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.
The chamise plants that blanket California’s shrubby chaparral
should have grown new sprouts by now, flowering after winter
rains before baking in the arid summer heat. They are highly
flammable and abundant in wildland areas — and, for that
reason, a bellwether to wildfire researchers. This month, a San
Jose State University team analyzing moisture levels was
shocked at what it found at study sites in the Santa Cruz
Mountains. At two locations researchers found no new growth to
cut from the shrubs. It’s an ominous sign of just how dry the
vegetation is around California, where boundless numbers of
plants and trees have been starved of life-sustaining water
thanks to an entire winter of paltry precipitation. Those dry
plants are fuel for wildfires, and they’re primed to burn
explosively.
Another legal challenge has been launched against a project by
downtown-based water infrastructure company Cadiz Inc. to pump
and transport water from its desert aquifer to connect with
existing water conveyance systems. This latest lawsuit was
filed March 23 against the Bureau of Land Management by the
Center for Biological Diversity, Earthjustice and the Sierra
Club. It asks the federal court to overturn a December BLM
decision to approve the conversion of an idle oil and gas
pipeline to carry water from Cadiz’s desert aquifer. Cadiz is
not a direct party to the lawsuit but would be impacted by a
decision resulting from the suit. The filing marks the third
decade in which Cadiz’ water transfer plan has faced legal
challenges from environmental groups.
San Diego hiking enthusiasts might have to share part of their
favorite trail with a cement mixer for the next year. The San
Diego County Water Authority is building a massive
5-million-gallon concrete water storage tank, called a flow
regulatory structure. You will never see it once it’s
completed. One of the hiking trails in the northwest corner of
Mission Trails Regional Park is closed and there are trail
detours on other parts. … Construction began in February
as the pandemic took over California. It’s expected to take
another year to complete. As of Friday, more than a dozen
concrete pillars were sticking up out of the ground like a
building straight out of Ancient Rome.
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.
After the worst fire season in California history and as
drought conditions raise fears of what’s to come, Gov. Gavin
Newsom and legislative leaders unveiled a $536-million proposal
Thursday to boost efforts at firefighting and a variety of
prevention measures, including vegetation management and the
construction of fire-resistant structures across the state. The
proposal, which the Legislature could send to the governor’s
desk as soon as Monday, marks an early agreement by the
governor and lawmakers to spend more than half of the $1
billion in wildfire funding Newsom called for in his state
budget proposal in January. The gravity of the issue became
clear last week after state officials reported the water
content in the Sierra Nevada snowpack stood at 59% of the
average for early spring.
A tiny silver fish few people in the Bay Area have heard of
could be a new symbol of the state’s continuing battle over
water resources. San Francisco Baykeeper sued the Biden
administration on Thursday to list the local population of
longfin smelt as an endangered species. The environmental
group’s legal action comes nine years after the federal
government first declared that the fish warranted that status.
Once an important source of food for marine mammals, birds and
chinook salmon, the local population of the longfin smelt has
dropped by 99.9% since the 1980s. Scientists and
environmentalists say that reduction is a direct result of too
much water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin river system being
diverted to farms and other water users rather than flowing
through the bay to the Pacific.
The Rancho California Water District received a nearly $3.5
million grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency
which will fund up to 75% of Phase 1 of the Vail Dam Hazard
Mitigation Project. Phase 1 has already begun and includes
pre-construction activities such as design, environmental
compliance and permitting to upgrade the dam at Vail Lake,
located east of Temecula. Vail Lake, a reservoir with water
storage capacity of approximately 45,000 acre-feet or 14.7
billion gallons of water, was acquired by Rancho Water in 1978
and is an component of Rancho’s diversified water supply
portfolio for providing water supplies to over 150,000 urban
and agricultural water users in the cities of Temecula and
Murrieta, and the surrounding areas.
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.
Our Layperson’s Guide to the Central Valley Project has just
been updated to reflect the latest developments affecting
California’s largest surface water delivery system. The 24-page
guide explores the history of the Central Valley Project, from
its roots as a state water project that stalled amid the Great
Depression to its development as a federal project that
stretches from Shasta Dam in far Northern California to
Bakersfield in the southern San Joaquin Valley.
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.
Scientists have been predicting for years that the Colorado
River would continue to deplete due to global warming and
increased water demands, but according to new studies it’s
looking worse than they thought. That worries rancher Marsha
Daughenbaugh, 68, of Steamboat Springs, who relies on the water
from the Colorado River to grow feed for her cattle.
… Recent reports show that the river’s water flows were
down 20% in 2000 and by 2050 that number is estimated to more
than double.
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.
California’s hottest commodity could become even more scarce as
state and federal officials announce water cutbacks on the
brink of another drought. Now, state legislators are banding
together to ask Governor Newsom to declare a state of emergency
amid what they call a water crisis. … [State Senator Andreas]
Borgeas authored a letter alongside the Assembly agriculture
committee chair and several other state lawmakers to send to
the governor. This comes after the California Department of
Water Resources announced a 5% allocation to farmers and
growers in late March.
A barely-noticed action early in March by the San Luis Obispo
County Board of Supervisors likely has placed greater control
of the region’s water supply in the hands of a few individuals
and private water agencies. On a split 3-2, north-south vote,
supervisors on March 3 approved an amendment to the county’s
contract with the state of California for deliveries from the
State Water Project (SWP). An approval that creates the
opportunity, some say, for a controversial practice called
“water banking.”
In the first episode in the Delta Conveyance Team Spotlight
video series, [DWR] spoke with the project’s Executive
Director Tony Meyers about his long and eventful career in
engineering, including work on some of DWR’s most ambitious and
significant infrastructure projects. In this excerpt, he
reflects on the appeal of large-scale engineering projects and
speaks about the importance of the Delta Conveyance Project in
protecting the security of California’s water supply.
Rainstorms grew more erratic and droughts much longer across
most of the U.S. West over the past half-century as climate
change warmed the planet, according to a sweeping government
study released Tuesday that concludes the situation is
worsening. The most dramatic changes were recorded in the
desert Southwest, where the average dry period between
rainstorms grew from about 30 days in the 1970s to 45 days
between storms now, said Joel Biederman, a research hydrologist
with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Southwest Watershed
Research Center in Tucson, Arizona.
Our two-day Water 101 Workshop begins on Earth Day,
when you can gain a deeper understanding of
California’s most precious natural resource. One of our
most popular events, the once-a-year workshop will be held as
an engaging online event on the afternoons of Thursday, April
22 and Friday, April 23. California’s water basics will be
covered by some of the state’s leading policy and legal
experts, including the history, geography, legal and political
facets of water in the state, as well a look at hot topics and
current issues of concern.
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.
