Water quality in California is regulated by several state
agencies, including the State Water Resources Control Board
(State Water Board) and its nine regional boards, which
enforce clean water laws and the Department of Public Health.
Water quality concerns are also often involved in disputes
over water rights, particularly in situations involving
endangered species or habitat.
The State Water Board administers the Clean Water Grant Program
that funds construction of wastewater treatment facilities. The
State Water Board also issues general permits for municipalities
and construction sites that try to prevent contaminants from
those sources from entering municipal storm sewers.
Drinking water standards and regulations are developed by federal
and state agencies to protect public health. In California, the
Department of Public Health administers the federal Safe
Drinking Water Act, which regulates drinking water quality in the
United States.
The San Elijo Joint Powers Authority’s water reclamation
facility near San Elijo Lagoon on Manchester Avenue in
Encinitas was named “Plant of the Year” by the California Water
Environment Association, the agency announced today. The award
recognizes accomplishments in compliance, innovative practices,
cost-effectiveness and superior plant performance amongst
wastewater agencies across California.
In a new symbol of California’s worsening drought, construction
crews are putting the finishing touches on a $10 million
emergency project to build a massive rock barrier through part
of the Delta in Contra Costa County to preserve water supplies
for millions of people across the state. The 800-foot long
barrier — the size of San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid laid
on its side — is essentially a rock wall, 120 feet wide, built
in water 35 feet deep. Its purpose: To block salt water from
the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay from flowing too far
east and contaminating the huge state and federal pumps near
Tracy …
Water Audit California sued the City of St. Helena this week
over its management of water. The watchdog group says the city
is violating its “public trust” responsibilities relating to
the Napa River and its aquatic habitat. It cites the city’s
policies on groundwater pumping, well permitting, and water
consumption by vineyards and wineries.
Zone 7 directors have approved spending $2 million to design a
facility to treat potential human health threats in Cope Lake’s
water should chemicals accumulate above legally acceptable
levels. Those chemicals are called per- and polyfluoroalkyl
substances (PFAs and PFOAs), which are found in consumer
products, such as cookware, food packaging and stain
repellents. They make their way into drinking water sources.
Several locations along the American River north of Sacramento
are showing above-average levels of E. coli, according to the
Central Valley Water Board. KCRA 3 spoke with health officials
in Sacramento County on Friday about the concerning levels of
E. coli.
[T]he problem goes way beyond grazing. Dozens of tributaries
and hundreds of springs feed Upper Klamath Lake, supplying
plenty of good, clean water. A century of mismanagement has
caused erosion of high phosphorus soils that accumulate in the
bottom of Upper Klamath Lake. Now, annual algae blooms kill
entire generations of young endangered fish every year.
… All the problems in the Upper Klamath Lake flow
downstream, affecting endangered salmon in the Klamath River as
it runs to the Pacific Ocean. The Karuk, a Klamath River tribe,
are worried that this could be another year marked by a
historic fish kill.
A hacker accessed the computer system of a Bay Area water
treatment plant in January and deleted programs the plant used
to treat drinking water, a senior intelligence official
confirmed Thursday. NBC News
first reported Thursday that the unidentified hacker
used a former plant employee’s username and password to gain
entry to the unidentified Bay Area water treatment facility on
Jan. 15.
Does your tap water taste a little off right now? Sacramento
city leaders say the drought is probably to blame. The city
says they have been recently getting some calls with people
reporting an “earthy” taste to their tap water. Some people
have also been reporting an off smell as well.
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.
While the saying, “too much of a good thing,” sounds pleasant
at its core, water managers take that very seriously when it
comes to managing salt, or salinity, in the water supply. Water
managers across California are responsible for providing a
clean and safe drinking water supply, and salinity management
plays a critical role in the quality of water that is provided
to communities. While salt is composed of natural elements
commonly found in soil and water, how is salinity managed to
support a diversified water resource portfolio?
President Biden’s “Build Back Better” initiative proposes to
invest $111 billion in rebuilding and modernizing drinking
water and wastewater infrastructure, as well as funding other
water quality-related priorities, including addressing per- and
polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in drinking water
supplies. Legislation proposed in both the Senate and
House of Representatives in the 117th Congress (2021-2022)
reflects a bipartisan effort to translate the President’s goals
into national policy.
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.
The drought facing the Western United States is
bad. Really bad. It’s become worse faster than the last
one. As more of the United States suffers from drought
conditions and water supplies are diminishing, water
demands are rising. Smaller water supplies combined with
increasingly unpredictable weather patterns and other effects
of climate change pose an enormous threat by creating a
feedback loop that exacerbates drought conditions and
increases wildfire risk across the United States.
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.
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.
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.
California’s drought highlights the importance of an
appointment sitting on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk – filling the
final seat on the State Water Resources Control
Board. This is a critical agency appointment at a
critical time. The drought highlights many inequities in
California water policy. Disadvantaged communities in Stockton
face the prospect of a drought summer plagued by harmful algae
blooms in Delta rivers. Those algae outbreaks, which can
harm children and kill pets, are caused by excessive nutrients
and inadequate freshwater flow. -Written by Belinda Faustina, a strategic advisor
with Los Angeles Waterkeeper, and Barbara
Barrigan-Parilla, the executive director of Restore the
Delta.
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.
San Luis Obispo’s 2020 Water Quality Report shows zero
violations of health regulations. Jason Meeks is the supervisor
of the city’s water treatment plant. He has been working in
water and wastewater for nearly 22 years. Meeks said one of the
most important things for city residents to know about the 2020
Water Quality Report is that it only shows substances that were
detected in the water.
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.
San Franciscans are pretty proud of their tap water.
Sourced from the Hetch Hetchy watershed in Yosemite National
Park, the complex supply system of reservoirs, tunnels,
pipelines, and treatment systems stretching from the Sierra to
San Francisco is uniquely almost entirely gravity fed. The San
Francisco Public Utilities Commission even boasts on its site
that their water is “among the purest water in the
world.” So the 2.7 million residents who benefit from the
supposed crème de la crème of tap water may be surprised to
learn that the water coming out of the faucets in SoCal has
been named the best tasting tap water in America, on qualities
including odor and “mouth feel.”
In victories that make the state’s drought even crueler, two
Southern California water districts have won the top prizes for
best tap water in the U.S. at an international tasting contest.
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California finished
first and Santa Ana took second place for the nation’s Best
Municipal Water on Saturday at the 31st annual Berkeley Springs
International Water Tasting in West Virginia. Those two
competitors finished first in the category in 2008 and 2018,
respectively. Third place went to the Southwest Water Authority
of Dickinson, in North Dakota.
Water is weird – and yet so important. In fact, it is one of
the most unusual molecules on Earth. It boils at a temperature
it shouldn’t. It expands and floats when it is in the
solid-state. Its surface tension is higher than it should be.
Now, new research published in the journal Nature has
added one other equally strange property to water’s list of
oddities. The implications of this new revelation could have a
remarkable impact on all water-related processes from water
purification to drug manufacturing.
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.
Construction of a temporary salinity barrier on the False River
is underway after an emergency request by the Department of
Water Resources (DWR) was approved by the State Water Resources
Control Board (SWRCB). The barrier, necessitated by worsening
drought conditions, is intended to help preserve water quality
in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta by reducing saltwater
intrusion. The declaration of a drought emergency made by Gov.
Gavin Newsom on May 10 suspended the requirement that a project
of this nature complete a California Environmental Quality Act
(CEQA) assessment.
At the May meeting of the Delta Stewardship Council, Dr. Steve
Brandt, Chair of the Delta Independent Science Board, provided
a brief background on the Delta Independent Science Board,
reported on the Board’s recently completed review on non-native
species in the Delta, and discussed the Board’s approach going
forward in light of the recent compensation issues. Also,
Dr. Laurel Larsen spotlighted a recent study looking at the
effects of the Sacramento Regional Sanitation District plant
upgrade on phytoplankton.
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.
Climate change has created new “seasons” that challenge
communities across the nation. California now has a “fire
season,” and sadly, we are embarking on harmful algal bloom
(HAB) season again. NRDC has updated its national map of
state-reported freshwater HABs, which tracks the HABs reported
by states from 2008-2020 and shows that these toxic outbreaks
are increasing across the country, making our rivers, lakes,
and beaches unsafe for swimming, boating, and drinking. Between
2008 and 2020, over 44,000 HAB events were recorded across 38
states.
In September 2012, California’s transportation agency announced
it was leading a multi-state partnership to buy more than 100
new passenger railcars, each one assembled on American soil.
Funded in part by the Obama administration’s economic stimulus
plan, the cars would start arriving in late 2015. Instead, the
project has gone badly off the rails. … Excessive levels
of lead have been found in some of the cars’ restroom water
supplies, discovered during routine testing last November, said
Caltrans spokesman Christopher Clark.
[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.
[P]rivate and public stakeholders must hold Rise Gold Corp.
accountable when it promises to deliver drinkable water — a
promise it’s made — and in particular, investigate what primary
and secondary drinking water standards mean. According to the
Environmental Protection Agency, national primary drinking
water regulations are legally enforceable standards applied to
public water systems. In contrast, secondary drinking
water standards are “non-enforceable guidelines regulating
contaminants that may cause cosmetic or aesthetic effects.”
Cosmetic effects are detailed as affecting skin or teeth color,
and aesthetic effects refer to water’s taste, odor, or color.
The State Water Board recently completed a multi-year needs
assessment of the state’s safe drinking water challenges. One
big takeaway: more money is needed. The study identified a
funding gap of $4.6 billion to resolve safe drinking water
problems over the next five years. We talked to Greg Pierce—the
study’s lead researcher and associate director of the UCLA
Luskin Center for Innovation—about the findings.
When hackers penetrated a small water utility in North Carolina
three years ago that debilitated its IT systems, operators
there refused to “bow” to hackers and fork over ransom money to
make the assault stop. That 2018 cyberattack was part of what
experts say is a fast-growing and evolving threat in the water
sector and a glaring example of the type of attack — ransomware
— that earlier this month shut down the East Coast’s largest
fuel supplier, the Colonial pipeline… EPA is in the
process of collecting data from water utilities on their
cyberdefenses to assess hacking risks.
The Bureau of Reclamation announced today that ongoing drought
conditions require the Delta Cross Channel gates to remain
closed until further notice to help maintain water quality
standards. Typically, the gates are opened on weekends for
recreational purposes from May 21 through June, as well as
holiday weekends. The gates control the diversion channel near
Walnut Grove, about 30 miles south of Sacramento. Keeping the
gates closed under current drought conditions targets improving
water quality in the Sacramento River channel.
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.
In the latest chapter of California’s unfolding drought, state
officials are planning to build a giant rock wall across a
river in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to save the
vital freshwater estuary from San Francisco Bay’s saltwater.
The emergency measure is a page from last decade’s drought when
the delta, a maze of sloughs and man-made channels east of the
Bay Area, was at risk of becoming too salty to provide water to
the nearly 30 million Californians who depend on it. As in
2015, the freshwater rivers that feed the 1,100-square-mile
delta have gotten so low that they no longer counter the
brackish flows that push in from the bay.
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.
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.
A group of protesters gathered at Sugarman’s Corner in downtown
Klamath Falls on Saturday, preparing to welcome a 25-car
caravan of mostly Klamath Tribal members calling for solutions
to the Klamath Basin’s water crisis. A man walked by the
demonstrators, eyeing their signs with statements like “Peace
and Healing in the Klamath Basin,” “Water Justice is Social
Justice” and “Undam the Klamath.”
Construction on 8 miles of water pipeline that will be serve as
life-blood for the Pure Water Soquel Project, is set to begin
on May 24 in Santa Cruz. Three distinct components of building
are set to take place during the next several months. From late
May until June 15 crews will work around California Street,
from the Santa Cruz Wastewater Treatment Facility to Laurel
Street. After that, and until around July 6, construction will
take place on Laurel Street to Chestnut Street. The third
scheduled construction phase will run from July 6 through Aug.
12 on Chestnut to the west end of the Laurel Street Bridge.
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.
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.
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.
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…
The North Marin Water District failed to adequately study
whether there will be enough water for endangered fish in
Lagunitas Creek if it builds a new well in West Marin, an
environmental group alleges. The well is intended to address
worsening saltwater contamination in the water supply. Save Our
Seashore, a nonprofit in Inverness, filed an appeal against the
project with the Marin County Planning Commission. … The
commission is expected to hold a hearing on the issue on May
24.
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.
Kern County ag producers are making changes big and small —
from redeveloping entire orchards to fine-tuning their
irrigation systems — as they try to adjust to worsening
drought conditions across the Central Valley. Strategies vary
depending on access to water and ability to shift irrigation to
different fields. Some landowners are trying to hold onto as
much water as they can in case prices rise later in the year.
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.
At its next meeting Wednesday, the Ukiah City Council will
consider a recommendation to spend more than $175,000 on a
system to help control algae in its recycled water system, also
called the Purple Pipe. According to the staff report prepared
for the May 5 meeting, “due to high nutrient content and local
climate, the water quality of recycled water within the storage
reservoirs can become negatively impacted by algal blooms.
Algae can become problematic once it is in the distribution
system and lead to clogging of filters or irrigation
equipment.”
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 …
Gov. Doug Ducey has asked the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD)
to address groundwater contamination near military
installations in Arizona. In an Apr. 27 letter to Secretary of
Defense Lloyd Austin, Gov. Ducey requested DOD to identify and
treat water in Arizona contaminated in the areas surrounding
four DOD installations and to prevent additional human exposure
to per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from other DOD
facilities in Arizona, which impact the groundwater. … These
bases are located in the two most populous metropolitan areas
in Arizona and each is surrounded by thousands of Arizonans who
rely on clean groundwater for drinking water purposes.
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.
A familiar scene has returned to California: drought. Two
counties are currently under emergency declarations, and the
rest of the state could follow. It was only four years ago when
a winter of torrential rain finally wrestled the state out of
its last major drought, which had dragged on for five years and
left thousands of domestic wells coughing up dust. That
drinking-water crisis made national headlines and helped shine
a light on another long-simmering water crisis in California:
More than 300 communities have chronically unsafe drinking
water containing contaminants that can come with serious health
consequences, including cancer.
In 2021, access to running water and clean drinking water is a
given for most Americans. The Census Bureau has even considered
dropping a question on plumbing access from the U.S. census
questionnaire. But many of the nation’s tribes still lack
running water, access to clean water, and even flushing
toilets. Native American households are 19 times more likely
than white households to lack indoor plumbing, according to the
U.S. Water Alliance, and more likely to lack piped water
services than any other racial group. That problem is at an
inflection point for the Navajo Nation and 29 other tribes in
the Colorado River Basin, which stretches from the Rocky
Mountains to Mexico.
On Thursday the U.S. Senate voted to pass S. 914, the
Drinking Water and Wastewater Infrastructure Act
(DWWIA). It is the first infrastructure bill approved by
the Senate this Congress. The bipartisan, comprehensive clean
water and drinking water infrastructure legislation will
authorize strong annual water infrastructure investment to help
boost total federal investment. In full, the legislation
authorizes more than $35 billion for drinking water and
wastewater resource development projects across the country …
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 …
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.
With the dry year facing California, there is increased
awareness about water quality issues and particularly harmful
algal blooms. The Natural Resources Agency in its Report To The
Legislature on The 2012–2016 Drought provided that “the
drought’s most visible water quality impact was harmful algal
blooms (HABs), which were reported more frequently during the
2012–2016 drought than during prior droughts.”
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.
No one will forget the intense challenges that 2020 brought us,
from record-breaking hurricanes and wildfires to a global
pandemic that devastated our economy and public health. As
Congress and the Biden administration look to help our country
rebuild and recover from these compounding crises, investing in
nature presents an opportunity to deliver multiple benefits for
communities, birds, and other wildlife. Audubon presents a new
suite of policy recommendations for making our communities and
wildlife more resilient to climate change, by putting our
wetlands, barrier islands, and other ecosystems to work.
CZU Lightning Complex fire survivors who are rebuilding their
homes, are invited to join the Santa Cruz County Office of
Response, Recovery and Resilience on Saturday for a townhall on
the septic and water permitting process. … Attendees can
expect to learn about septic and water system permitting
requirements, but also county and state-level regulations that
apply to their properties. … The Office of Response, Recovery
and Resilience works with fire survivors on an
individual-basis, to help them understand what is needed
to ultimately, get a rebuild permit.
Mayor London Breed on Monday said she has nominated City
Attorney Dennis Herrera to lead the San Francisco Public
Utilities Commission as general manager. … The
SFPUC oversees the generation of clean power for the city’s
buildings, residents and businesses through programs like
CleanPowerSF, and also oversees the delivery of drinking water
and the treatment of wastewater. The commission is tasked with
providing oversight for the SFPUC’s rates and charges,
services, approval of contracts and organization policies.
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.
The State Water Resources Control Board issued investigative
orders on March 11 to over 160 refineries and bulk fuel storage
terminals in over 30 California counties, requiring
environmental investigation and sampling for per- and
polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as “PFAS.” This most recent
wave of PFAS investigation orders is consistent with
California’s increasingly aggressive approach to regulating and
investigating PFAS in everything from soil, groundwater, food
packaging, and consumer products.
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.
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 …
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.
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.
Following a temporary delay in Colorado federal court, the
Trump administration’s Navigable Waters Protection Rule (NWPR)
will now take effect in Colorado on April 23, 2021. Under
the NWPR, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and
Army Corps of Engineers will no longer require permits for
operations affecting certain categories of streams and wetland
areas previously subject to the Clean Water Act.
[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.
People in some Stanislaus and Merced counties are being warned
if their water comes from groundwater wells, it could be
contaminated with harmful amounts of nitrate. Now those
homes could be receiving free bottled water as a solution. Some
have already been buying bottles for years, to avoid getting
sick. … At his Salida home with a water fountain flowing in
his front yard, Jose Olagues can’t drink from the faucet in his
own home. … Bottled water keeps him from becoming sick.
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.
The Richardson’s Bay Regional Agency is exploring a plan that
would create a designated anchoring zone to protect eelgrass
beds. Rebecca Schwartz Lesberg, a biologist with Coastal Policy
Solutions consulting firm, presented a draft eelgrass
protection and management plan to the agency board on April 8.
Schwartz Lesberg said the plan would not change the 72-hour
anchor limit. It would create a designated anchoring zone in
deeper water, closer to Belvedere and the mouth of Richardson
Bay, where eelgrass does not grow.
The Yurok Tribe said it’s sounding the alarm as culturally
invaluable salmon edge closer to extinction. The Yurok also
said it is canceling its commercial fishery for the fifth time
this year. Tribal officials said past water management
decisions and climate change have put Klamath river salmon
stocks at risk. The tribe said it’s gravely concerned about the
rapidly declining salmon stocks in the Klamath River
Basin … Tribal officials said [Reclamation's] plan
provides bare-minimum flows for imperiled Klamath salmon and
sucker fish populations.
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.
Radhika Fox, a former executive for a nonprofit water advocacy
group and water utility official, is leading the Biden
administration’s work to incorporate environmental justice into
EPA’s water work and chart a course to reverse a litany of
Trump-era rollbacks. She comes to the role with a deep history
in equity work and water infrastructure advocacy — a focus that
she’s already brought to bear in helping to shape President Joe
Biden’s call to remove all lead piping from drinking water
systems under his massive infrastructure proposal, and in
launching a review of the Trump administration’s overhaul of
the regulation governing lead levels in drinking water.
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.
Advocates, such as the Colorado Water Trust, a nonprofit that
spearheaded the new approach, say the tools can be used as
templates across other river basins, where older water rights
are already spoken for. … Across Colorado nearly 40,000
miles of streams flow year-round and, as a result, have the
potential to receive protection under the state’s Instream Flow
Program.
There’s just one week left to register for our Water 101
Workshop, which offers a primer on the things you need to know
to understand California water. One of our most popular events,
this once-a-year workshop will be held as an engaging online
event on the afternoons of Thursday, April 22 and Friday,
April 23.
California households face over $600 million in household water
debt, with some 1.6 million homes — roughly 12 percent of all
state residents — dealing with an average of $500 in arrears.
The findings show clear racial inequities, with households of
color bearing the brunt of this debt. More than 130 smaller
utilities across the state will need federal help in the next
six months if they are to survive. It is clear that we
need a solution now. -Written by Michael Carlin, the acting general
manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.
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.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is looking into whether a
previously unexplored vitamin deficiency could play a role in
the decline of sucker species in the Klamath Basin. Thiamine,
also known as vitamin B1, is essential for all vertebrates. It
helps enzymes break down sugars, produce energy and create
genetic material. In fish, it plays a significant role in early
growth and development.
Climate change affects our weather patterns, sea levels,
wildlife populations, and global temperatures, but very few
people understand the ramifications it’s had on the human
population. Believe it or not, our food, water, and air quality
have all been seriously affected by climate change, and as a
result, climate change has affected human health in a number of
dangerous and potentially deadly ways. … [D]roughts cause
wildfires, which are contributing to air quality problems.
We’ve already seen what the immense plumes of smoke created by
wildfires can do to air quality
in California and Australia.
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.
One of the worst droughts in memory in a massive agricultural
region straddling the California-Oregon border could mean steep
cuts to irrigation water for hundreds of farmers this summer to
sustain endangered fish species critical to local tribes. The
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which oversees water allocations in
the federally owned Klamath Project, is expected to announce
this week how the season’s water will be divvied up after
delaying the decision a month.
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.
Salinity has often become a major limit for irrigated
agriculture in semi-arid regions, from ancient Mesopotamia to
parts of California today. A previous blog post showed that
conjunctive use with more saline groundwater can differ
fundamentally from freshwater aquifers. Higher salinity limits
groundwater use for irrigation during dry years, when less
surface water is available to dilute groundwater salinity, and
increases aquifer pumping in wetter years to avoid
water-logging. Brackish groundwater can no longer serves as
drought storage, but becomes a supplemental water supply in all
years, limited by availability of fresh surface water for
diluting salts. This greatly reduces groundwater’s ability to
support permanent crops and increases variability in annual
crop acreage across different water years, thus reducing
profit.
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.
ACWA staff testified with a support-if-amended position on AB
1500 (E.Garcia) during an Assembly Water, Parks and Wildlife
Committee hearing on April 8. The bill is one of two climate
resilience bond proposals that are currently advancing through
the state Legislature and could be headed for the June 2022
ballot. AB 1500 would create a $6.7 billion bond measure. ACWA,
with input from the State Legislative Committee’s Bond Working
Group, is requesting amendments to the bills to add funding for
water-related climate resilience projects that help provide a
reliable water supply during drought and flood. The amendments
propose the bill include funding for conveyance, dam safety,
groundwater protection and sustainable groundwater management,
flood management, integrated regional water management and safe
drinking water for disadvantaged communities, as well as water
quality and water reuse and recycling.
With a salmonella outbreak in eight states already under
investigation by the Centers for Disease Control, officials are
watching in California for another disease that impacts
waterfowl. Botulism killed thousands of waterfowl and other
birds last year on two national wildlife refuges near the
border of California and Oregon. Some estimates were as high as
60,000 dead birds. The Lower Klamath Basin and Tule Lake
national wildlife refuges were among the first created more
than 100 years ago. Millions of waterfowl and shore birds,
along with songbirds, migrated along the Pacific Flyway into
the two refuges and beyond. Today, between severe
restrictions on water flowing into and out of the refuges
and a crippling drought that shows no sign of letting up,
the refuge marshes are going dry.
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…
The city of St. Helena’s water system recently failed a
drinking water standard, city officials said Thursday evening.
… The city routinely monitors its distribution system for the
presence of drinking water contaminants. Testing results
received for Nov. 10, 2020, and March 9, 2021, showed the
system exceeded the standard or maximum contaminant level —MCL
— for haloacetic acids, or HAA, [Jo Ann Burkman, acting chief
operator for the city's water division] said. The standard
MCL for haloacetic acids is 60 ug/L; the running annual average
for the LSWTP Distribution System in the fourth quarter of 2020
measured 68 ug/L…
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.
As drought worsens in the West, a coalition of more than 200
farm and water organizations from 15 states that has been
pushing to fix the region’s crumbling canals and
reservoirs is complaining that President Joe Biden’s new
infrastructure proposal doesn’t provide enough funding for
above- or below-ground storage.
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.
A $230,000 revision of the Pure Water Monterey expansion
project’s environmental review document will move forward after
the Monterey One Water board approved the work earlier this
week. At the same time, board members backing the study
revision made it clear they wouldn’t support approving the
recycled water expansion proposal itself until an outside
funding source is available. On Monday, the Monterey One Water
board voted 7-3 to approve the work needed to update a
supplemental environmental impact report for the expansion
proposal, including consultant contracts and a cost-sharing
agreement with the Monterey Peninsula Water Management District
whose board agreed last month to cover most of the revision’s
cost.
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.
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.
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 Buena Vista Lagoon Ecological Reserve in San Diego County
sits between the cities of Oceanside to the north and Carlsbad
to the south. It’s historic because it was the state’s
first-ever reserve, created in 1968. … [H]omeowners in that
area, the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), CDFW
and several other groups came to an agreement after years of
dispute on how the lagoon should be altered so it thrives well
into the future. … Like lagoons up and down that part of San
Diego County, Buena Vista took in runoff from hills to the east
and fed water to the west into the Pacific Ocean. But in the
‘40’s a weir was added at the mouth by nearby landowners, so
the lagoon essentially became freshwater only. …
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.
Now that his massive coronavirus relief package is law,
President Joe Biden is laying out his next big proposal: A
roughly $2 trillion plan for improving the nation’s
infrastructure … Biden’s plan allocates $111
billion to rebuild the country’s water infrastructure. It
would replace all of the nation’s lead pipes and service lines
in order to improve the health of American children and
communities of color. The White House says replacing the pipes
would reduce lead exposure in 400,000 schools and childcare
facilities. The proposal would upgrade the country’s
drinking water, wastewater and stormwater systems, tackle new
contaminants and support clean water infrastructure in rural
parts of the country.
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.
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…
People living on San Francisco’s streets and in its parks face
daily barriers to finding and accessing clean water, according
to a report released earlier this month by the nonprofit
organization, Coalition on Homelessness. The coalition
surveyed 73 unhoused people during the 2020-21 winter months to
better understand how they access, use, and store water. Of
those surveyed — mostly elderly and disabled people living in
the Tenderloin area — some 68 percent responded that meeting
their daily water needs is a burden. Sources of hardship
abound. Some unhoused residents said they have trouble getting
water at grocery stores or restaurants because of their
appearance.
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.
The Vallecitos Water District received two awards for its
innovative use of technology to reduce algae blooms at Mahr
Reservoir, it was announced Thursday. The district received the
“Excellence in Action” national award from the WateReuse
Association and the “Innovation and Resiliency” state award
from the California Association of Sanitation Agencies for its
use of an ultrasound technology to address water quality at the
Stanley A. Mahr Reservoir with a reduced need for chemical
treatment. The most common method of treating algal blooms is
with chemicals. VWD instead uses technology developed by the
international company LG Sonic, which provides an overview of
the water quality allowing identification and treatment of
algal blooms.
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.
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…
In 2020 wildfires ravaged more than 10 million acres of land
across California, Oregon and Washington, making it the largest
fire season in modern history. Across the country, hurricanes
over Atlantic waters yielded a record-breaking number of
storms. While two very different kinds of natural disasters,
scientists say they were spurred by a common catalyst – climate
change – and that both also threaten drinking water supplies.
As the nation already wrestles with water shortages,
contamination and aging infrastructure, experts warn more
frequent supercharged climate-induced events will exacerbate
the pressing issue of safe drinking water.
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.
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 …
A Biden initiative expected to pour up to $3 trillion into
repairing America’s decrepit infrastructure and funding other
programs has sparked a scramble across the nation for the
federal funds — with California expecting to reap the biggest
piece. …Rep. John Garamendi, a Northern California Democrat
who is a senior member of the House Transportation and
Infrastructure Committee…spent more than an hour with Biden
in recent weeks and came away convinced that the program will
be broad enough to improve most areas of the nation’s
infrastructure: highways, passenger rail, electric grids, dams,
sewers and water systems, ocean terminals and
airports….
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.
The Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday will
likely hire a contractor for the sweeping Lower Walnut Creek
Restoration Project that aims to improve both flood control and
conditions for wildlife and recreation. County staff recommends
the board approve a deal with Four M Contracting, which came in
with the lowest bid on the project, at $11.285 million. The
Winters-based civil engineering firm specializes in wetland
enhancement projects and the creation of wildlife habitat.
While water shortages and lack of access are usually associated
with developing countries, there were more than 2 million
people in the United States without running water or
basic indoor plumbing as of 2019, according to the U.S. Water
Alliance. Among them are members of the Navajo Nation who
drive 40 miles every few days to haul water to their homes;
communities in California dealing with contaminated wells; and
people across the country living with outdated water systems.
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
A proposal to create a watchdog for South Los Angeles County’s
dozens of disjointed and struggling water systems has stirred
fear among public agencies and companies further down the
pipeline that they could be the target of hostile
takeovers. AB 1195, introduced by Assemblywoman Christina
Garcia, would establish the Southern Los Angeles County
Regional Water Agency and grant it authority to assist failing
water systems with aging infrastructure, or to take control if
a system is no longer able to provide affordable, clean
drinking water.
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.
Acting in advance of its Pure Water Monterey expansion project
partner, the Monterey Peninsula Water Management District board
has agreed to spend an additional $180,000 on updating the
project’s environmental document and source water analysis for
the proposal. On Monday, the water district board voted
7-0 to spend $181,125 on work to update the recycled water
expansion project’s supplemental environmental impact report
and conduct source water modeling in an attempt to address an
issue that has drawn heavy criticism and opposition.
When a region’s groundwater is critically depleted and its dirt
as hard as a frying pan, how do you refill the aquifer? Ask a
fifth grader. Actually, ask the fifth and sixth grade
combination class at Bakersfield’s Munsey Elementary School
taught by Barbara Elrod. Elrod’s students discovered a pretty
cool way to both conserve water and recharge aquifers through
“grey water.” That’s water from sinks, showers and washing
machines. Turns out most of that water has soap in it and soap
is a surfactant.
[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.
San Francisco’s homeless residents struggle to access enough
water to live and stay healthy, according to a grim report
released Tuesday by the nonprofit Coalition on Homelessness.
The Coalition surveyed 73 homeless residents, and found that 61
percent of them do not have access to 15 liters of water a day,
which is UNICEF’s disaster response standard for people to meet
a minimum survival level.
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.
