Stormwater runoff has emerged as a primary water quality issue.
In urban areas, after long dry periods rainwater runoff can
contain accumulations of pollutants. Stormwater does not go into
the sewer. Instead, pollutants can be flushed into waterways with
detrimental effects on the environment and water quality.
In response, water quality regulators use a range of programs to
reduce stormwater pollution including limiting the amount of
excess runoff and in some cases recapturing freshwater as well.
Matt Lindsey farms almonds in Fresno County. He irrigates with
flood water on his sandy ground, which is good for his almonds
but also with groundwater recharge.
According to the American Chemical Association, the average
American consumes up to 121,000 microplastic particles each
year—through air, water, and soil—and people who drink only
bottled water could consume an additional 90,000. Now,
California is taking the lead in trying to regulate the
presence of microplastics in drinking water, with significant
implications for manufacturers in the state and beyond. Here’s
what manufacturers should know about California’s current
microplastics requirements—and how they can prepare for future
regulations, today.
Over the next two decades, Los Angeles County will collect
billions more gallons in water from local sources, especially
storm and reclaimed water, shifting from its reliance on other
region’s water supplies as the effects of climate change make
such efforts less reliable and more expensive. The L.A. County
Board of Supervisors on Tuesday adopted the county’s first
water plan, which outlines how America’s largest county must
stop importing 60% of its water and pivot over the next two
decades to sourcing 80% of its water locally by 2045. The plan
calls for increasing local water supply by 580,000 acre-feet
per year by 2045 through more effective stormwater capture,
water recycling and conservation. The increase would be roughly
equivalent to 162 billion gallons, or enough water for 5
million additional county residents, county leaders said.
Today, at an event in San Bernardino, California, the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a $70 million
Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (WIFIA) loan to
San Bernardino Valley Municipal Water District. This WIFIA
funding will support an innovative regional partnership to help
secure a drought-resilient water supply while supporting the
long-term ecological health of the Upper Santa Ana River. Since
its creation, EPA’s WIFIA program has announced nearly $20
billion in financing to support over $43 billion in water
infrastructure projects that are strengthening drinking water,
wastewater, and stormwater infrastructure while creating over
140,000 jobs.
There’s a lot to love about meadows in the Sierra-Cascade
region and recent momentum in restoration efforts means there
could be a lot more meadows to love. Currently, approximately
50 percent of known existing meadows are degraded or expected
to be degraded and many more have already disappeared. The
Sierra Nevada Conservancy (SNC) and its partners are working to
restore these beloved ecosystems so that they can continue to
provide essential services. A recent study by the U.S. Forest
Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station found that meadows
historically covered 3 times the amount of area as they do
today. This is more than previously documented, raising the
possibility that meadows could be restored across even more of
the landscape.
An avid scuba diver who also surfs and sails, Ben Maurer
prefers the sights and sounds of the ocean to any other
setting, so he leaves the waves and water behind reluctantly.
… A native of northern California who earned his doctorate in
oceanography, Maurer has spent the last three and a half years
with the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy
Laboratory (NREL), which has its main campuses in landlocked
Colorado. But Maurer works from home and over the past year has
crisscrossed the country, boating down major rivers to
investigate the ongoing problem of waterborne plastics. He is
the principal investigator of the Waterborne Plastics
Assessment and Collection Technologies project, otherwise known
as WaterPACT.
Imperial Beach wants more residents to start using rain
barrels. That’s the goal behind a new set of guidelines adopted
by the city last week, which officials hope will ultimately
help shore up the city’s aging infrastructure against rising
sea levels. Rain barrels are tanks that collect and store
rainwater for future use. They can help users conserve drinking
water and save money on irrigation. They also have the added
advantage of reducing the amount of rainfall that flows into
the city’s stormwater collection system.
Last winter, residents experienced the second largest flood in
East Palo Alto history. Now Bay Area nonprofits are installing
gardens designed to soak up stormwater and mitigate future
flooding. On Nov. 11, Climate Resilient Communities (CRC),
Fresh Approach, and Grassroots Ecology broke ground on the
first of 25 rain garden systems to be installed for homeowners
at no cost. CRC received nearly $1 million in funding for the
project from Coastal Communities, an organization working to
reduce water pollution. … Efforts to curtail the effects of
flooding are more important than ever as California heads into
an ‘El Nino’ year, a period of cooler and wetter weather. Many
older East Palo Alto residents still remember flooding in 1998
that resulted in $40 million dollars in damages.
“If I had a chance to tell Gov. (Gavin) Newsom something about
the pollution in the Tijuana River Valley, I would tell him to
get it fixed as soon as possible because the odor is horrible,
and I don’t know what else it’s doing to our health. Like my
partner says, if this was happening to rich people in La Jolla,
this would have been taken care of a long time ago.” That’s
what Analisa Corrales, a nine-year resident of the Nestor
neighborhood in San Diego, told me when I asked how she felt
about the pollution from the Tijuana River Valley and how
aerosolized contaminants might be affecting the health of her
and her three children. They are 12 years old, 7 years old
and 6 months old, and they live less than 2 miles from the
sewage-choked river. -Written by Pedro Rios, director of the American
Friends Service Committee’s U.S./Mexico Border program and a
longtime human rights advocate.
Sewage overflows from Tijuana have been contaminating Imperial
Beach for many decades. The problem recently reached crisis
levels, with city leaders calling on the state and federal
governments for more funds to fix the aging sewage
infrastructure on both sides of the border. By causing sea
levels to rise, climate change also plays a role in
compromising the sewage infrastructure of Imperial Beach,
according to a new study in the
journal Sustainable Cities and Society. [Researchers]
examine how rising sea levels impact sewer pipes in the city
and what this means for the future.
Scientists based in and/or work on issues in California—from
The Nature Conservancy and Ocean Conservancy—will be traveling
to Nairobi, Kenya for the UN environment programme’s third
session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC-3)
from Nov 13-19. At this session, the following scientists will
hold observer status on behalf of their organizations as
nations come together for the goal of developing an
international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution,
including in the marine environment.
For several decades, many coho salmon returning to waterways
around Seattle to spawn have died mysteriously following heavy
rains. In some urban streams, nearly all of the coho returning
from the ocean died. It wasn’t until 2021 that scientists
figured out what was behind what they called “urban runoff
mortality syndrome,” and it was not until this month that
federal regulators at the Environmental Protection Agency moved
to do something about it. The EPA on Nov. 2 said it would
consider an August petition from the California-based Yurok
Tribe and the Washington-based Port Gamble S’Klallam and
Puyallup tribes, calling for a ban of the chemical 6PPD-q. It’s
used in car tires to keep them from cracking and degrading, but
as tires wear down, they shed particles containing the chemical
into stormwater and streams.
Central Sierra runoff delivered over 13.19 million acre/ft of
snowmelt this past water year ending in September. That’s the
arithmetic counting the snowmelt from the five major
rivers from north to south-from the San Joaquin River down to
the Kern near Bakersfield. For some of these watersheds like
the Kings River it was the wettest year ever at 4.5 mil af. The
Tulare Basin’s four rivers – Kings / Kaweah /Tule
/Kern are just a few drops short of the 1983 record
number with a combined runoff of a gushing 8.69 million acre/
feet. That’s what 31 atmospheric rivers that drenched
California will do.
U.S. regulators say they will review the use of a chemical
found in almost every tire after a petition from West Coast
Native American tribes, including one in Northern California,
that want it banned because it kills salmon as they return from
the ocean to their natal streams to spawn. The Yurok tribe in
Northern California and the Port Gamble S’Klallam and Puyallup
tribes in Washington asked the Environmental Protection Agency
to prohibit the rubber preservative 6PPD earlier this year,
saying it kills fish — especially coho salmon — when rains wash
it from roadways into rivers. Washington, Oregon, Vermont,
Rhode Island and Connecticut also wrote the EPA, citing the
chemical’s “unreasonable threat” to their waters and fisheries.
Federal environmental regulators have granted a petition to
develop regulations addressing a vehicle tire compound that,
when it reacts with the air and mixes with water, kills coho
and other salmonids. The petition was submitted by three West
Coast tribes last summer, and in response the Environmental
Protection Agency announced it will publish an advance notice
of proposed rulemaking around the chemicals 6PPD and
6PPD-quinone by fall 2024, according to a notice.
New research describes the development and operation of a novel
incentive program that uses water rebates to pay for some of
the costs of stormwater capture, according to a press
release from the University of California – Santa Cruz. Many
aquifers in California and around the world are being drained
of their groundwater because of the combined impacts of excess
pumping, shifts in land use, and climate change. However, the
new study published on Oct. 18 in Nature Water, may offer a
solution. The study describes the development and operation of
a novel incentive program that uses water rebates to pay for
some of the costs of getting stormwater runoff into the ground.
The program is called recharge net metering (ReNeM).
It was exactly the sort of deluge
California groundwater agencies have been counting on to
replenish their overworked aquifers.
The start of 2023 brought a parade of torrential Pacific storms
to bone dry California. Snow piled up across the Sierra Nevada at
a near-record pace while runoff from the foothills gushed into
the Central Valley, swelling rivers over their banks and filling
seasonal creeks for the first time in half a decade.
Suddenly, water managers and farmers toiling in one of the
state’s most groundwater-depleted regions had an opportunity to
capture stormwater and bank it underground. Enterprising agencies
diverted water from rushing rivers and creeks into manmade
recharge basins or intentionally flooded orchards and farmland.
Others snagged temporary permits from the state to pull from
streams they ordinarily couldn’t touch.
On average, more than 60 percent of
California’s developed water supply originates in the Sierra
Nevada and the southern spur of the Cascade Range. Our water
supply is largely dependent on the health of our Sierra forests,
which are suffering from ecosystem degradation, drought,
wildfires and widespread tree mortality.
This tour ventured into the Sierra to examine water issues
that happen upstream but have dramatic impacts downstream and
throughout the state.
Blasted by sun and beaten by waves,
plastic bottles and bags shed fibers and tiny flecks of
microplastic debris that litter the San Francisco Bay where they
can choke the marine life that inadvertently consumes it.
One of California Gov. Gavin
Newsom’s first actions after taking office was to appoint Wade
Crowfoot as Natural Resources Agency secretary. Then, within
weeks, the governor laid out an ambitious water agenda that
Crowfoot, 45, is now charged with executing.
That agenda includes the governor’s desire for a “fresh approach”
on water, scaling back the conveyance plan in the Sacramento-San
Joaquin Delta and calling for more water recycling, expanded
floodplains in the Central Valley and more groundwater recharge.
Although Santa Monica may be the most aggressive Southern California water provider to wean itself from imported supplies, it is hardly the only one looking to remake its water portfolio.
In Los Angeles, a city of about 4 million people, efforts are underway to dramatically slash purchases of imported water while boosting the amount from recycling, stormwater capture, groundwater cleanup and conservation. Mayor Eric Garcetti in 2014 announced a plan to reduce the city’s purchase of imported water from Metropolitan Water District by one-half by 2025 and to provide one-half of the city’s supply from local sources by 2035. (The city considers its Eastern Sierra supplies as imported water.)
Imported water from the Sierra
Nevada and the Colorado River built Southern California. Yet as
drought, climate change and environmental concerns render those
supplies increasingly at risk, the Southland’s cities have ramped
up their efforts to rely more on local sources and less on
imported water.
Far and away the most ambitious goal has been set by the city of
Santa Monica, which in 2014 embarked on a course to be virtually
water independent through local sources by 2023. In the 1990s,
Santa Monica was completely dependent on imported water. Now, it
derives more than 70 percent of its water locally.
Farmers in the Central Valley are broiling about California’s plan to increase flows in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river systems to help struggling salmon runs avoid extinction. But in one corner of the fertile breadbasket, River Garden Farms is taking part in some extraordinary efforts to provide the embattled fish with refuge from predators and enough food to eat.
And while there is no direct benefit to one farm’s voluntary actions, the belief is what’s good for the fish is good for the farmers.
Sixty percent of California’s developed water supply
originates high in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Our water
supply is largely dependent on the health of our Sierra forests,
which are suffering from ecosystem degradation, drought,
wildfires and widespread tree mortality.
We headed into the foothills and the mountains to examine
water issues that happen upstream but have dramatic impacts
downstream and throughout the state.
GEI (Tour Starting Point)
2868 Prospect Park Dr.
Rancho Cordova, CA 95670.
As we continue forging ahead in 2018
with our online version of Western Water after 40 years
as a print magazine, we turned our attention to a topic that also
got its start this year: recreational marijuana as a legal use.
State regulators, in the last few years, already had been beefing
up their workforce to tackle the glut in marijuana crops and
combat their impacts to water quality and supply for people, fish
and farming downstream. Thus, even if these impacts were perhaps
unbeknownst to the majority of Californians who approved
Proposition 64 in 2016, we thought it important to see if
anything new had evolved from a water perspective now that
marijuana was legal.
California voters may experience a sense of déjà vu this year when they are asked twice in the same year to consider water bonds — one in June, the other headed to the November ballot.
Both tackle a variety of water issues, from helping disadvantaged communities get clean drinking water to making flood management improvements. But they avoid more controversial proposals, such as new surface storage, and they propose to do some very different things to appeal to different constituencies.
Sixty percent of California’s developed water supply
originates high in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Our water
supply is largely dependent on the health of our Sierra forests,
which are suffering from ecosystem degradation, drought,
wildfires and widespread tree mortality.
Microplastics – plastic debris
measuring less than 5 millimeters – are an
increasing water quality concern. Entering the water as
industrial microbeads or as larger plastic litter that degrade
into small pellets, microplastics come from a variety of
consumer products.
Point sources release pollutants from discrete conveyances, such
as a discharge pipe, and are regulated by federal and state
agencies. The main point source dischargers are factories and
sewage treatment plants, which release treated
wastewater.
Problems with polluted stormwater and steps that can be taken to
prevent such pollution and turn what is often viewed as
“nuisance” runoff into a water resource is the focus of this
publication, Stormwater Management: Turning Runoff into a
Resource. The 16-page booklet, funded by a grant from the State
Water Resources Control Board, includes color photos and
graphics, text explaining common stormwater pollutants and
efforts to prevent stormwater runoff through land use/
planning/development – as well as tips for homeowners to reduce
their impacts on stormwater pollution.
This card includes information about the Colorado River, who uses
the river, how the river’s water is divided and other pertinent
facts about this vital resource for the Southwest. Beautifully
illustrated with color photographs.
This 30-minute documentary, produced in 2011, explores the past,
present and future of flood management in California’s Central
Valley. It features stories from residents who have experienced
the devastating effects of a California flood firsthand.
Interviews with long-time Central Valley water experts from
California Department of Water Resources (FloodSAFE), U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Reclamation, Central Valley Flood
Management Program and environmental groups are featured as they
discuss current efforts to improve the state’s 150-year old flood
protection system and develop a sustainable, integrated, holistic
flood management plan for the Central Valley.
This 30-minute documentary-style DVD on the history and current
state of the San Joaquin River Restoration Program includes an
overview of the geography and history of the river, historical
and current water delivery and uses, the genesis and timeline of
the 1988 lawsuit, how the settlement was reached and what was
agreed to.
This 25-minute documentary-style DVD, developed in partnership
with the California Department of Water Resources, provides an
excellent overview of climate change and how it is already
affecting California. The DVD also explains what scientists
anticipate in the future related to sea level rise and
precipitation/runoff changes and explores the efforts that are
underway to plan and adapt to climate.
20-minute DVD that explains the problem with polluted stormwater,
and steps that can be taken to help prevent such pollution and
turn what is often viewed as a “nuisance” into a water resource
through various activities.
Many Californians don’t realize that when they turn on the
faucet, the water that flows out could come from a source close
to home or one hundreds of miles away. Most people take their
water for granted; not thinking about the elaborate systems and
testing that go into delivering clean, plentiful water to
households throughout the state. Where drinking water comes from,
how it’s treated, and what people can do to protect its quality
are highlighted in this 2007 PBS documentary narrated by actress
Wendie Malick.
A 30-minute version of the 2007 PBS documentary Drinking Water:
Quenching the Public Thirst. This DVD is ideal for showing at
community forums and speaking engagements to help the public
understand the complex issues surrounding the elaborate systems
and testing that go into delivering clean, plentiful water to
households throughout the state.
This 7-minute DVD is designed to teach children in grades 5-12
about where storm water goes – and why it is so important to
clean up trash, use pesticides and fertilizers wisely, and
prevent other chemicals from going down the storm drain. The
video’s teenage actors explain the water cycle and the difference
between sewer drains and storm drains, how storm drain water is
not treated prior to running into a river or other waterway. The
teens also offer a list of BMPs – best management practices that
homeowners can do to prevent storm water pollution.
The 28-page Layperson’s Guide to Water Rights Law, recognized as
the most thorough explanation of California water rights law
available to non-lawyers, traces the authority for water flowing
in a stream or reservoir, from a faucet or into an irrigation
ditch through the complex web of California water rights.
The 24-page Layperson’s Guide to Integrated Regional Water
Management (IRWM) is an in-depth, easy-to-understand publication
that provides background information on the principles of IRWM,
its funding history and how it differs from the traditional water
management approach.
For all the benefits of precipitation, stormwater also brings
with it many challenges.
In urban areas, after long dry periods rainwater runoff can
contain heavy accumulations of pollutants that have built up over
time. For example, a rainbow like shine on a roadway puddle can
indicate the presence of oil or gasoline. Stormwater does not go
into the sewer. Instead, pollutants can be flushed into waterways
with detrimental effects on the environment and water quality.
Lake Tahoe is one of the world’s most beautiful yet vulnerable
lakes. Renowned for its remarkable clarity, Tahoe straddles the
Nevada-California border, stretching 22 miles long and 12 miles
wide in a granitic bowl high in the Sierra Nevada.
Tahoe sits 6,225 feet above sea level. Its deepest point is 1,645
feet, making it the second-deepest lake in the nation, after
Oregon’s Crater Lake, and the tenth deepest in the world.
This printed issue of Western Water discusses several
flood-related issues, including the proposed Central Valley Flood
Protection Plan, the FEMA remapping process and the dispute
between the state and the Corps regarding the levee vegetation
policy.
This printed issue of Western Water discusses low
impact development and stormwater capture – two areas of emerging
interest that are viewed as important components of California’s
future water supply and management scenario.
Growth may have slowed in California, but advocates of low impact
development (LID) say the pause is no reason to lose sight of the
importance of innovative, low-tech management of stormwater via
incorporating LID aspects into new projects and redevelopment.
This printed issue of Western Water, based on presentations
at the November 3-4, 2010 Water Quality Conference in Ontario,
Calif., looks at constituents of emerging concerns (CECs) – what
is known, what is yet to be determined and the potential
regulatory impacts on drinking water quality.
This issue of Western Water examines the continuing practice of
smart water use in the urban sector and its many facets, from
improved consumer appliances to improved agency planning to the
improvements in water recycling and desalination. Many in the
water community say conserving water is not merely a response to
drought conditions, but a permanent ethic in an era in which
every drop of water is a valuable commodity not to be wasted.
