Watch our series of short videos on the importance of the
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, how it works as a water hub for
California and the challenges it is facing.
When a person opens a spigot to draw a glass of water, he or she
may be tapping a source close to home or hundreds of miles away.
Water gets to taps via a complex web of aqueducts, canals and
groundwater.
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Unlike California’s majestic rivers and massive dams and
conveyance systems, groundwater is out of sight and underground,
though no less plentiful. The state’s enormous cache of
underground water is a great natural resource and has contributed
to the state becoming the nation’s top agricultural producer and
leader in high-tech industries.
A new era of groundwater management began in 2014 in California
with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. The landmark law
turned 10 in 2024, with many challenges still ahead.
Mark your calendars! Registration will be opening soon for two
exciting Water Education Foundation events this fall.
Water Summit | Oct. 29
Join us for our premier event of
the year, bringing together leading policymakers and experts from
all sectors to discuss the most pressing water issues facing
California and the West.
For the past 20 years, the Colorado
River has been operated under a set of guidelines negotiated
between the seven states that depend on the river. Those
guidelines expire this year, and after five years of grinding
negotiations over a new agreement, the upstream states of
Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico remain deadlocked against
the downstream states of California, Arizona and Nevada.
Some 40 million people and 5.5 million acres of farmland depend
on the river’s water. But after the states failed to meet two
federal deadlines in three months, the river is in a moment of
unprecedented crisis. A dire snowpack has left flows just 15
percent of normal, many farms without water and several cities
scrambling to secure water supplies as they gird themselves for
shortages.
This morning [July 27], the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission – the agency overseeing Pacific Gas and Electric’s
effort to decommission two dams on the upper Eel River – told a
Southern California water agency that its late bid to take over
the project, along with the water rights that come with it,
will not be allowed to proceed. In making its decision, FERC
staff told the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District that it
presented no compelling argument as to why it should be
allowed to intervene in the case more than eight months after
the deadline to do so had passed. … Elsinore
Valley now has 30 days to ask the commission to revisit the
decision, according to the notice.
Some farming towns in California’s Central
Valley have sunk by more than 11 feet in recent
years because of groundwater pumping, the extraction
of water from underground aquifers using wells and electric
pumps for drinking, farming and industry. … New research from
UCLA and Caltech has outlined a way to detect when temporary
land subsidence becomes permanent and irreversible. The
research, published this week in Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences, uses satellite imagery to
identify the “abrupt transition to irreversible
damage.” Researchers hope this will give decision
makers new tools to keep an eye on water resources.
A U.S. plan for sharing the waters of the drought-stricken
Colorado River would require Arizona, California and Nevada to
cut their water use by a fifth in the next two
years and to make even deeper reductions later, a
senior water official from one of those states said on Monday.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss
sensitive matters, said the plan should also include
reductions for Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and
Wyoming. … The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is
expected this week to adopt a short-term
proposal by Arizona, California and Nevada, known as
the Lower Basin states, to cut their water use by 1.6 million
acre feet in 2027 and 2028, for a total of 3.2 million acre
feet, equivalent to cutting their current allotment by 21%,
the state official said.
… Welcome to one of the hottest and driest summers metro
Denver has seen in years, notwithstanding scattered monsoon
rain relief last week in pockets of the Front Range. And the
critical buffer the state relies on — stored water in
reservoirs — is shrinking steadily, hobbled by the lowest
recorded snowpack in Colorado since 1941. … Cities and
towns are grappling with whether to boost limits on water
consumption, especially with forecasts calling for high
temperatures to remain in the 90s well into this week. And
don’t be surprised if a citation arrives in your mailbox, as
new monitoring technology gives water providers a
precise view of who is complying with watering rulesat any hour — and who is trying to get away
with an extra helping of forbidden H2O.
Operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the
Bay Model is a giant hydraulic replica of San Francisco
Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin
Delta. It is housed in a converted World II-era
warehouse in Sausalito near San Francisco.
Hundreds of gallons of water are pumped through the
three-dimensional, 1.5-acre model to simulate a tidal ebb
and flow lasting 14 minutes.
As part of the historic Colorado
River Delta, the Salton Sea regularly filled and dried for
thousands of years due to its elevation of 237 feet below
sea level.
The most recent version of the Salton Sea was formed in 1905 when
the Colorado River broke
through a series of dikes and flooded the seabed for two years,
creating California’s largest inland body of water. The
Salton Sea, which is saltier than the Pacific Ocean, includes 130
miles of shoreline and is larger than Lake Tahoe.
Drought — an extended period of
limited or no precipitation — is a fact of life in California and
the West, with water resources following boom-and-bust patterns.
No portion of the West has been immune to drought during the last
century and it occurs with much greater frequency in the West
than in any other region of the country.
