PG&E will pay the Central Coast Regional Water Quality
Control Board $5.9 million in a landmark settlement that
recognizes the long-term impacts of dumping water used to cool
Diablo Canyon Power Plant back into the Pacific Ocean — but
also the realities of a plant that is expected to close in the
next decade.
Help may be on the horizon for the about 700 residents of East
Orosi dependent on bottled water. The Tulare County Board of
Supervisors has directed county staff to begin negotiating the
scope of work and a budget … to take control of the East
Orosi Community Services District public water system.
… East Orosi’s water has been plagued with nitrates from
fertilizers and coliform bacteria since at least 2003, for
which their water system has been cited for violating the
Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) both contaminants dozens of
times.
The State Water Resources Control Board (State Water Board) and
Sonoma County Department of Environmental Health Services
advise caution for anyone who boats, fishes or swims after
harmful algal blooms (HABs) were discovered in multiple Sonoma
County rivers. Because children and dogs are most susceptible
to serious health impacts, it is recommended that they avoid
touching any suspicious-looking algal material found in the
water or along river banks.
San Diego Gas & Electric Co. (SDG&E) appears to be
violating a water discharge waver by the California Water
Quality Control Board issued earlier this month by the board,
according to Larry Schmidt of the VC Planning Group, whom The
Roadrunner contacted Saturday. Schmidt is the lead for the
planning group on this issue after being appointed Monday night
to head the group’s subcommittee investigating the utility’s
work on Cole Grade Road that is near Cool Valley Road.
Hot temperatures are drawing people to the cool water of
Tiscornia Beach, but what many there may not know, there are
high levels of E.coli found in the water. … Robert
Metcalf is a retired professor who’s taught microbiology at
Sacramento State University for 42 years. He said finding
E. coli in the water means there is recent fecal
contamination. Mary Beth Metcalf, a retired clinical
professor of pediatrics from UC Davis, said E.coli leads
to other infections.
The Senate voted 55-43 Wednesday to confirm Radhika Fox as head
of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of Water.
Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Tom
Carper (D-Del.), in remarks on the Senate floor, praised Fox’s
record and highlighted the organizations endorsing her for the
position. These include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the
Family Farm Alliance and the U.S. Water Alliance, where she
previously served as CEO.
The first glimpse of the water driving down Highway 86 is
breathtaking. From some angles, you can’t even see the other
side of California’s biggest lake. It seems out of place in the
vast desert expanse of the Imperial Valley, just north of the
Mexican border, where it’s over 100 degrees for much of the
year. But then the car door opens, and it hits: the
overwhelming smell of rotten eggs. At the shoreline is a
sign saying not to touch the toxic water.
Instead of turning on the faucet to fill her pots to cook
dinner, Maria Olivera turns to her drums of state issued water
sitting next to the stove at her home in Tooleville.
… Tooleville spans all of two dusty dirt roads at the
edge of the Friant-Kern Canal, where the blue hue of flowing
water is just out of sight over raised levees. Along with it,
the basic human right of having clean drinking water. Nitrates
from farming fertilizers have rendered the water undrinkable in
Tooleville, and the community is dependent on biweekly water
deliveries.
As California suffers from a major drought and enters a climate
change fueled wildfire season, oil and gas operators continue
to use hundreds of millions of gallons of freshwater for
drilling operations annually. It’s a vicious symbiotic cycle:
fracking and drilling contribute to climate change and suck up
finite water resources, then drought and wildfires worsen from
climate change.
With harmful algal blooms (HABs) being forecast to increase, in
part due to the effects of climate change, more water systems
can expect to face problematic cyanotoxin conditions more
frequently and for more days per year. In its efforts to
mitigate the negative effects of such increases, the U.S. EPA
has enhanced its information resources for water utilities by
issuing a new Cyanotoxins Preparedness and Response Toolkit.
As California plunges into another “historic” drought, people
across the state are worried about water shortages. But the
last drought never really ended for some Californians, like
residents of East Porterville that still have emergency water
storage tanks in their front yards. With the state’s current
financial surplus, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity
to fund drought preparedness and water safety in communities
that have lived for decades with shallow and contaminated
drinking water wells, inadequate water treatment, and other
infrastructure failures… -Written by Carolina Garcia, a resident of Tombstone
Territory, and Sandra Chavez, a member of the
Safe and Affordable Funding for Equity and Resilience (SAFER)
Advisory Group.
Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced
selections under two Clean Water Act (CWA) grant programs to
support leadership of Tribes in protecting and restoring water
resources. The agency anticipates awarding approximately $3
million to 18 Tribal nations and one Intertribal organization
under the Tribal Wetland Program Development Grant competition
and an additional $3 million in CWA Section 319 Tribal
Competitive Grants to 32 Tribal nations to support projects to
manage nonpoint source pollution.
Toxic manmade chemicals, like per- and poly-fluoroalkyl
substances (PFAS) and 1,2,3-Tricholoropropane (TCP), are
showing up in water systems across the US. It’s not new, but it
has become more common, as municipalities are now increasing
mandatory testing due to new state and federal
regulations. … TCP was tagged as a carcinogen in
1999 by the state of California which lead to the strictest
state MCL level in the country at 5 ppt. One ppt is the
equivalent of one drop of impurity in 21 million gallons of
water – in other words, TCP is very toxic.
A large oilfield wastewater disposal pond near Buttonwillow
will likely close this summer, and its operator and last
remaining customer will together pay $645,000 in penalties and
fees, under a recent court settlement that further restricts a
decades-old practice that has become a focus of regional water
quality regulators. The accord concludes a 2019 lawsuit that
accused facility owner Valley Water Management Co. and
Colorado-based oil producer Sentinel Peak Resources of dumping
fluid containing harmful chemicals above a reservoir that
provides local drinking and irrigation water.
Humboldt County gave the public two chances to air concerns
this week surrounding Nordic Aquafarms’ proposed onshore fish
farm on the Samoa Peninsula. County planners held two public
scoping meetings Thursday to gather input from the public and
affected governmental agencies on areas that should be covered
in the project’s environmental impact report (EIR). The
Humboldt County Planning and Building Department had released a
mitigated negative declaration (MND) for the project in April
but a coalition of environmental groups argued that the
assessment didn’t go far enough.
Military bases across California, including some in San Diego,
have tested positive for a toxic chemical. A bill sponsored by
U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla attempts to find the money to finally
clean up the legacy of PFAS. The Department of Defense has
known for decades that a chemical found in aviation fire
fighting foam contains potentially toxic polyfluoroalkyl
substances (PFAS), which has been linked to cancer when found
in groundwater, Padilla said.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of
Engineers announced their intent to revise the reach of the
federal Clean Water Act by changing the definition of “waters
of the United States.” This move, announced yesterday, would
reverse the Navigable Waters Protection Rule adopted during the
Trump administration, which itself replaced a 2015 revision by
the Obama administration.
A Central Valley pistachio processing plant whose wastewater
ponds triggered numerous odor complaints from nearby residents
will pay a $221,440 fine, a portion of which will fund improved
ventilation at two public schools in the area. The Central
Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board (Central Valley
Water Board) fined Setton Pistachio after determining the
company had violated the terms of an August 2020 cease and
desist order (CDO) directing it to immediately eliminate
objectionable odors coming from ponds at its plant in Terra
Bella in Tulare County.
The Biden administration began legal action Wednesday to repeal
a Trump-era rule that ended federal protections for hundreds of
thousands of small streams, wetlands and other waterways,
leaving them more vulnerable to pollution from development,
industry and farms. The rule — sometimes referred to as “waters
of the United States” or WOTUS — narrowed the types of
waterways that qualify for federal protection under the Clean
Water Act. It was one of hundreds of rollbacks of environmental
and public health regulations under President Donald Trump, who
said the rules imposed unnecessary burdens on business.
The Union has printed several opinion pieces by Idaho-Maryland
Mine Project opponents. The majority of these columns present
“information” that’s either biased or misleading and based
neither on science nor logic. Here are the facts.
… Recent columns erroneously suggest that groundwater
impacts cannot be accurately predicted. Numerous expert
hydrogeologists and a century of mining at the Idaho-Maryland
say otherwise. … The actual conclusion is that no wells
would be drained… -Written by Ben Mossman, president of Rise Grass
Valley and CEO of Rise Gold Corp., U.S. corporations.
In unburned forests, the spring runoff is a glorious, annual
event. But not this year. [U.S. Forest service ecologist Liz]
Roberts and other forest experts know that the runoff will
carry an array of frightening heavy metals and ash-laden
sediment generated in the burned soils, posing danger to the
people of Glenwood Springs, who rely on Grizzly Creek and its
neighbor just to the west, No Name Creek, for drinking
water.
For decades, large red-hot furnaces cooked the lead from
smashed batteries at the Exide plant, just seven miles from
Downtown Los Angeles, spouting plumes of toxic air that settled
on and contaminated thousands of homes. … In the years
since, the facility has been cited repeatedly for serious
compliance problems. According to a former DTSC senior
scientist’s review of public records, at least four are
responsible for soil and groundwater contamination that the
department has or should have known about for years or even
decades.
Citing numerous “concerns” with the Clean Water Act (CWA)
section 401 water quality certification rule enacted by the
Trump Administration in 2020, the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) has issued a Notice of Intention to
reconsider and revise the rule. EPA’s notice states that
the new rule will be “better aligned with the cooperative
federalism principles that have been central to the effective
implementation of the Clean Water Act” and is “responsive to
the national objectives outlined in President Biden’s Executive
Order 13990.”
Recent research from the US Geological Survey (USGS) suggests
that droughts, particularly the prolonged kind happening in
parts of the US, could increase the risk of harmful arsenic
exposure for people that rely on well water. Hundreds of
millions of years ago, the baseline quality of your drinking
water may have been set in stone, literally. Arsenic is a
common groundwater contaminant, largely because of local
geology. In Maine, for instance, the formation of the
Appalachian Mountains and volcanic activity came together to
concentrate arsenic and other metals into cracks inside the
bedrock…
The ocean shoreline at Tijuana Slough National Wildlife Refuge
and Border Field State Park was closed Saturday due to
contaminated sewage water that may be moving north into the
U.S., county water authorities said. The San Diego County
Department of Environmental Health and Quality issued the
contact closure for the ocean shoreline Saturday. Ocean water
samples exceeded state health standards, DEHQ officials said.
Oxygen levels in the world’s temperate freshwater lakes are
declining rapidly — faster than in the oceans — a trend driven
largely by climate change that threatens freshwater
biodiversity and drinking water quality. Research published
today in Nature found that oxygen levels in surveyed lakes
across the temperate zone have declined 5.5% at the surface and
18.6% in deep waters since 1980.
Too often, ocean water is laced with sewage and pollutants,
affecting how safe beaches are for swimming and surfing –
that’s the message of this year’s Clean Water Report released
Tuesday, May 25, by the Surfrider Foundation. …
[T]he report highlights inefficiencies in sewer
infrastructure and a need to stop urban runoff before it
reaches the coast, both main contributors to dirty water that
plagues the country’s coastlines.
Hidden from view when driving by is the [Rise Gold]
mine that is filled with water contaminated with
byproducts of hard rock mining. The water now forms a murky
lake several hundred yards wide. Rise Gold plans to pump out
3.6 million gallons of water every single day for six months
and after that another 1.2 million gallons a day for up to 80
years from this site. Let that sink in. Get your mind
fully around this. This is real. They will dump this water
into the little creek alongside the site and send it on its way
down Wolf Creek to the Feather River to the Sacramento River to
San Francisco Bay … -Written by Billy Packard.
Free bottled water has begun to arrive at homes
with nitrate-tainted wells in parts of Stanislaus and
Merced counties. The ambitious effort, funded by farmers
and other parties, launched the week of May 10 with free
testing of residential wells. Those that exceeded the nitrate
threshold can start getting the 5-gallon jugs about 17 to 21
days later.
[R]esearchers collected water during heavy rainstorms from 12
streams flowing into the San Francisco Bay. … Microscopic
fibers and black rubbery fragments were the most common
microparticles, while natural debris, glass, paint and wool
were only minor components. Then, the team identified a subset
of plastic- or rubbery-looking fragments as being made mostly
of plastic polymers or other synthetic materials, and many of
the black rubbery particles originated from tires.
It was a question asked of panelists discussing the Salton Sea
on Tuesday, May 25. State and local officials were asked a
number of questions about the drying sea during a one-hour
online forum. The Red Hill Bay project that stalled after
breaking ground in 2015 was one of the topics panelists
discussed.
Malibu residents voiced concerns about a large algae bloom in
Malibu Lagoon at the Monday, May 24, Malibu City Council
meeting, with one requesting the city demand California State
Parks to do something about the lagoon—which public speakers
said could breach as soon as the early morning of Wednesday,
May 26. Malibu Lagoon has previously been plagued by algal
blooms; in 2018, one large bloom choked native plants and
fish—which suffocated, died and floated to the surface in a
massive, smelly die-off.
The Kern River Conservancy received a $23,000 grant to study
whether last year’s Sequoia Complex Fire harmed the water
quality in the wild and scenic section of the Kern River. The
Virginia and Alfred Harrell Foundation awarded the grant to the
non-profit conservancy, Gary Ananian, the conservancy’s founder
and executive director, told the Kern Valley Sun.
In terms of sheer size, Nordic Aquafarms’ land-based
aquaculture facility, slated for construction on the Samoa
Peninsula, would be the largest development project Humboldt
County has seen for decades, maybe since the heyday of the
timber industry. The facility’s five buildings — including two
massive production modules where Atlantic salmon would be
raised inside fully-contained recirculating tanks — would total
766,530 square feet, nearly an acre larger than the footprint
of the Bayshore Mall. It’s been more than two years since the
Norwegian company announced its ambitious plans, and the
environmental review period was scheduled to wrap up this
week.
Just who is in charge of revitalization of California’s largest
lake, and why has it been so tough to solve the issues at the
Salton Sea? … There has been a lot of blame passed around by
those who own the land around and under the Salton Sea. The
biggest land owner here is the Imperial Irrigation District, or
IID. Then, the federal government. Next, the Torres-Martinez
tribe.
Growers in the Central Coast region of California produce most
of the cool-season vegetables for the U.S. from March to
mid-November. After several years of multi-cropping vegetables,
the groundwater in many of the coastal valleys has become
contaminated with nitrate. Some wells have concentrations of
nitrate several times the federal drinking water standard of 10
ppm (parts per million) nitrate-N. Rural communities that rely
on groundwater as their sole source of drinking water must
purchase bottled water or install small reverse osmosis
systems.
The deadline is looming: According to a state law adopted in
2018, the California State Water Resources Control Board has
until July 1 to adopt a standard methodology for testing
drinking water for the presence of microplastics; adopt
requirements for four years of testing and reporting of
microplastics in drinking water, including public disclosure of
the results; and accredit qualified laboratories in California
to analyze microplastics. The problem? Testing for
microplastics … is not quite ready for prime time. It is not
yet precisely clear what effects microplastics have on animals,
including humans, and at what levels they may be harmful.
More wildfires. Hotter days. Drought. Sea-level rise. Those
conditions are an increasing reality in California, which is
steadily becoming an altered state. But if the grimmest
predictions of experts about our state and climate change
become true, the conditions will become far worse.
The U.S. Senate confirmed Radhika Fox, former US Water Alliance
CEO, as EPA Office of Water Assistant Administrator during a
confirmation hearing May 12. With the confirmation, Fox became
the first woman of color and first individual of Asian heritage
to be both nominated and confirmed to lead the EPA Office of
Water. Fox had been appointed to the Office of Water after
President Joe Biden’s inauguration in January.
A state appeals court has upheld California’s cleanup standards
for a cancer-causing chemical that was added to pesticides and
has polluted groundwater in the Central Valley, rejecting
challenges by manufacturers that may have to pay the costs. The
State Water Resources Control Board’s 2017 mandate for removing
nearly all TCP (1,2,3-trichloropropane) from drinking water was
contested by the California Manufacturers and Technology
Association, representing Dow Chemical Co. and Shell Oil, which
included the chemical in worm-killing fumigants widely used by
farmers through the 1980s.
California Governor Gavin Newsom on May 14 unveiled
his May budget revision that allocates $200
million to plug abandoned and orphaned oil and gas wells, many
located near low-income residential areas where the majority of
residents are Latino and Black. In January
2020, a report by the California Council on
Science & Technology revealed that California taxpayers could
be on the hook for more than $500 million to plug thousands of
“orphan” wells drilled and abandoned by oil and gas companies.
.. Plugging all 107,000 oil and wells in California when
they become idle would cost more than $9 billion, the
report also found.
[I]n a new study, UCLA researchers found that nitrogen in
treated sewage is driving a massive growth of oceanic algae and
loss of oxygen, which will likely have lasting effects on the
region’s ecosystem. From 1997 to 2000, for example, the growth
of microscopic marine algae called phytoplankton was 79% higher
than it would have been without nitrogen from human sewage in
the waters along the coast from the Baja California Peninsula
to Santa Barbara. The problem occurs in large part because
freshwater from sewage is less dense than the seawater it’s
injected into, which causes the wastewater to rises to the
surface, where phytoplankton live.
Nancy Smith remembered that children had called it “the sick
land” — the wedge of property alongside the 110 Freeway where a
dry cleaning facility had laundered aprons and uniforms for
decades across from a Lincoln Heights elementary school.
… Decades after the old Welch’s laundry was shuttered,
California regulators worked to clean up the soil and check the
groundwater for the chemicals used there — volatile
organic compounds such as tetrachloroethylene that could damage
the human liver and nervous system and have
been tied to an increased risk of cancer. The Department
of Toxic Substances Control oversaw a cleanup effort that
lasted for years and has continued to monitor groundwater at
the site.
The Salton Sea continues to be a big talker when it comes to
lithium, but a long problem remains in and around the sea when
it comes to toxic air. During our extensive coverage of the
Salton Sea, we learned that toxic air is not only coming from
dried-up parts of the sea, but other parts of the sea are now
contributing to the toxicity. “It is not just the toxic
elements that have been trapped by the water and now exposed as
the sea recedes,” explained Frank Ruiz, Salton Sea Director
with Audubon California. Ruiz has been working with researchers
who have been studying the toxic levels at the Salton Sea.
May is American Wetlands Month and this year also marks the
50th anniversary of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of
International Importance. This intergovernmental treaty is
focused on the conservation and wise use of important wetlands
and their resources. … Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine
Research Reserve … provides habitat for a diversity
of wildlife species, including more than 100 species of fish,
500 species of invertebrates, and the region’s iconic southern
sea otters. … Tomales Bay is a marine-coastal
wetland consisting of estuaries, eelgrass beds, sand dune
systems, and tidal marshes.
Although Indigenous people had, since prehistoric times,
modified the [Sierra Nevada] landscape and caused widespread
ecological change, the arrival of Europeans and Americans for
the gold rush brought a much more invasive level of alterations
with the construction of dams, permanent manipulation of
rivers, clear-cutting of old-growth trees and an ill-advised
practice of fire suppression that makes these forests ripe for
wildfires, especially when compounded by climate change, which
means more heat waves, decreased snowpack and drier conditions
among other impacts.
Senators Dianne Feinstein and Alex Padilla (both D-Calif.)
today joined with Senators Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky
Rosen (both D-Nev.) to introduce bipartisan legislation to
extend authorization of the Lake Tahoe Restoration Act. The
original Lake Tahoe Restoration Act was passed in 2000 and
authorized $300 million for the restoration of the lake and
surrounding basin. The current authorization, which was passed
in 2016, will expire in 2024. Reauthorizing the bill will
prevent an interruption in conservation and restoration
planning.
When Sandra Chavez’ mother discovered she had stage four cancer
last year, one of Sandra’s first thoughts was about their
water. Her family’s private well is contaminated with nitrates
and Chavez wondered if years of drinking the water could have
caused her mother’s sickness. Chavez and her family have relied
on bottled water since they found out their well water was
unsafe in 2015. But sometimes they don’t have enough and are
forced to drink the contaminated water. So when Chavez
found out about a new program providing free bottled water
delivery for families with nitrate-contaminated wells, she was
frustrated she hadn’t been contacted.
AB-377, is a proposed state Assembly bill titled Water Quality:
Impaired Waters. The premise of this legislation seems to be
that local authorities are responsible for all the dirty water
in local waterways. While the goal of “cleaning up the water”
is commendable the proposed solution is problematic. The Lompoc
City Council discussed a staff request to oppose this
legislation on May 4; the staff explains that “Assembly Bill
(AB) 377 seeks to ensure California’s waterways are drinkable,
fishable and swimmable by 2050.” -Written by Ron Fink, a Lompoc resident.
Tiny specks of degraded plastics have been documented in the
snowpack around Lake Tahoe — and in the lake itself. They
have been found in the Las Vegas Wash. The phenomenon is not
unique to Nevada. Microplastics, the end product of our plastic
consumption, have been found in ecosystems across the
world, even in remote areas. Microplastics are small
— less than 5 millimeters — but they are not uniform.
They can have different shapes and vary in size. Microplastics
from clothing can appear as synthetic fibers, whereas degraded
plastic from bags or water bottles might take on a different
composition.
Newly announced state funding for the Salton Sea is expected to
maximize habitat outcomes and provide immediate economic relief
to the community. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s $5.1 billion water
infrastructure, drought response and climate resilience
proposal, which he announced Monday as part of his $100 billion
“California Comeback Plan,” includes $220 million for the
Salton Sea. At Tuesday’s Imperial County Board of Supervisors
meeting on Tuesday, District 1 Supervisor Jesus Eduardo Escobar
wanted to know what is meant by providing immediate economic
relief to the community and how this would occur.
Newly released emails reveal that lawyers and lobbyists for
mining companies, developers and the agriculture industry had a
hand behind the scenes in shaping Arizona’s newly adopted law
on clean-water rules for rivers and streams. The emails
show the involvement of these influential groups went beyond
their public endorsements of the legislation. Their lawyers and
lobbyists were given access to offer input while the final
legislation was being drafted, and the emails show they
suggested specific language, offered “wordsmithing” tweaks and
requested significant changes that state officials incorporated
into the bill.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s $5.1 billion water infrastructure,
drought response, and climate resilience proposal
includes $220 million for the Salton Sea, and Assembly
member Eduardo Garcia, D-Coachella, applauded the announcement.
Garcia, chair of the Assembly Committee on Water, Parks, and
Wildlife, stated in a press release from his office that the
funding would maximize habitat outcomes and provide immediate
economic relief to the community.
The California State Lands Commission properly reviewed a
stalled desalination planned to be built on the coast south of
Los Angeles, a state appeals court says. In a decision filed
Saturday, the appeals court affirmed a lower court’s rejection
of a challenge to the plant by the environmental group
California Coastkeeper Alliance and others. It determined that
a 2017 re-review of the planned desalination plant in
Huntington Beach adequately complied with the requirements of
the California Environmental Quality Act.
Chula Vista resident and Imperial Beach lifeguard Lillian
Burkhart still remembers the sting on her skin after surfing in
Imperial Beach waters one day last summer. Within 24 hours, she
fell ill with a gastrointestinal infection, she said.
… Burkhart’s experience is commonplace and a reminder of
the decades-long struggle to address the recurring sewage
spills from Tijuana that pollute the South Bay shoreline.
As California slowly emerges from the depths of the COVID-19
pandemic, one remnant left behind by the statewide lockdown
offers a sobering reminder of the economic challenges still
ahead for millions of the state’s residents and the water
agencies that serve them – a mountain of water debt.
… Our latest article in Western Water explores the
hurdles to helping consumers, how some water agencies have
devised workarounds and how far more lasting solutions remain
out of reach.Western Water is just one of the publications
produced by our journalism team…
In 2020, the Salton Sea was described by Palm Springs Life
Magazine as “the biggest environmental disaster in California
history.” With the largest lake in California holding such a
bleak title, it’s amazing how obscure its legacy is. Over
spring break, we decided to go on a road trip to visit an
eccentric settlement in the middle of the lower Colorado
desert, known as a Slab City. This settlement is most well
known for being a site of post-apocalyptic garbage art and a
home for colorful nomads. Due to its libertarian ethos, it is
billed as the “last free place in America.”
Every spring, California farmers brace themselves for signs of
wriggling organisms destined to launch multigenerational
attacks on their crops. Many insect species survive the
winter as eggs or larvae and then emerge in early spring as the
first generation to feed and breed on millions of acres of
California vineyards, orchards and row crops. Climate change
will complicate farmers’ efforts to control these pests in
complex and unpredictable ways. The most alarming
consequence is apt to be ramping up pesticide applications,
with broad implications for the safety of California’s
waterways—just as the state gears up for a future filled with
drought.
A U.S. District Court judge has ordered McKinleyville-based
construction firm Kernen Construction Co. to pay over
$2,087,750 in civil penalties after it was found to have
violated the Clean Water Act by discharging contaminated storm
water into a nearby tributary creek of the Mad River. The order
was issued by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers on May 2 after the
company was found to have discharged storm water without
engaging in pollution control measures mandated by the
CWA.
More than 58,000 fires scorched the United States last year,
and 2021 is on track to be even drier. What many people don’t
realize is that these wildfires can do lasting damage beyond
the reach of the flames – they can contaminate entire drinking
water systems with carcinogens that last for months after the
blaze. … Since 2017, multiple fires have
impacted drinking water systems … including the CZU
Lightning Complex, Camp and Tubbs fires in California.
Thousands of private wells have been affected too.
Just a short drive south of Palm Springs, you’ll find
California’s largest lake. The drive along the circumference of
the Salton Sea reveals surprising, majestic views unlike
anything you’d expect to find in the desert. But for its
impressive sights and size, the Salton Sea is not a household
name, least of all in the very state it’s found. These days, if
you travel along the increasingly shrinking shorelines, you’ll
see suffering communities dotted with abandoned homes and lined
with silent streets.
Pregnant women exposed to too much nitrate in their drinking
water are at greater risk of giving birth prematurely,
according to a Stanford University study of more than 1.4
million California births. Agricultural runoff containing
fertilizer and animal waste can greatly increase the nitrate
level in groundwater, which naturally contains a low level of
the chemical. … The strongest effects of nitrate on
prematurity risk were seen in California’s agricultural
regions, including the San Joaquin Valley and the Inland
Empire, the study noted. A higher proportion of births in
these areas are to Hispanic women than in other regions of the
state …
Many miles of streams and rivers in the United States and
elsewhere are polluted by toxic metals in acidic runoff
draining from abandoned mining sites, and major investments
have been made to clean up acid mine drainage at some sites. A
new study based on long-term monitoring data from four sites in
the western United States shows that cleanup efforts can allow
affected streams to recover to near natural conditions within
10 to 15 years after the start of abatement work. The four
mining-impacted watersheds—located in mountain mining regions
of California, Colorado, Idaho, and Montana—were all designated
as Superfund sites …
When Ramona Hernandez turns on her kitchen faucet in El Adobe,
an unincorporated town just a few miles southeast of
Bakersfield, the water that splashes out looks clean and
inviting. But she doesn’t dare drink it. … Drinking the
tap water in this tiny community of dusty ranches and unpaved
roads could expose Hernandez to arsenic. So, for years, she and
her husband, Gerardo, have shuttled twice a week to the nearby
town of Lamont to load up on bottled water. At a cost of about
$80 a month, it’s enough for drinking and cooking.
Regenerative farming practices integrate the entire ecosystem —
building upon the relationships of the natural world — to
simultaneously produce healthier, more abundant crops and
restore the Earth’s natural resources. … And
restoring soil health and fertility produces more abundant,
nutrient-dense crops that better resist pests and disease. It
increases soil’s ability to filter and store water, reduce
erosion and sequester carbon. And it builds a diversity and
abundance of microbes that drive every function of soil.
Seven years ago, after the fish died, Sarah Ryan decided she
couldn’t wait any longer for help. California at the time
was in the depths of its worst drought in the last millennium
and its ecosystems were gasping. For Ryan, the fish kill in
Clear Lake, the state’s second largest and the centerpiece of
Lake County, was the last straw. Ryan is the environmental
director for Big Valley Rancheria, a territory of the Big
Valley Band of Pomo Indians that sits on the ancient
lake’s western shore. She and others raised alarms for several
years about increasingly dire blooms of toxic
cyanobacteria.
A little more than a week ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that
not only would California effectively ban hydraulic fracturing,
or fracking, by 2024, but the state also would work to phase
out oil extraction entirely by 2045. … It was — like the
governor’s promise last year that the state would ban the sale
of new gas-powered cars by 2035 — a sweeping pronouncement
meant to show urgency in addressing climate change while the
state he leads struggles with many of its most dire effects.
But meeting those goals requires complex regulatory
maneuvering.
British journalist James Bartholomew is widely credited with
creating the phrase “virtue signaling” to describe positioning
oneself on the popular side of an issue without actually doing
anything about it. Politicians are particularly prone to
uttering words or making token efforts on difficult issues to
stave off criticism about their failure to act meaningfully.
Gov. Gavin Newsom is California’s champion virtue-signaler as
he faces a recall election later this year. … There’s no
better example than Newsom’s ever-shifting attitude toward
hydraulic fracturing to increase petroleum production. -Written by Dan Walters
Gold Rush communities celebrate their mining past but are
largely unaware of the lasting impacts of that era. For more
than 100 years public and private investors have purchased and
developed land for public uses seemingly unaware of the
presence and implications of the physical and chemical hazards
found on abandoned mine lands (AMLs). As a result, residents of
the Sierra Nevada’s Gold Country – the state’s headwaters – are
living on top of and surrounded by abandoned mines. The toxic
metals discharged by legacy mines continue to flow down river
and deposit into the San Francisco Bay Delta …
Poseidon Water won a key approval Thursday in its long quest to
build a seawater desalination plant on the Orange County
coastline. But the permit from the Santa Ana Regional Quality
Control Board does not ensure that the $1-billion ocean
desalter will rise on the grounds of an old power plant in
Huntington Beach. Poseidon still needs a construction permit
from the California Coastal Commission and, most critically, a
binding deal with a public agency to buy 50 million gallons a
day of purified seawater.
Disagreement over restoring the Ballona Wetlands still remains
high. Walter Lamb, president of the Ballona Wetlands Land
Trust, recently held a webinar to discuss why the current
restoration plans are inadequate. The Land Trust disagrees with
the assertions of organizations such as Friends of Ballona
Wetlands, as they aren’t supported by available facts. Lamb
based his talking points around Gov. Gavin Newsom’s executive
order made on October 7, 2020, of protecting biodiversity and
an announcement phasing out fossil fuels from September 23,
2020.
Brown and Caldwell has been granted funding from The Water
Research Foundation (WRF) to study the fate of per- and
polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) through sewage sludge
incineration. PFAS is a group of human-made chemicals found in
a range of consumer and industrial products. Many PFAS are
resistant to grease, oil, water, and heat and used in many
applications, including stain- and water-resistant fabrics and
carpeting, cleaning products, paints, and fire-fighting foams.
The widespread use of PFAS and their ability to remain intact
in the environment over time can result in environmental
contamination.
The US Forest Service is taking public comments on a proposed
exploratory mining operation near the headwaters of Hot Creek
in the Eastern Sierra that could lead to harmful open pit
mining near this fishery. We need your help to stop it. This
project is problematic and disastrous in many ways: KORE
Mining wants to drill around Hot Creek for gold with no plan or
guarantee that gold exists in that area. Dredging,
excavation, and hydraulic mining will cause dramatic
stream degradation. The proposal for the exploratory operation
provides no information on how much water is needed, the depth
of drilling, or the negative impact on the wildlife and the
environment.
Hydraulic fracturing has occurred in California and nationwide
for decades; however, recent advancements in horizontal
drilling technologies and “well stimulation” techniques have
been instrumental in triggering an oil and gas boom, making the
U.S. the world’s largest producer of oil and gas
reserves. California produces more oil than all but three
other states (Texas, North Dakota and Alaska), and Kern County
is responsible for more than 70 percent of the state’s oil
production. Environmentalists and other members of the
public became concerned that the hydraulic fracturing process
may contaminate groundwater aquifers …
On Friday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) unveiled a new
initiative to ban new and future permits for hydraulic fracking
beginning in 2024. The ban is part of California’s effort to
move away from oil extraction to source fuel, focusing on
developing renewable sources such as wind and solar. Fracking,
or hydraulic fracturing, is the sourcing of oil from deep
subterranean rocks, using a high-pressured water mixture
drilled into the earth that releases natural gas and oil.
The California State Water Resources Control Board Friday urged
people and their pets to avoid the water in the Salton Sea due
to a toxic algae outbreak. Officials said that patches of toxic
cyanobacteria have been discovered at numerous sites in the
sea, and a dog recently died after swimming in the water.
“Cyanobacteria harmful algal blooms can affect the skin, liver
and nervous system of people and of dogs and livestock,” the
state water board said. As a precaution, visitors were urged
not to swim in the water, or let their pets enter the water, or
eat algal mats scattered about the shore line.
For years it’s been relatively easy to measure pollution from,
say, a factory. At a factory, there might be just one pipe of
waste to measure. Easy enough. But what about a farm? We
might not typically think of farms as sources of pollution. But
they can have big impacts on the land over time. Unlike at a
factory, the waste filters slowly through soil across
the whole plot of land. This waste—excess nutrients from
fertilizer—can eventually reach groundwater.
Both proponents and opponents of the controversial Poseidon
Water desalination plant in Huntington Beach made their voices
heard Friday in an all-day virtual meeting that continued well
into the night. In the end, however, a decision by the Santa
Ana Regional Water Board on whether to permit Poseidon’s
$1.4-billion project will have to wait until at least [this]
week. Another meeting is scheduled for Thursday, with a third
meeting on May 13, as necessary.
Gov. Gavin Newsom directed the state Friday to stop issuing
permits for the oil extraction method known as fracking by
January 2024 and to draw up plans to end all fossil-fuel
drilling in California by 2045 — the most sweeping declaration
of its kind in the nation. … Eliminating all extraction would
have far-reaching consequences in California, the nation’s
seventh-largest producer of crude oil… [Fracking
has] long been a controversial method because of what
climate activists see as unacceptable dangers, including the
possibility that it can contaminate groundwater.
The Biden administration and Congress are stepping up efforts
to control the release and cleanup of poly and perfluoroalkyl
substances, or PFAS, in drinking water sources and elsewhere,
joining states that have expanded scrutiny of the chemicals,
which are used widely in manufacturing and are extremely
persistent in the environment. EPA’s current “advisory”
limit on PFAS in drinking water is 70 parts per trillion, but
some states have set or proposed required levels from 6.5 to 20
ppt, including California …
Questions have been raised over California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s
political maneuvers to push a controversial seawater
desalination plant proposed for the Huntington Beach
coastline. Critics say their concerns about the actual
need for the project and its potential environmental effects
remain. The company pushing it, Poseidon Water, remains
steadfast in its intent to build a plant that would suck in 100
million gallons of seawater daily and make half of it
drinkable….[The Regional Water Quality Control] board’s next
hearing is scheduled for [Friday] April 23. If the board
approves the permits, the project then goes for a final say
from the state Coastal Commission.
The Los Angeles River spans nearly 51 miles — running from
Canoga Park to Long Beach. [T]he river changed in the 1930s
after a series of catastrophic floods hit the region and the
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers channelized the entire length of
the river — encasing it in concrete — and turning it into a
flood control channel. … [Marissa Christiansen, president of
the Friends of the Los Angeles River, hopes] to bring the
river back to its roots. And, for Earth Week, FOLAR is planning
a huge cleanup. From June to July, the group is asking for help
cleaning up 100 tons of trash from the waterway.
A former member of a Marina water advocacy group filed a motion
with state regulators requesting a change in a water decision
under the pretense of still being a member of the group,
officials with the group say. In a letter emailed to the
California Public Utilities Commission on Monday, Liesbeth
Visscher, the chairwoman of Citizens for Just Water, and Lisa
Berkley, one of the early members of the advocacy group,
informed the commission that a request to change a CPUC
decision, called a Petition for Modification, filed by
Margaret-Anne Coppernoll under the guise of being a current
member of the group was never authorized by the organization.
In fact, Coppernoll hasn’t been a member of the group since
2017 …
Given a growing body of evidence that many chemicals in
plastics pose human health risks, Californians should welcome
recently-passed legislation putting the state on path to be the
first to track microplastics in tap water. Because
plastics are highly resistant to biodegradation, instead
fragmenting into ever smaller bits, eventually reaching micron
and nanometer dimensions (there are 25.4 million nanometers in
one inch)—they travel unseen in wind and waterways so that even
the most remote regions of the globe, like the Arctic
seabed and summit of Mount Everest, are contaminated
with microplastics. -Written by Sarah Mosko.
Thousands of wells that bring water to San Joaquin Valley homes
are at risk of drying up this summer, leaving families without
running water for drinking, cleaning and bathing. While no one
knows the extent of the threat from this second year of drought
conditions, Jonathan Nelson with the Community Water Center
says “the alarm bells are sounding.” Homes, farms and
entire communities that rely on shallow wells as their only
source of water are vulnerable to declining groundwater levels
from dry conditions and agricultural pumping.
Turlock residents impacted by nitrate groundwater contamination
will soon be supplied with safe drinking water as the state
seeks out more permanent solutions. The Central Valley
Regional Water Quality Control Board is leading the charge on a
program which will provide bottled water deliveries or
bottle-filling kiosks to six geographic zones deemed to have
the most-serious groundwater contamination issues. The
Turlock Subbasin has been identified as a Priority 1 zone by
the board and is one of the two largest zones included in the
program.
[A] study, titled “Freshwater Salinization Syndrome on a
Continental Scale,” found at least a third of U.S. streams and
rivers have become saltier over the last 25 years. On December
3, freshwater scientist John Olson of California State
University, Monterey Bay, conducted a modeling study that
validated these results, indicating that the future looks briny
as well. The study is titled “Predicting Combined Effects of
Land Use and Climate Change On River and Stream Salinity.”
Salinization levels will likely increase by at least 50% in
half of U.S. streams by 2100 if salt use persists at its
current pace, according to Olson’s party.
If the San Diego-Tijuana region were a human body, it’d have
the stomach flu: Bad stuff is coming out of both ends. But
instead of tackling the complicated source of the infection,
the border towns are fighting over where to put a Band-Aid. Six
miles from the U.S.-Mexico border lie three giant ponds full of
really old poo that regularly flush into the Pacific Ocean and
flow north along the Southern California coast during summer
tourist season.
In a potential solution to a two-decade-old problem, Sonoma
County’s water agency has commissioned a $156,000 study of a
potential pipeline carrying Occidental’s wastewater to a
treatment plant in neighboring Graton. A pipeline between
the two west county hamlets would resolve the dilemma dating
back to a 1997 state order banning Occidental from
discharging effluent into a tributary of
the Russian River. Since 2018, the Occidental wastewater
system — one of eight managed by Sonoma Water — has been
trucking raw sewage 18 miles through Graton to a county
treatment plant at the airport, an expensive program seen as a
stopgap measure.
After a year hiatus because of COVID-19, the H2O Hackathon
returned to San Joaquin County on Saturday
with middle school, high school and college students
tackling a virtual challenge to help solve California’s water
problems. … The challenge for this year’s event was to
protect the San Francisco Bay-Delta estuary from harmful algal
blooms, bacteria that live in freshwater, estuarine and marine
environments that grow out of control and
produce toxic or harmful effects on people,
fish, shellfish, marine mammals and birds.
San Diegans will undoubtedly head to the ocean this weekend as
temperatures warm — but not in Imperial Beach. Sewage spilling
over from Tijuana forced officials on Friday to completely
close the city’s shoreline yet again. The move comes less than
a week after Baja officials said repairs were completed to a
broken water pump in the Tijuana River, which had allowed tens
of millions of gallons of sewage-tainted water to escape
capture starting in late March.
In what one board member called a hearing that isn’t going to
be topped, the Imperial County Air Pollution Control District
Hearing Board voted 4-0 to issue an order of abatement against
the Imperial Irrigation District over the Red Hill Bay project
site at the Salton Sea. … The Red Hill Bay project
is aimed at creating hundreds of acres of shallow marine
wetlands to provide aquatic bird habitat and reduce airborne
dust from playa exposed due to a shrinking Salton Sea.
General Waste Discharge Requirements for Discharges
from Irrigated Lands, simply known as Ag Order 4.0, will
officially begin to be implemented. Just prior to the deadline,
the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board approved
the measure Thursday evening. There has been unease among
farmers throughout the lengthy development process as to how
the rule will affect production.
For the past four years, a Canadian mining company has been in
Nevada County, about 60 miles northeast of Sacramento,
collecting samples of what it suspects is one of the world’s
highest-grade underground gold deposits, potentially worth
billions. … The legacy of gold, while widely celebrated, is
not something that many in this area, now home to more retirees
and Bay Area transplants than men in hard hats and overalls,
want to revisit. … [T]he scars it left on the landscape
remain visible, and unwanted. Creeks still get mucked up
with iron and sulfuric acid from old mines. Soils contain
arsenic left over from drilling. …
California was the first U.S. state to legally recognize access
to safe, clean and affordable water as a human right. But
substantial parts of the state lack access to drinking water
that meets those criteria. A new study published by the
California State Water Board and supported by UCLA research
identifies a risk for failure among a significant portion of
the state’s small and medium-sized public water systems.
As the latest evidence of extended drought and extreme wildfire
danger confirms, California’s climate is changing quickly. Its
policy on burning planet-warming fuels — not so much. A
state Senate bill to ban hydraulic fracturing and otherwise
restrict oil and gas extraction died in its first committee
Tuesday, with Gov. Gavin Newsom and three Democratic lawmakers
withholding support.
The City of San Diego’s Public Utilities Department has
completed the 2020 Watershed Sanitary Survey, which evaluates
any potential water quality issues at the source and will be
used as a basis for future watershed management and planning
efforts. A watershed is an area of land that drains water into
a specific body of water. Everything that is on the land,
whether a natural feature or a human activity, is part of the
watershed.
Monterey County must rescind all approvals of California
American Water’s proposed desalination project, per an order
from a Monterey County Superior Court judge who earlier this
year found the county violated the California Environmental
Quality Act by approving the project without identifying a
water source. The ruling was handed down April 3 by Judge Lydia
Villarreal, who on Jan. 21 granted in part—and denied in part—a
writ requested by the Marina Coast Water District regarding the
2019 approvals of the desal plant component of Cal Am’s
Monterey Peninsula Water Supply Project.
A final decision on the pending Irrigated Lands Regulatory
Program known as Ag Order 4.0 is expected by Friday, April 16.
Producers have anxiously been monitoring the development of the
program from the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control
Board. Stakeholders have repeatedly provided feedback on the
proposal, detailing the challenges it would create within
agriculture. As the adoption deadline quickly approaches,
industry members still have concerns about multiple provisions
of the measure.
Bay Area environmental groups are celebrating a decision by an
affiliate of Cargill to withdraw its appeal of a federal
judge’s finding that Redwood City salt ponds are protected by
the Clean Water Act. While the withdrawal does not mean
development is prohibited it does make it more difficult, as
the federal act requires permits be issued before any dredging
or filling of the salt ponds, a 1,365-acre area adjacent to the
San Francisco Bay filled with tidal pools, marshland and
commercial salt mining operations.
The state plans to inspect three dairy ranches in the Point
Reyes National Seashore after independent water quality tests
conducted in nearby creeks and lagoons earlier this year found
E. coli bacteria concentrations up to 40 times higher than
state health standards. The San Francisco Regional Water
Quality Control Board plans to inspect Kehoe Dairy, McClure
Dairy and R&J McClelland Dairy, which are located near
Kehoe Creek and waterways that flow into Abbotts Lagoon in the
northern region of the national seashore.
Harmful algal blooms (or HABs) occur when colonies of algae,
under the right conditions, grow out of control and produce
toxic or harmful effects on people, fish, shellfish, marine
mammals, and birds. Every U.S. coastal and Great Lakes state
experiences harmful algal blooms. In California, reports
of harmful algal blooms have increased from 91 in 2016 to 241
in 2019. In 2020, Stockton experienced a severe harmful
algal bloom; it marked the first year that algal blooms spread
into the San Joaquin and Calaveras Rivers so early in the
summer and fall months. Drought and heat are factors that
increase harmful algal blooms …
A far-reaching proposal to outlaw hydraulic fracturing and ban
oil and gas wells from operating near homes, schools and
healthcare facilities failed in the California Legislature on
Tuesday, a major setback for progressive leaders who hail the
state as the nation’s bellwether on environmental protection.
Gov. Gavin Newsom in September called on state lawmakers to ban
fracking and voiced his support for safety buffer zones around
wells …
A new state analysis estimates a $4.6 billion funding gap for
water system infrastructure needed to ensure Californians have
access to safe and affordable drinking water. The State Water
Resources Control Board this month released the first-ever
drinking water needs assessment, showing that approximately 620
public water systems and 80,000 domestic wells are at-risk of
failing to provide a sufficient amount of drinking water that
meets basic health standards.
Tree roots are being blamed for a 98,280-gallon sewage spill in
Sausalito that went unnoticed for two weeks. The overflow
started on March 17 and went undetected because of heavy
vegetation, according to the county.
Poseidon Water announced that the Third District California
Court of Appeal issued a decision denying the petition by
seawater desalination opponents to overturn the Sacramento
County Superior Court’s 2019 ruling upholding the California
State Lands Commission’s 2017 approval of an amended lease for
the proposed Huntington Beach Desalination Project (“Project”).
The Court of Appeal decision reaffirms that the State Lands
Commission correctly analyzed the Project under the California
Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and that the Project protects
the state’s Public Trust resources.
Legislation that would gradually phase out fracking and other
extraction methods that account for most of California’s
petroleum production faces its first big test in Sacramento on
Tuesday. The nine-member Senate Natural Resources and Water
Committee is set to vote on a proposal, Senate Bill 467, that
would bar new permits for hydraulic fracturing, cyclic
steaming, steam flooding and water flooding. The legislation
would begin taking effect in 2023 and also prohibit renewing
existing permits for fracking and the other targeted methods,
which a committee bill analysis says accounts for an estimated
80% to 95% of the state’s oil production.
California’s shrinking Salton Sea is getting a closer look
scientifically with the state, local air districts, and
community groups examining air, water, and even dust from the
parched shoreline where water was once plentiful. The increased
scrutiny comes as the state has continuously failed to meet
dust suppression and habitat goals set in a 2017 management
plan to restore nearly 30,000 acres of the state’s largest body
of water by 2028. The sea spans Imperial and Riverside counties
near the Mexican border, where disadvantaged communities
breathe some of the nation’s worst air and suffer from high
asthma rates. Chronic nosebleeds are also common.
The State Water Resources Control Board announced the
completion of its first-ever comprehensive look at California
water systems that are struggling to provide safe drinking
water to communities and how to help them. With criteria for
the state’s Human Right to Water list recently expanded, the
assessment identifies both failing water systems and those at
risk of failing, offering the most indepth view of long-term
drinking water safety the state has ever had.
The California State Water Resources Control Board (the State
Board) will use $4.4 million of a U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) grant to fund projects in seven counties around
the state. EPA’s Nonpoint Source Program grant assists the
State Board in implementing programs to address pollution
caused by runoff moving over the ground, known as nonpoint
source pollution. The Marin Resource Conservation District was
awarded over $700,000 by the State Board for its Conserving Our
Watersheds Program. This project helps ranchers within the
Point Reyes National Seashore prevent nitrogen, phosphorus,
sediment, and bacteria from livestock operations from running
off into Tomales Bay. Tomales Bay supports oyster production
and recreational activities including kayaking and fishing.
Despite its green reputation, California has a big fossil fuel
problem on its hands: neighborhood oil and gas drilling. In
California, there’s nothing preventing frackers or drillers
from setting up shop right next to your home, school, or
hospital — and indeed, this is the reality for 7.4 million
Californians currently living within 1 mile of oil and gas
drilling operations, who are disproportionately non-white and
low-income. Now, a new state bill called S.B. 467, slated
for a hearing in the California Senate Committee on Natural
Resources and Water on Tuesday, may reshape the lives of
frontline communities by eliminating fracking and instituting
mandatory buffer zones between oil and gas extraction and
places where Californians live, work, and study.
Nearly every resident of California has experienced an
earthquake. Even the youngest schoolchildren have the safety
procedure drilled into them: duck under a table, hold on, and
pray that it’s only a small one. Barring a truly catastrophic
quake, the situation usually ends there. You go on with your
day as if nothing had happened, the near catastrophe completely
forgotten. Most people assume that the danger ends after the
last remnants of the tremor share the ground. But there is a
much more sinister side effect of earthquakes that affects
daily life around California and much of the rest of the world:
contaminating the groundwater supply.
Throughout 2020 and early 2021, California issued more than 300
permits to oil and gas companies for new underground injection
wells — an intensive form of oil production and wastewater
disposal. But the actual number of new injection wells is
likely higher, owing to the state’s opaque approval process
that has drawn scrutiny from auditors and environmentalists.
Some of these undercounted wells may be polluting groundwater
used for public drinking and agricultural purposes, according
to regulatory filings reviewed by Capital & Main. The impact of
injection wells on groundwater in California is understudied,
regulators say.
In June 2017, the California Regional Water Quality Control
Board and the Central Valley Region adopted a Basin Plan
Amendment for the Sacramento River and San Joaquin River Basins
for the control of pyrethroid pesticide discharges. The
amendment establishes controls for pyrethroid discharges,
including prohibition of discharges of pyrethroid pesticides
above certain concentrations, total maximum daily loads (TMDLs)
for pyrethroid pesticides, recommendations for agency
regulation of pyrethroids and potential monitoring
requirements. Synthetic pyrethroids are the most common forms
of commercially available urban pesticides for ants, termites
and flying insects…
California remains far behind its targets for addressing
exposed playa around the Salton Sea, according to data released
in the 2021 Salton Sea Management Program annual report.
But state officials expressed optimism in a public
workshop that they are finally beginning to catch up to those
goals. The state was supposed to implement dust suppression
projects or build wetlands habitat across 3,500 acres of
exposed playa by the end of 2020 to tamp down dust that’s
imbued with a century’s worth of salts, pesticides and other
agricultural runoff.
A year ago, when stay-at-home orders were a newly disorienting
fact of life, I started taking long walks through my
neighborhood on L.A.’s Westside. Wandering south from Palms
into Culver City, I realized I live near a huge concrete
channel — a creek, trapped in place — with a bike path along
the water, and a view of oil pumpjacks rising and falling atop
the Baldwin Hills. There were beautiful murals, too, showing a
healthy, thriving waterway. They were hashtagged
#KnowYourWatershed. And the more I admired them, the more I
realized that I did not, in fact, know my watershed, despite
growing up not far from here. -Written by Sammy Roth, a Los Angeles Times staff
writer.
South Bay officials are beginning to run out of patience over
the continued cross-border flow of sewage-tainted water. The
pollution warning signs have been up most of 2021 on the sand
in Imperial Beach. Last Friday, the pollution flowed north to
Coronado, forcing beach closures there. Imperial Beach’s top
officials are fed up.
State water pollution officials have hit the city of Sunnyvale
with $187,000 penalty after the city’s wastewater treatment
plant spilled more than a quarter million gallons of partially
treated sewage into San Francisco Bay last summer. The spill
occurred on July 29 when a 36-inch welded steel pipeline
ruptured, releasing 292,600 gallons — the equivalent of about
12 backyard swimming pools — of partially treated sewage that
had not been disinfected into channels that flow into the bay
near Moffett Field. … The spill was one of the two largest
illegal discharges from a Bay Area sewage treatment plant into
San Francisco Bay over the past six years …
For the second time in less than a year, state health officials
plan to ask lawmakers to fast-track permitting authority over
hundreds of miles of streams left unprotected after a 2020
Trump Administration rollback of federal Clean Water Act rules.
The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s move
comes just weeks after a federal court denied Colorado’s effort
to prevent the new federal rules from taking effect.
Governor Gavin Newsom frequently says California is a leader in
sustainability and the transition away from fossil fuels. The
governor has also issued an executive order to fight climate
change in response to the deadly wildfires that ravaged our
state last year. Despite these public statements and official
efforts, it’s puzzling that his administration has been
promoting the climate-wrecking Poseidon desalination plant in
Huntington Beach as an infrastructure to source additional
water for California. There are plenty of things we can do to
ensure that Southern Californians have enough water to
thrive….
-Written by Alejandro Sobrera, the Orange County Hub
Coordinator for the Sunrise Movement, a youth led effort to
bring about a just transition to a greener
world.
When Gov. Gavin Newsom voiced his support last year for a ban
on hydraulic fracturing by oil and gas companies, an effort
long fought by the industry and trade unions alike, he gave
Democrats a green light to send him legislation to achieve that
goal as they saw fit. But the crackdown on oil and gas
production under consideration by the California Legislature is
much wider in scope than the plan requested by the governor,
who may get more than he bargained for as he shoulders the
pressures of carrying out the state’s COVID-19 pandemic
response while battling a looming recall election. The
ambitious proposal would outlaw hydraulic fracturing, or
fracking, and a series of other oil extraction methods reviled
by environmental activists.
The California Department of Justice (DOJ) filed comments with
the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Army Corps) regarding Sunset
Exploration’s proposal to drill for natural gas in the Suisun
Marsh. Located in the San Francisco Bay-Delta, this 88,000-acre
wetland is home to a number of endangered and threatened
species, including California Ridgway’s rail, black rail, and
Chinook salmon – and is just a few short miles from
environmental justice communities in Solano County…. DOJ
urges the Army Corps to fully consider the proposal’s
significant environmental impacts, including harm to these
communities and protected species, as well as increased
greenhouse gas emissions, before deciding whether to grant the
requested permit.
In the wake of California’s worst-ever wildfire season,
researchers are exploring how mushrooms can help detoxify
polluted soil and water. Scientists and volunteers at
CoRenewal, a nonprofit dedicated to ecological restoration, are
conducting the experiment in burn zones along high-risk
waterways in Northern California. Burned and melted plastics,
metals, electronics, and building materials leave behind toxic
ash, which then washes into water systems. For instance, in the
months following the Tubbs Fire in 2017 and Camp Fire in 2018,
authorities found toxic levels of benzene—a cancer-causing
chemical—in local drinking water.
If the mountain of proposed legislation is any indication,
lawmakers are increasingly primed to crack down on the plastic
waste that is littering roadsides, washing onto beaches and
into oceans, being digested by fish, and ending up in our own
bellies. In Sacramento, at least a dozen bills go after plastic
pollution from a variety of angles, including reducing the
amount of single-use plastics and refilling returnable beverage
bottles. And in Washington, D.,C., a sweeping federal proposal
co-authored by Rep. Alan Lowenthal, D-Long Beach, would place
much of the responsibility for plastic reduction and recycling
on companies that make and utilize single-use plastics.
Barack Obama was seven months into his first term as President
of the United States, the World Health Organization had
declared a H1N1 flu pandemic, and the California State Water
Resources Control Board (State Board) adopted the current
Construction General Permit for Stormwater Discharges (Permit
or CGP). It was September 2009. Now, having
administratively extended the Permit since 2014 when, by its
terms, the Permit expired, the State Board may, under a
schedule released late last year, soon release a new draft CGP
for public comment, with a goal of adopting it late this
summer. As with the current permit, the proposed new CGP will
regulate the discharge of pollutants from construction sites in
California.
Although most residents have safe drinking water, more than 250
water systems serving 900,000 people were out of compliance
with drinking water standards in 2020. This is a chronic issue
for some systems; more than 170 have been out of compliance for
three or more years. More than half of these noncompliant
systems are in the San Joaquin Valley—California’s largest
farming region and home to a third of the state’s low-income
communities. Some tribal water systems face similar challenges.
Data are lacking on water quality provided by roughly 1,500
very small, county-regulated water systems and more than
350,000 domestic wells, but some of these supplies may have
chronic issues as well.
Last week, the California State Water Resources Control Board
(State Water Board) officially released an order (the Order) to
investigate and sample for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances
(PFAS) at over 160 bulk fuel storage terminals and refineries
throughout California. The State Water Board’s Order is the
latest action in a series of investigative orders over the last
two years to study and identify industrial and municipal
sources of PFAS in California including at airports, landfills,
manufacturing facilities, chrome platers, and wastewater
treatment facilities.
Underneath Orange County is a hidden arterial highway that
groundwater moves through before eventually finding its way
into homes. More than 70% of the water served in Orange County
is from groundwater. But some of that water has become
contaminated from industrial manufacturing when harmful
chemicals that weren’t properly disposed of seeped down into
the ground. … The Orange County Water District is tasked
with determining the extent of the pollution, and containing it
before more drinking water wells need to be shut down and
contaminants spread to the principal aquifer, which is directly
pumped by production wells for drinking water.
City officials in Oceanside described their drinking water as
consistently “high-quality, safe and reliable” Wednesday in the
hope of reassuring residents after a lawn care company ranked
Oceanside’s water at 198 out of 200 cities nationwide.
Rosemarie Chora, the city’s water utilities division manager,
said a March 23 report from LawnStarter “hit big” as residents
expressed alarm on social media. Based in Austin, Texas,
LawnStarter vets gardeners and pest control companies and
connects them online with homeowners in about 120 cities
nationwide, according to its website. It dinged the city in
multiple ways.
Rejecting arguments that a utility can’t be sued over
century-old pollution, a federal judge signaled Wednesday that
he will likely advance a lawsuit seeking to hold Pacific Gas
and Electric liable for contamination that occurred more than
100 years ago. … [Plaintiff and San Francisco resident Dan]
Clarke claimed groundwater contamination stemming from the site
of PG&E’s former gas plant “is intermittently discharged
into the bay.” He said seasonal, tidal and other factors result
in groundwater passing the former plant site and intermixing
with contaminants before leaking into the San Francisco Bay.
Much of the state’s water infrastructure was designed decades
ago and was built to serve half the size of our current
population. Faced with aging infrastructure, California cities
have taken innovative approaches to modernizing water treatment
and recycling systems to meet the needs of a growing population
and a changing climate. One infrastructure need that many
residents take for granted is wastewater treatment.
… The San José-Santa Clara Regional Wastewater
Facility is the largest advanced wastewater treatment
facility in the Western United States. Originally built in
1956, today it serves more than 1.4 million residents and
17,000 businesses in eight cities in Silicon Valley and
unincorporated areas of Santa Clara County. Using
a treatment process that simulates the way nature
cleans water, the facility treats an average of 110 million
gallons of wastewater per day.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has
agreed to pay a $2.5 million penalty for discharging comingled
stormwater at Mule Creek State Prison, in violation of the
Clean Water Act. The penalty was assessed for unpermitted
discharges between January 2018 and April 2019 to Mule Creek, a
tributary to Dry Creek and the Sacramento-San Joaquin
Delta. The case began three years ago when the Central
Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board (Central Valley
Water Board) received a complaint that the prison was
discharging wastewater into the nearby creek. Central Valley
Water Board staff confirmed discharges were occurring from the
prison to Mule Creek.
What do climate change, aging infrastructure, and urban
population growth have in common? They all pose major
challenges – especially for water infrastructure in the United
States. And many utilities are having a hard time keeping up.
Part of the problem is that the industry has relied on the same
handful of technologies for decades. The wastewater sector
sorely needs to adopt new strategies and technologies.
Innovation could serve to improve the ability of utilities to
respond to stressors, increasing resilience and providing
co-benefits.
Arsenic naturally occurs in the region’s groundwater and
Allensworth is served by two groundwater wells that have
contained arsenic levels up to 60 percent higher than state
defined safety levels for drinking water. … To tackle
those challenges in Allensworth, the community is collaborating
with SOURCE to outfit their local community center with two
Hydropanels to sustainably generate drinking water. The
Hydropanels use the warmth of the sun to draw clean,
pollutant-free water vapor out of the air through a patented,
water-absorbing material and into a reservoir inside the
panel.
New forest management plans that could be in effect for the
next 15 years in California’s Sierra Nevada are almost complete
– using public comments made prior to the catastrophic Creek
Fire that burned nearly a third of Sierra National Forest. The
aftermath of that wildfire – the largest single fire in
California’s history – isn’t prompting big changes in national
forest plan revisions that have been in the works for years,
federal land managers said. … Aside from air
quality, these forests directly affect the lives of millions of
people in California most prominently via billions of gallons
of water that annually flow from these forests into the central
San Joaquin Valley.
About 40 million Americans in the West and Southwest rely on
the Colorado River for drinking water, as do the region’s
massive agriculture and recreation industries. Water has been
the most valuable commodity in the West since the time of the
pioneers. It became a source of modern political power when the
water of the Colorado River was divvied up among seven Western
States in the 1920s — the Jack Nicholson movie “Chinatown”
dramatized California’s legendary water battles. Today, a
rapidly shrinking Colorado River is forced to support
relentless development in California and across the West — very
thirsty development.
For the last seven years, Lomita resident Brenda Stephens has
been advocating for better, locally sourced tap water.
… Following a long history of water quality issues, plus
the detection of benzene in 2019, the city of
Lomita’s Cypress Water Production Facility has remained
offline. The city currently outsources its water supply. For
Stephens, it’s been a break from water issues. … In late
2019, Stephens and other Lomita residents took part in a CWPF
tour that showcased how a new filtration system will
alleviate the city’s locally-sourced water problems and bring
the facility back online, safely. The city of Lomita received
a $2 million grant from the Water Replenishment
District’s Safe Drinking Water program.
With racism in the public eye and the pandemic wreaking havoc
on vulnerable populations disadvantaged by ecological hazards,
the need to ensure environmental justice has become more
apparent – and more important – than ever… Race affects
class. Class then affects your options. It’s more of
a human rights issue today than a civil rights
issue. When you broaden it to human rights, then we’re
talking about a wide variety of things that affect the
opportunities open to people as people, not as citizens: Do we
have a right to clean water? Do we have a right to decent
housing? Do we have a right to an environment free of
pathogens?
In the coming weeks, officials are expected to release a new
plan for reaching the goals set out under the Paris Climate
Agreement and recommend changes to several national monuments.
More broadly, the administration is considering steps that
could include taking a harder line on climate regulations.
… The Biden administration has also listed dozens of
Trump-era environmental rules across several agencies that it
plans to review, including rules governing air quality
standards, water pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.
Industry attorneys say they’re bracing for a wave of corporate
liability and litigation as the Biden administration works
swiftly to fulfill a campaign promise to control “forever
chemicals.” The Environmental Protection Agency this month
announced it’s working on three water-related regulations for
per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. It sent a fourth
chemical data-collection proposal to the Office of Management
and Budget, or OMB, for approval. … One of the the four
regulations the EPA announced would provide a needed, national
drinking water limit for two PFAS…
Water-related challenges are among the biggest issues in
Oceanside, ranging from our drinking water quality to concerns
over drought and runoff polluting the ocean. With an overall
score of 39.79, Oceanside finished just above Moreno Valley,
CA, and Garden Grove, CA to be ranked as the 3 cities with the
worst water quality. The city with the highest-ranking was
Columbus, OH, with a score of 81.03.
The Ninth Circuit reversed a conviction for three counts of
violations under the Clean Water Act because the district court
failed to instruct the jury that the defendant needed to
knowingly discharge material “into water” to convict.
… In the summer of 2014, Lucero executed a scheme under
which he charged construction companies to dump dirt and debris
on lands near the San Francisco Bay, including wetlands and a
tributary subject to the Clean Water Act. Although Lucero
admitted to “walking the land” where the dumping happened, the
period when the dumping occurred was unusually dry due to
drought. The trial court found Lucero guilty on two counts of
discharges into wetlands and one count of discharge into a
tributary.
Water quality testing commissioned by two groups lobbying for
the end of ranching in the Point Reyes National Seashore shows
fecal contamination exceeding federal recreational standards in
several waterways feeding the Pacific Ocean. In response,
seashore personnel point to their nearly finalized general
management amendment, which requires water quality
improvements. The tests from two rainy January days included
samples from and near Kehoe Lagoon, Abbotts Lagoon and Schooner
Creek, and showed exceedances in levels of E. coli and
Enterococcus—bacteria that serve as common indicators for fecal
contamination.
A San Diego program that aims to keep toxic sewer water out of
the Pacific Ocean suffers from outdated methods and inadequate
efforts to identify and inspect the business sites of
industrial polluters, a new city audit says. The 56-page audit
says the program, which oversees industrial polluters served by
San Diego and 12 other local sewer districts, needs to step up
efforts to find polluters and modernize its inspection program.
The program – the Industrial Wastewater Control Program – is
also understaffed and not capable of handling the larger
workload it should handle without adding more workers, the
audit says.
Most Californians rely on groundwater in some way, through the
kitchen faucet, when buying food, or at a green local park to
relax and recreate. Those underground aquifers are even more
important during droughts. In California’s Southern San Joaquin
Valley, groundwater pumping more than tripled in the 2012-2016
drought to make up for lost rain. But that over-pumping comes
at a cost, causing land to sink as much as two feet a year,
damaging bridges, roads, and houses, and drying up drinking
water wells and rivers. The people and places most hurt are the
ones without the money to drill down to find diminishing
groundwater.
The top state scientific agency charged with protecting
Californians from toxic chemicals has proposed adding the
“forever chemical” PFOA to the list of substances known to the
state to cause cancer in humans under the Safe Drinking Water
and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986, otherwise known as
Proposition 65. The California Environmental Protection
Agency’s Office of Environmental Health and Hazard Assessment,
or OEHHA, said March 19 that PFOA “meets the criteria for
listing as known to the state to cause cancer under Proposition
65,” based on the findings of a National Toxicology Program
report last year.
It wipes out entire communities in a matter of moments, weakens
our lungs and even taints our drinking water, yet federal
strategy to combat wildfires remains outdated and largely
ineffective. The Biden Administration has an opportunity to
rewrite the playbook on combatting wildfires, according to
Stanford University science and policy experts whose research
on a range of related issues points toward bipartisan
solutions.
A new lawsuit brought by environmental groups against the
Bureau of Land Management seeks to rescind leases for seven
parcels of federal land auctioned to energy companies in the
waning days of the Trump administration. They are the first
federal land oil and gas leases of their kind to be sold in
nearly a decade and would open vast tracts to oil exploration
and fracking. The land in question sits in California’s Central
Valley, an agricultural region that already experiences some of
the worst air and water quality in the country.
According to USGS, 56 percent of streams sampled had one or
more pesticides in water that exceeded at least one
aquatic-life federal standard. Many of these pesticides are
also linked to a range of human and environmental health
effects including cancer, birth defects, neurological and
reproductive health impacts. … [A] report released by UC
Davis examined the the four-county Tulare Lake Basin and the
Monterey County portion of the Salinas Valley. The study found
that … agricultural fertilizers and animal wastes applied to
cropland are by far the largest regional sources of nitrate in
groundwater; nitrate loading reductions are possible, some at
modest cost. Large reductions of nitrate loads to groundwater
can have substantial economic cost…
Water is one of the most valuable resources on the
planet — we need it to survive, to stay clean
and healthy, to grow food, to run businesses, to
support ecosystems, and so much more. And yet clean,
accessible, abundant water is often taken for granted, in
part because its cost rarely reflects its true value. But
anyone who has spent even a day, or a few hours, without
access to water knows its vital importance. Still today
over 2.2 billion people globally lack
access to safe drinking water.
Inframark LLC, has entered into a five-year partnership with
the City of Camarillo, Calif., for the operations and
maintenance (O&M) of the City’s new $66.3 million North
Pleasant Valley Desalter. On January 13, the City Council
unanimously approved Inframark’s proposal over three other
international competitors. Inframark will also assist in the
startup and commissioning of the brackish water reverse osmosis
facility, which is currently under construction and is expected
to be up and running this fall.
Nitrogen pollution is one of agriculture’s biggest and most
intractable problems. Crops can’t grow without the critical
nutrient, and because sources of nitrogen are easy to come
by—synthetic fertilizer is cheap and manure from large animal
agriculture operations is plentiful—farmers often apply too
much, to try to ensure the highest yields. Because plants can’t
use it all, the excess makes its way into groundwater and
washes into waterways where it contaminates drinking water and
creates vast dead zones in oceans and lakes.
… California’s largest hotspot unsurprisingly includes
21 counties that cover the Central Valley, America’s produce
capital.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management decided to sell oil and gas
leases on public land in California for the first time in
nearly a decade without taking a hard look at the environmental
and public health impacts, according to a lawsuit filed Monday
in a federal court in the state. The agency’s “hasty”
environmental review ignored comments from experts and failed
to consider evidence showing fracking could pollute already
scarce groundwater resources, environmental groups say in the
U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California
filing. The decision violated the National Environmental Policy
Act …
The name Erin Brockovich has become synonymous with those who
investigate and hold corporations to account for polluting
people’s water. Actor Julia Robert’s sassy film portrayal of
the single mum’s key role in winning the largest settlement
ever awarded at the time for a direct-action lawsuit against
Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), made her a household name.
… Despite the win, there was no Hollywood ending for the
community … Even with on-going clean-up efforts,
hexavalent chromium (also known as chromium-6, a chemical that
has been shown to cause lung cancer when inhaled by humans)
still haunts the plaintiffs, as the plume continued to spread.
Under an agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA), the USDA Forest Service closed 77 large-capacity
cesspools (LCCs) it operated in Arizona and California. The
Forest Service met the deadlines set forth in the agreement and
closed the cesspools, which can be sources of harmful water
pollution, in 11 national forests across the two states.
… Cesspools collect and release untreated raw sewage
into the ground, where disease-causing pathogens and harmful
chemicals can contaminate groundwater and surface waters that
are sources of drinking water.
The Porter-Cologne Water Quality Act, California’s state clean
water law, passed in 1969 and became the model for the 1972
federal Clean Water Act. Nearly half a century after passage of
the landmark federal law, it is time for both the state and the
nation to assess progress and chart a new course. Once again,
California is leading the way with Assembly Bill 377, a new
bill introduced by Assemblyman Robert Rivas (D-Hollister).
Although new legislation is needed, the existing federal and
California clean water acts have produced successes that should
be celebrated. -Written by Terry Tamminen, president of 7th
Generation Advisors and founder of Santa Monica
Baykeeper.
Santa Clarita, a comfortable exurb of some 213,000 residents
about 30 miles northwest of Los Angeles, is one of hundreds of
California communities and districts grappling with the pricey
problem of drinking water that’s been tainted by per- and
polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), chemicals that have been
linked to cancer, liver damage, decreased fertility and
increased risk of asthma and thyroid disease. Last year the
Santa Clarita Valley Water Agency (SCV Water) joined a
multidistrict lawsuit filed in South Carolina that goes after
chemical manufacturers and makers of PFAS-laden aqueous
firefighting foam.
Tucked out of sight, oil wells run thousands of feet deep,
tapping thick crude from one of California’s many urban oil
fields. And in the fall of 2019, investigators with the state’s
oil agency flagged trouble. Nasco Petroleum was injecting
huge amounts of water into well bores above the legal pressure
limits, aiming to push more crude out of the aging downtown
field. … The wells, investigators wrote in a report to a
manager, posed “immediate” risks to drinking water aquifers.
To have enough excess time and energy in your life to spend on
cultivating a lawn means that you are a successful member of
society — not just economically, but in spirit and values. But
where did this obsession come from? A lawn, taken out of
context, is a very peculiar landscaping choice. … There
are tons of alternatives to lawns that can be more appropriate
for the California climate. Xeriscaping, or the practice of
using drought tolerant plants for decorative landscaping, is
rapidly becoming more popular as homeowners are trying to keep
their front yards looking neat and elegant while cutting down
their water costs and environmental impact. -Written by Landon Iannamico, staff writer for the
Daily Californian
Earth Island Institute, a Berkeley, Calif.-based environmental
nonprofit, sued a collection of the world’s largest food,
beverage and consumer goods companies, saying their use of
millions of tons of plastic packaging has resulted in polluted
oceans, waterways and beaches. … Another novel element
of the case is that the Earth Island Institute is claiming the
10 companies in question are also harming the institute
specifically by allowing plastics to proliferate in the oceans
off of California, causing the nonprofit to expend enormous
sums to effect beach clean-ups and other related
projects.
As more people move into the Truckee River watershed, demand
for water is increasing while more and more nonpoint source
(NPS) pollution is making its way to the river. Nearly half a
million people get their water from the Truckee River, and
nonpoint source pollution threatens the quality of not just the
drinking water, but the greater ecosystem of the entire
watershed. Nonpoint source contaminants are the largest single
source of water pollution in Nevada and across the
nation. Here in the Truckee Meadows, things such as
fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, motor oil, engine
coolant, septic tanks, chemical runoff , silt from erosion, and
e. Coli bacteria, to list a few, all affect the overall quality
of ground, surface, and ultimately, drinking water.
[The Salton Sea is] drying up, spewing harmful dust into the
Imperial Valley’s already badly polluted air. There are
countless stories to be told around the Salton Sea. To me, one
of the most fascinating is about lithium. … I wrote
about the increasingly bright prospects for Salton Sea
lithium extraction in October 2019. Today, I’ve got
several updates on the companies trying to make the Imperial
Valley the first major source of North American lithium
production — including the entrance of some powerful new
players.
The bipartisan confirmation of Michael Regan as Administrator
of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) elevates a
public servant with a wealth of federal, state and nonprofit
experience. … This will require Regan to rely on his
expertise in air quality and climate issues—and the cleanup
agreements he brokered at NCDEQ—as he oversees increased
regulation of traditional energy sources and businesses whose
operations result in air, land and water pollution.
An estimated 4.1 million people in the lower 48 states are
potentially exposed to arsenic levels that exceed EPA’s
drinking water standards A new U.S. Geological Survey study
highlights the importance of homeowners testing their well
water to ensure it is safe for consumption, particularly in
drought-prone areas. … The states with the largest
populations facing elevated arsenic levels in private domestic
well water during the simulated drought conditions are Ohio
(approximately 374,000 people), Michigan (320,000 people),
Indiana (267,000 people), Texas (200,000 people) and California
(196,000 people).
The Kiewit-Stantec design-build team recently broke ground on
two multi-year projects that together total $400 million and
will help remediate water from the San Fernando Valley
Groundwater Basin (SFB) for the Los Angeles Department of Water
and Power (LADWP). The SFB covers 226 square miles northwest of
downtown Los Angeles. The new state-of-the-art facilities at
the North Hollywood Central Response Action Treatment Facility
and Tujunga Well Field Response Action Treatment Facility will
address historical groundwater contamination from post WWII and
cold-war era industrial operations in the area.
As a scholar, my work is situated at the intersection of
climate change, public health, and public policy. I am an
interdisciplinary researcher, and my interests are centered on
environmental justice….During California’s last extreme
drought, I was doing my field work and visited East
Porterville, which was ground zero for how water injustice was
hitting migrant communities, particularly undocumented Latino
migrants. They had very little water, and what they had was
often contaminated.
The city of Lathrop’s longstanding goal of discharging
highly-treated wastewater into the San Joaquin River could
clear a major hurdle tonight. Based on the current plan
the wastewater would be mainly discharged directly into the
river during winter months when irrigation demands are low and
river flow is high and reduced in the summer months when
irrigation demands along the river are at their peak.
California water suppliers could face state limits on the
concentration of two so-called “forever chemicals” before the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sets national standards.
Maximum contaminant levels for perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA)
and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) are on track to be in
place in California in 2023 … The EPA announced in February
that it planned to regulate both chemicals and order nationwide
sampling for those and 27 similar compounds between 2023 and
2025.
Spurred by the rising price of gold, K2 Gold Corp., of
Vancouver, Canada, is drilling and trenching in hopes of
selling its findings or partnering with a bigger company that
would, perhaps, transform the public lands into an open pit
cyanide heap leach mine, just a few miles from Death Valley.
… Opponents … worry about air pollution … and
the water required for mining gold. Pumping out millions
of gallons from desert aquifers, or underground lakes, they
fear, could exhaust regional springs in valuable wildlife
habitat, and attract wildlife to ponds of cyanide-laced water.
Pacific Gas and Electric will pay to remove soil possibly
tainted by century-old gas plants and investigate groundwater
contamination in a San Francisco shoreline area under the terms
of a deal announced Monday. The agreement represents the third
and final settlement reached in a lawsuit filed in 2014 over
pollution from manufactured gas plants operated by PG&E in
the late 1800s and early 1900s. Under the deal entered Monday,
PG&E will fund a study on how to remove or mitigate
contamination from an underground storage tank on the former
site of its North Beach gas plant, which stopped operating
after it was damaged in the Great Earthquake of 1906.
Humboldt County’s timber industry legacy includes abandoned
mill sites that can be contaminated with dioxins. Now, a former
mill site between the cities of Arcata and Blue Lake is a
priority case because it’s a potential threat to the drinking
water of 88,000 county residents.
A beach water use advisory is now in effect until Thursday,
warning people of possible bacteria in the water following
rainfall. The recent rainfall, bacteria, chemicals, debris,
trash, and other public health hazards from city streets and
mountain areas are likely to contaminate ocean waters at and
around discharging storm drains, creeks, and rivers. People who
enter the water in these areas could become ill, according to
Los Angeles County Health Officer, Muntu Davis, MD, MPH. This
advisory will be in effect until at least Thursday at 1o a.m.
I’ve been writing a lot about the broken sewage system in
Tijuana causing spills into San Diego. Part of the concern, San
Diego officials told me, is that Mexico lacks a system to
monitor whether businesses are dumping toxic waste into the
sewer system. That’s part of the reason why it’s risky to reuse
any of that river water because, if we don’t know what’s in the
water, we can’t be sure how to best treat it. San Diego is
about to run into this issue in a big way with its Pure Water
project, a multibillion-dollar system that’s going to recycle
the city’s sewage and treat it so, well, you can drink
it.
Companies in these [pollution] cases weren’t required to plead
guilty; they weren’t convicted of any crimes, according to the
agreements. Instead, the government agreed to forego
prosecution for a certain time period or drop the case
altogether if the companies paid hefty fines and promised to
clean up the environmental damage they had inflicted.
… One concerned a waste hauler, Asbury Environmental
Services, accused of discharging marine diesel oil into a storm
drain that led to the Los Angeles River. In 2020, 10 years
after that incident, prosecutors wrapped up the case with a
nonprosecution deal.
Local political leaders and a dozen Bay Area environmental
groups are urging the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to reject a
permit proposal for an exploratory natural gas drilling project
in Suisun Marsh. The 88,000-acre wetland in Solano County — the
largest contiguous brackish marsh on the west coast of North
America — lies near the North Bay cities of Fairfield and
Benicia, at the mouth of the vast Sacramento-San Joaquin River
Delta where the salty waters of San Francisco Bay mix with
river water to create an estuary ecosystem that is home to
hundreds of species of birds, fish, amphibians and mammals,
including river otter, tule elk and the endangered salt marsh
harvest mouse.
California is poised to issue the world’s first guidelines for
microplastics in drinking water despite no data on how
plentiful they are in the state, no scientific agreement on how
to test water for them and little research on their health
risks. The pieces of plastic — smaller than an ant, some
so tiny they can be seen only with a microscope — have
contaminated wildlife and human bodies through their food, air
and water. … Now the state Water Resources Control Board is
blazing a trail to issue a preliminary health-based threshold
and testing methods by July 1.
There has been no shortage of recent regulatory developments
concerning per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in
California, which are especially relevant to drinking water
systems and the consumer product community. On March 5, 2021,
the State Water Resources Control Board (State Water Board),
Division of Drinking Water (DDW), issued a notification level
of 0.5 parts per billion (ppb), and a response level of 5 ppb,
for perfluorobutane sulfonic acid (PFBS) in drinking
water. PFBS is a type of PFAS compound that is commonly
used as a replacement compound for perfluorooctane sulfonic
acid (PFOS).
It was a chilly morning in 2010 when Oxnard farmworkers,
tending to their broccoli crops, discovered an oily sheen
floating on their irrigation water. In a nearby oilfield, a
tank of diluent — a carcinogenic mix of benzene, toluene, and
diesel — had sprung a leak. … A decade later, we
still face the same dangers. Right in the heart of our prime
farmland, which infuses Ventura County with over two billion
dollars annually. We’re risking that vital economy for the
dregs: Tar Sands becomes bunker fuel and asphalt — not
gasoline. And annually, Tar Sands extraction in Oxnard could
use up approximately 12 Olympic-size swimming pools worth of
drinkable water — just to make steam. -Written by Liz Beall, executive director of Climate First:
Replacing Oil and Gas.
Professor Marc Beutel and his graduate student Mark Seelos have
been recognized for papers and a presentation on toxic mercury
mitigation by the North American Lake Management Society. …
In the winning paper … Beutel and his former Ph.D.
advisor, UC Berkeley Professor Alex Horne, detailed what
happened when an engineered oxygenation cone using pure oxygen
gas was installed in the bottoms of very large reservoirs to
protect fish health. The papers are based on their research at
Camanche Reservoir and a fish hatchery downstream of the
reservoir on the Mokolumne River.
The forested watersheds of the Sierra Nevada are the origin of
more than 60 percent of the state’s developed water supply.
Sierra Nevada megafires that kill all, or nearly all,
vegetation across large landscapes pose serious risks to this
system. In the immediate aftermath of a fire, high-severity
burn areas lack vegetation to stabilize soils. … The
resulting sediment enters nearby creeks and rivers, degrading
water quality and adversely affecting regional aquatic
habitats.
The Grand Canyon Protection Act was recently introduced by U.S.
Rep. Raύl Grijalva and passed in the House and has been
introduced in the Senate by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. The bills will
permanently protect about 1 million acres of public lands
surrounding Grand Canyon from the harmful and lasting damage of
new uranium mining. … This legislation is critical
to stopping the threats that mining poses to water quality and
quantity, unique habitats and wildlife pathways, and to sacred
places. -Written by Sandy Bahr, director for Sierra
Club’s Grand Canyon Chapter, and Amber Wilson
Reimondo, Energy Program director with Grand Canyon
Trust.
For decades, the Cargill salt ponds in Redwood City have
stretched into the San Francisco Bay like a blank slate. What’s
to come of them? The Cargill corporation sees the outline of a
new housing development, while environmental groups see a
restored wetland habitat. David Lewis and his group Save the
Bay recently joined a lawsuit against the former Trump
administration’s EPA in a back-and-forth battle over whether
the area falls under federal protection.
Environmental and community groups have sued a California
county after the prime oil-drilling region approved a plan to
fast-track thousands of new wells in a state that’s positioned
itself as a leader in combating climate change. The Kern County
Board of Supervisors on Monday approved a revised ordinance
that could lead to approval of more than 40,000 new oil and gas
wells over roughly 15 years. … The oil and gas industry
faces challenges from California lawmakers and environmental
groups for creating air and water pollution and contributing to
climate change.
Last year, tens of thousands of water birds became paralyzed
and died in a gruesome botulism outbreak caused by lack of
water at two wildlife refuges on California’s border with
Oregon. And it could happen again this summer. The crippling
drought that has plagued the region for years shows no sign of
ending, and there’s been little relief from the bureaucratic
gridlock and lawsuits over water that has slowly starved the
Klamath Basin refuges of their supplies over the past two
decades.
In a January test of the water in Abbotts Lagoon [at Point
Reyes National Seashore] …, the number of E. Coli cells found
in water samples was twenty times the safe amount. At Kehoe
Lagoon, the safety margin was exceeded by a factor of 40. It
gets worse for E. Coli’s nasty bacterial cousin known as
Enterococcus. It can devour your heart, stomach, brain, and
spinal cord. This monster thrives in raw sewage and intestines.
Kehoe Lagoon seethes with 300 times the acceptable amount of
this voracious creature. … Gee, you’d think the Park
Service would put up a few warning signs. But, no, there are
zero signs cautioning those who touch these waters that a drop
can wound and kill.
When an oil or gas well reaches the end of its lifespan, it
must be plugged. If it isn’t, the well might leak toxic
chemicals into groundwater and spew methane, carbon dioxide and
other pollutants into the atmosphere for years on end.
… There are nearly 60,000 unplugged wells in Colorado in
need of this treatment — each costing $140,000 on average,
according to the Carbon Tracker, a climate think tank, in a new
report that analyzes oil and gas permitting data. Plugging this
many wells will cost a lot —more than $8 billion, the report
found.
Hearings have been scheduled to resume in April for Poseidon
Water’s controversial proposed Huntington Beach desalination
plant. Last April the California Regional Water Quality Control
Board, Santa Ana Region was expected to vote on renewing a
permit for the proposed $1 billion project but the workshop was
canceled due to COVID-19. A hearing scheduled for
September was also delayed so Poseidon could have
more time to address water board concerns.
There’s one type of oyster that’s indigenous to the San
Francisco Bay, and that’s the Olympia oyster (Ostrea lurida).
It’s named after Olympia, Washington, though these small, tangy
oysters can be found up and down the west coast from Alaska all
the way down into central Mexico. Olympias — or Olys for short
— can still be found in the San Francisco Bay today. But
scientists say pollution from agricultural runoff is too high
for commercial fishing.
California’s Governor broke new ground this year when he
committed to “transition away from harmful pesticides.” His
budget proposal to update fees charged on pesticide sales would
generate new funding that could be used to offer better
protections for farm workers, agricultural communities, and
vulnerable ecosystems, as well as help farmers adopt more
sustainable practices. … Pesticides remain a
widespread drinking water contaminant, particularly in
rural areas, and exposure to these pesticides has
been linked to increased vulnerability to COVID-19.
A bipartisan group of California lawmakers is confronting
pollution problems along the U.S.-Mexico border, especially in
the Tijuana River Valley between San Diego and Tijuana. Several
House members who represent Southern California introduced a
bill called the Border Water Quality Restoration Act. Similar
legislation was presented last week in the U.S. Senate. If
approved, it will give the Environmental Protection Agency the
authority to coordinate all federal, state, and local agencies
when planning construction and infrastructure projects to
mitigate pollution in waterways throughout the southern border.
A plan to fast-track drilling of thousands of new oil and gas
wells over the next 15 years in California’s prime oil patch
was approved Monday by Kern County officials over objections by
environmental groups….The ordinance came up for discussion as
the industry faces challenges from lawmakers as well as
ever-present opposition from environmental groups for creating
air and water pollution and significant contributions to
climate change.
Professor Marc Beutel and his graduate student Mark Seelos have
been recognized for papers and a presentation on toxic mercury
mitigation by the North American Lake Management Society.
… “About half the reservoirs in California are impaired
because of historic mercury and gold mining,” Seelos said.
