [Bay Area residents] use
less water than most Americans. Summer fog is why the mighty
coastal redwoods grow where they do, surviving California’s dry
season thanks to refreshing gulps of cold, wet air. It is why,
until recently, few people worried about wildfires along the
coast…. It nourishes the natural world. It enriches the
area’s cultural identity. It might even be an untapped resource
in California’s growing anxiety over water.
Californians should brace for another year of La Niña as the
stubborn climate pattern in the tropical Pacific is expected to
persist for a third consecutive year, forecasters say. The
latest outlook, published Thursday by the National Weather
Service’s Climate Prediction Center, has increased the chances
of La Niña sticking around through November to 91%, a near
certainty. The pattern may also linger into winter, with an 80%
chance of La Niña from November to January and a 54% chance
from January to March. La Niña is the cooler phase of the El
Niño-Southern Oscillation climate pattern and is a significant
driver of weather conditions across the globe, including
temperature, rain and snowfall, jet streams and tropical
cyclones.
Point Reyes National Seashore’s leadership could have done a
lot better in responding to water tests that show unacceptable
pollution levels. The park declined our request for comment,
citing ongoing litigation seeking to derail the park’s new
ranch and elk management plan. That plan, to its credit,
includes measures to reduce ranches’ possible role in pollution
levels – some of which far exceeded state health standards for
E. coli bacteria – and resumption of regular testing. The
recent report was conducted by an environmental engineering
firm hired by environmental organizations, among them the
Olema-based Turtle Island Restoration Network, part of which
includes the Salmon Protection and Awareness Network, or
SPAWN.
With water contamination at Point Reyes National Seashore at
dangerous levels, the California Coastal Commission gave the
green light Thursday to a strategy to regulate private ranchers
and require them to stop practices that increase fecal
pollution from cattle. The commission spent hours Thursday
debating a second version of a water-quality strategy from the
National Park Service, to address chronic water pollution
caused by private ranching in the only national seashore on the
West Coast.
By 2013, illegal cannabis grows were such a destructive
environmental force in California that state water regulators
decided it time to go beyond their complaint-driven, piecemeal
approach at enforcement. That required knowing how much
cannabis there was statewide, and where. Nearly a decade later,
the answer still eludes California. So the Los Angeles Times
embarked on its own effort to map illegally grown cannabis, one
that depended on a view from space. Cannabis operations are
easy to spot in satellite imagery. Plastic-covered hoop houses
and plots of individual dark-green plants are distinctive and
hard to miss, even more so in clear-cut tracts of forest or
vast expanses of desert.
California’s wine country, including the famed Napa and Sonoma
valleys, faces a climate crisis so dire that it’s posing an
existential threat to the future of the state’s industry.
Grapes have been hit with one extreme after another. This
year’s season started out with a deep frost that iced over
verdant green buds, nipping them right off the vine. For the
crops that survived, the freeze quickly gave way to drought and
heat. Just in the past week, record-breaking temperatures baked
parched vineyards. Then there’s the ever-present threat of
wildfires and smoke damage.
A historic heat wave is affecting the West, breaking all-time,
monthly and daily records and putting the California
electricity grid to test. The heat is relentless, potentially
peaking Tuesday but sticking around straight through the
upcoming weekend. The big picture: The immediate cause of the
heat wave is an unusually strong area of high pressure, or heat
dome, that is parked over the western U.S., causing air to sink
and dry out, stifling any widespread rainfall.
California is in the middle of a historic heat wave that has
brought triple-digit temperatures across the state for nearly a
week and made it hard to contain fast-moving wildfires.
Firefighters are battling blazes in Northern and Southern
California amid the record-breaking heat. The Mill Fire and
Mountain Fire both erupted on Friday in Siskiyou County and
rapidly burned thousands of acres. … There is also
potential that remnants of Hurricane Kay could creep up the
California coast this weekend, bringing thunder and lightning,
without rain — increasing the odds of dangerous
lightning-strike fires sparking.
As California grapples with drought, a record heat wave and
persistent wildfires, one state agency is turning to the beaver
in its battle against climate change. The large rodents,
according to researchers, are resourceful engineers capable of
increasing water storage and creating natural firebreaks with
their dams. On Tuesday, the California Department of Fish and
Wildlife posted its first job listing for its new beaver
restoration unit. The senior environmental scientist will help
develop methods for “nature-based restoration solutions
involving beavers” and artificial beaver dams.
New water quality tests conducted at several waterways in the
Point Reyes National Seashore found unsafe levels of fecal
bacteria, including up to 170 times the state health standard
for E. coli at one site. The tests were performed by Douglas
Lovell of the Streamborn environmental engineering firm in
Berkeley. Environmental organizations that raised funds to hire
Lovell said the test results are the latest proof that the
National Park Service is not efficiently addressing water
pollution caused by private cattle and dairy ranches that lease
land from the park.
The giant green warehouse known as Shed 17 loomed across the
railroad tracks from Debbie Cummins’ Alamo Avenue home since
she moved there in 1988. On Friday, she and dozens of her
neighbors watched in terror as the building turned into a giant
plume of black smoke and flames. … Within minutes,
powerful winds blew the fire into Weed’s historically Black
neighborhood, Lincoln Heights, just to the north of Cummins’
home. Dozens of homes burned to the foundations. The fire
eventually burned more than six square miles. Two women died.
… Environmentalists, neighborhood groups and the city
itself have battled [Roseburg Forest Products’ sprawling lumber
mill] for much of the past two decades over concerns about
air pollution and the city’s water supply.
A vast dome of high pressure has edged westward and settled
over California, inflicting sweltering and record-setting
temperatures across much of the state and threatening to strain
the state’s power grid. Record high daily temperatures scorched
several cities across the Bay Area on Monday, with oppressive
heat forecast to continue for days, according to the National
Weather Service. … Severe drought has reduced the
availability of hydropower, and solar power generation wanes as
night falls, leaving the state to rely heavily on aging
gas-fired power plants and on imported electricity from other
states.
In the desert near Agua Dulce, north of Los Angeles, hikers
along the Pacific Crest Trail who reached mile marker 502
encountered a cistern of water that smelled bad and tasted
worse, with a dead rat floating inside. They got out their
filters and refilled their bottles anyway. “Will update if I
get sick,” one wrote on a message board to those coming up
behind. The message was just one sign of how global warming is
affecting life along the trail, where, during a hot season
nearly devoid of rain, water tanks and caches were more
important than ever, the last line of defense against
dehydration. At least some hikers willing to take their
chances.
Residents throughout the Southland will yet again be faced with
additional watering restrictions as state officials work to
limit overuse in the face of California’s worst drought in
1,200 years. The 15-day shutdown is scheduled to begin on
Sept. 6 as Metropolitan Water District crews work on repairing
a crucial pipeline that serves more than 4 million Southern
Californians, affecting areas like Beverly Hills, Burbank,
Glendale, Long Beach, Pasadena, San Fernando and Torrance.
Alexander Jenkins III says his company has the technology to
make it rain and he wants to share it with Curry and Klamath
counties for free for three years. Jenkins, chief strategic and
scientific officer for Salem-based Oannes Research and
Development Corporation, says his company’s Aquaelicium device
can desalinate ocean water to create clouds, fog, mist,
direct-to-pipe water and even snow. He proposes to install
devices in either Brookings or Gold Beach and in Klamath
County. At the end of three years, he says, the coastal
communities will have three years’ worth of water, salt and
rare earth minerals such as cobalt and lithium to use how they
see fit.
As California confronts peak wildfire season with fewer
firefighters than usual, the state’s timber industry is pushing
federal and state officials to take the unprecedented step of
calling in the National Guard and the U.S. military before
fires get out of control. California has sought military
assistance in past years when its firefighting crews were
overwhelmed. But logging companies say this year the state
shouldn’t wait until it needs help. Worsening heat and drought
across California have led to dire predictions for this season,
which traditionally is at its worst between July and October.
At the same time, the U.S. Forest Service, which has long
struggled with staffing shortages, has been scrambling to fill
positions.
When it comes to climate change, cows have taken a reputational
hit. These belching bovines have been villainized for releasing
methane, a greenhouse gas with more than 25 times the
heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide. But now, a growing
number of Bay Area farmers are working to repolish the image of
the humble dairy cow, recasting their role from gaseous
emitters to carbon-capturing machines and powering farmers’
ability to fight the impacts of climate change. Chief among
them is Albert Straus, founder and owner of Straus Family
Creamery and Dairy in Marshall, an unincorporated town on the
northeast shore of Tomales Bay.
They’re among the biggest names in entertainment and sports:
Sylvester Stallone, Dwyane Wade, Kevin Hart, Kim and Kourtney
Kardashian. And as Southern California struggles with a third
year of punishing drought and unprecedented water restrictions,
they may be among the biggest names in water waste in the tony
San Fernando Valley enclaves of Calabasas and Hidden Hills,
documents obtained by The Times show. The celebrities were
among more than 2,000 customers who recently were issued
“notices of exceedance” by the Las Virgenes Municipal Water
District, indicating that they had surpassed 150% of their
monthly water budgets at least four times since the agency
declared a drought emergency at the end of last year.
