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.
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.
Arizona’s top water negotiator is working behind the scenes to
avoid “extremely draconian” cuts to the state’s share of the
Colorado River. It’s an eleventh-hour effort
to work with the federal government, which is expected to
release new rules for managing water in late July. Tom
Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water
Resources, briefed the public on the process of negotiations
and the state’s plans to adapt to water cutbacks. … The
three states that make up the river’s Lower Basin — Arizona,
California and Nevada, countered with a proposal to
voluntarily cut back on water use and avoid harsher, mandatory
cuts from the federal government. Now, Buschatzke
is trying to convince the federal government to adopt it.
The Stockton City Council proclaimed a local emergency
after invasive golden mussels began clogging the
city’s Delta Water Supply Project Intake Pump Station, raising
concerns about the reliability of the water
system serving nearly 200,000 customers in
northern and western Stockton. The council voted 7-0 on June 23
to ratify a local emergency proclamation issued June 19,
giving City Manager Johnny Ford expanded authority to
respond to the infestation. The resolution allows the city
manager to expedite emergency contracts and purchases, suspend
normal contracting limits, use contingency funds to cover
response costs, pursue actions necessary to protect public
health and maintain water operations, and seek state and
federal assistance.
After an exceptionally warm and dry winter, vast swaths of the
Western United States are up in flames—and conditions could get
worse. Several large fires are burning in Arizona,
Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Nevada and Utah. In Colorado,
three federal wildland firefighters died while battling a blaze
over the weekend. … Winter weather set the stage for
this early and aggressive start to fire season. As I reported
in March, many Western states saw record or near-record lows in
snowpack coinciding with consistently high winter temperatures,
capped off by a heat wave in March that melted much of the
meager reserves. … With an even hotter, dry forecast on
the horizon, experts are concerned that the fires tearing
through much of the Southwest could be a sign of what’s to come
over the next few months.
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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.
During California’s 2012–2016 drought, much of the state
experienced severe drought conditions: significantly less
precipitation and snowpack, reduced streamflow and higher
temperatures. Those same conditions reappeared early in 2021
prompting Gov. Gavin Newsom in May to declare drought emergencies
in watersheds across 41 counties in California.
