Aquafornia

Dams and reservoirs are often needed to provide environmental water and maintain suitable water temperatures for downstream ecosystems. Here, we evaluate if water allocated to the environment, with storage to manage it, might allow environmental water to more reliably meet ecosystem objectives than a proportion of natural flow. We use a priority-based water balance operations model and a reservoir temperature model to evaluate 1) pass-through of a portion of reservoir inflow versus 2) allocating a portion of storage capacity and inflow for downstream flow and stream temperature objectives. We compare trade-offs to other senior and junior priority water demands. In many months, pass-through flows exceed the volumes needed to meet environmental demands. Storage provides the ability to manage release timing to use water efficiently for environmental benefit, with a co-benefit of increasing reservoir storage to protect cold-water at depth in the reservoir.
(The researchers are affiliated with the Public Policy Institute of California, Stanford University, University of North Carolina, University of Essex and Blue Point Conservation Science.)

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• San Francisco Chronicle: California’s second-largest reservoir is not as big as everyone thought
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• UC Davis, UCLA, UC Merced, California Municipal Utilities Association: The magnitude of California’s challenges
• San Luis Obispo Tribune: SLO County will release reservoir water into the Salinas River. Here’s why.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the 1972 Clean Water Act should only apply to waters that are navigable year-round, and not to ephemeral streams — waterways that are underground for much of the year, until there is significant rainfall. In doing so, the court significantly rolled back federal environmental protections that had been around for half a century. A new study seeks, for the first time, to quantify the volume of water that was affected by last year’s ruling. According to the paper, published Thursday in the journal Science, ephemeral streams are responsible for roughly 55% of all water that comes from regional river systems in the U.S. In other words, more than half of the water flowing in and out of rivers in the U.S. is no longer under the protection of federal law. This newly opened loophole in the Clean Water Act could have massive implications, the study’s authors say. Waterways are, after all, connected, and pollutants from one stream inevitably make their way downstream. … Some states, like California, have their own protections. But many do not, and have relied on federal law, which gives third parties the right to sue for polluting waterways. Much of the enforcement of the Clean Water Act is done by nonprofits like the Waterkeeper Alliance and Riverkeeper suing polluters. Now, it will be left up to the states to regulate ephemeral streams.

Related articles:

• New York Times: Study Finds Small Streams, Recently Stripped of Protections, Are a Big Deal

It’s officially summer, and the Utah Water Conditions Update is here from the Utah Division of Water Resources, and the headlines are positive. Reservoirs are at 92% capacity, 88% of streams are flowing at normal to above-normal and Great Salt Lake has risen 6.5 feet since its historic low in 2022. According to the report, most of Utah’s snowpack has melted. Streams and reivers and running high, fast and cold, which creates dangerous conditions. The Park Record reported earlier this week that Wasatch County Search and Rescue has been called in to the Provo River frequently in the last two weeks due to recreationists falling in the rushing river, which has picked up due to snowpack melt.

The tangle of pipes at this industrial plant [in Corpus Christi, Texas] doesn’t stand out in this city built around the carbon-heavy business of pumping oil and refining it into fuel for planes, ships, trucks and cars. But this plant produces fuel from a different source, one that doesn’t belch greenhouse pollution: hydrogen. Specifically, hydrogen made from water using renewable electricity, also known as green hydrogen. This process could represent the biggest change in how fuel for planes, ships, trains and trucks is made since the first internal combustion engine fired up in the 19th century. … Turning hydrogen into liquid fuel could help slash planet-warming pollution from heavy vehicles, cutting a key source of emissions that contribute to climate change. But to fulfill that promise, companies will have to build massive numbers of wind turbines and solar panels to power the energy-hungry process. Regulators will have to make sure hydrogen production doesn’t siphon green energy that could go towards cleaning up other sources of global warming gases, such as homes or factories.

Contra Costa County received $1,499,285 from the California Ocean Protection Council’s Senate Bill 1 Sea Level Rise Adaptation Planning Grant Program, which aims to provide funding for coastal communities to develop plans to combat sea level rise and projects to build resilience along the entire coast of California and the San Francisco Bay, according to a press release from the state. The Contra Costa Resilient Shoreline Plan will create a comprehensive roadmap to address sea level rise across the entire 90-miles of the county’s shoreline with a focus on impacted communities. It will serve a coordinating and organizational role for local plans in alignment with Bay Conservation and Development Commission guidelines and explore natural and constructed infrastructure improvements.

The Tuolumne Utilities District held a ceremonial ribbon cutting marking the completion of the successful overhaul/replacement of the Sonora Regional Wastewater Treatment facility. The project commenced in October of 2021 and the updated operation, on the outskirts of Sonora, now has the ability to treat an average of two million gallons of wastewater per day. The $42-million project replaces an outdated plant built in the 1970s. The project site was strategically contained within the footprint of the existing treatment plant on Southgate Drive.

It’s around 9:30am on the banks of Penitencia Creek in San Jose, and Santa Clara Valley Water is here for creek clean-up. This public agency that provides water to county residents is charged with keeping water sources clean and preventing floods. … Valley Water is getting $3 million in federal funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to ramp up the cleanups across nine of the county’s creeks, and undo other ecological damage—like fixing up human-dug caves and stairways along river banks, or removing rafts of entangled trash that are clogging salmonid streams. But with no long-term housing solution for the people living in the camps, trash and damage tends to reappear rapidly. Most camps are cleaned up on a monthly or quarterly basis. The whole operation (trash compactor, laboring crew, police escort, and all) is as expensive as it looks. 

It’s been two and a half months since the state brought the hammer down on water managers in Kings County for lacking an adequate plan to stem overpumping in the region and the situation is, in a word – chaotic. One groundwater sustainability agency (GSA) has imploded, leaving the county to potentially pick up the pieces. Another doesn’t have enough money in the bank to pay its newly hired manager. One GSA has repeatedly canceled meetings, others appear to be crafting their own plans and one is banking on being exempted as a “good actor,” despite the state’s repeated insistence that there will be no such exemptions in San Joaquin Valley basins now under scrutiny. Oh, and the Farm Bureau is suing the state Water Resources Control Board over its vote April 16 to put the region, the Tulare Lake subbasin, into probation – the first step toward a possible state pumping takeover. All this while a deadline is rapidly approaching July 15 for all Kings County pumpers to register their wells and begin tracking their groundwater consumption.

Related articles:

• KVPR: A legal battle could determine fate of groundwater regulation in rural San Joaquin Valley

Stephen Roe Lewis grew up seeing stacks of legal briefs at the dinner table — often, about his tribe’s water. His father, the late Rodney Lewis, was general counsel for the Gila River Indian Community and fought for the tribe’s rights to water in the Southwest, eventually securing in 2004 the largest Native American water settlement in U.S. history. Years later, Stephen would become governor of the tribe, whose reservation is about a half-hour south of downtown Phoenix. Amid his tenure, he’s been pivotal in navigating a water crisis across the seven-state Colorado River basin caused by existential drought made worse by climate change and decades of Western states overdrawing from the river. Lewis, 56, has leveraged the Gila River tribe’s water abundance to help Arizona, making his tribe a power player in the parched region. His fingerprints are on many recent, high-stakes decisions made in the West about the future of the river that supports 40 million people, and the tribe’s influence is only growing.

Related articles: 

• The Colorado Sun: Much of Colorado could be pushed into drought by late summer thanks to hot, dry conditions
• KSL: Utah’s rivers could lose water at an alarming rate without conservation
• Utah Public Radio: The future of the Colorado River on Access Utah