A collection of top water news from around California and the West compiled each weekday. Send any comments or article submissions to Foundation Writer Matt Jenkins.
Subscribe to our weekday emails to have news delivered to your inbox at about 9 a.m. Monday through Friday except for holidays.
Please Note:
Some of the sites we link to may limit the number of stories you can access without subscribing.
We occasionally bold words in the text to ensure the water connection is clear.
The headlines below are the original headlines used in the publication cited at the time they are posted here and do not reflect the stance of the Water Education Foundation, an impartial nonprofit that remains neutral.
U.S. authorities are investigating a data breach at a small
maker of water utility technology, highlighting infrastructure
cybersecurity threats even though the Kansas firm was
apparently not part of a suspected Iranian-affiliated campaign
against water plants in Minnesota and other states starting in
July. The company and the FBI confirmed the attack at
Micro-Comm in Olathe, Kansas, which has not previously been
reported. Responsibility was claimed by Barracuda, a relatively
new ransomware group that says it is motivated by profit and is
not government sponsored. … The Micro-Comm breach
highlighted the complexity of securing local U.S. water systems
and the vendors that support them from increasing cyberattacks
on computer systems embedded in the nation’s critical
infrastructure.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced
the availability of $10.8 million in grant funding to support
training for the water sector workforce. The agency said
enhancing recruitment and training for workers in the water
sector is more important than ever in light of anticipated
retirements, aging water infrastructure, evolving technologies
used in the sector and emerging risks like cyberattacks.
Nationally, drinking water, wastewater and stormwater systems
are facing a shortage of qualified workers due to expected
retirements. … EPA said the new grant builds on the agency’s
recent roundtable in which it led discussions on how to help
recruit and retain individuals into meaningful careers in
water. The roundtable also identified opportunities where EPA
can help reduce barriers and improve interstate coordination.
Colorado once again has sidestepped the Trump administration’s
opening of 45 million acres of U.S. wildlands through a
separately negotiated “roadless rule” that the U.S. Forest
Service says it will respect even while it rescinds protections
in dozens of states. Colorado will keep roadless
protections for the 4.2 million acres of protected lands
negotiated under the administration of Republican Gov. Bill
Owens in 2012, a Forest Service spokesperson said.
… Environmental groups with Colorado offices welcomed
news that the Forest Service would not touch the Colorado and
Idaho pacts. But they noted that hunters, anglers and hikers
will be affected by roads that cut up wildlife habitat in
surrounding states. “Fish and wildlife don’t know state
boundaries,” said Corey Fisher, Missoula, Montana-based public
lands policy director for Trout Unlimited.
It’s a hot, mid-summer day but a welcome breeze keeps a team of
bird conservationists cool as they walk along an earthen levee
in Suisun Marsh, a flat expanse between San Francisco Bay and
the Delta. … The team is here to track the effectiveness of a
program called BirdReturns, which helps birds in California’s
vast Central Valley. … But the Central Valley has lost 95% of
the wetlands where migrating birds once rested and refueled.
BirdReturns pays farmers and wetland managers to flood
strategic points during the late spring through early fall dry
season, providing temporary wetlands when and where birds need
them. … Now BirdReturns has expanded to include Suisun Marsh
duck clubs, which account for about half of this 115,000-acre
managed wetland.
Just days after the federal government released new plans for
sharing water from the shrinking Colorado River, it is getting
sued by one of the states impacted by the plan. Water officials
in Nevada filed a lawsuit against the Interior Department on
Monday morning. … Arizona’s leaders are still
figuring out how to respond to the
lawsuit. … Much of the recent chatter
about Colorado River lawsuits has been focused on Arizona, and
a legal move called a “compact call.”
… Nevada’s lawsuit does something different. It alleges
that the federal government violated procedural laws
while drawing up its new plans for managing the river.
In short, the lawsuit argues that Interior failed to check
certain legally required boxes while writing its new strategy.
The California Supreme Court dealt a blow to a local
government’s ability to seize water utilities on Monday,
ruling that courts get the final say on whether a
public utility is necessary. Apple Valley, located in
San Bernardino County, California, will have to go back to the
drawing board for its plans to take over the privately owned
water utility, Apple Valley Ranchos Water Company. In a
unanimous decision sending the case back down to a California
appeals court, the California Supreme Court sided with
the utility company in the latest in a decade-long eminent
domain dispute between Apple Valley and the utility
company. … The case goes back to at least 2010
when investment firm Carlyle Infrastructure Partners bought
Apple Valley Ranchos Water Company and raised the rates
significantly.
Electric power generation for data centers is a threat to
water supplies even in states outside the arid
Southwest, according to a report published Tuesday by
the think tank Ceres. Data centers in the seven states with the
highest concentrations of them use about 3.4 trillion
gallons of freshwater for electric power generation every
year, but few electric power producers have connected
increasing power demand to water supply risks, says the report,
“The Water Behind the Watts.” That volume of water adds up to
10.4 million acre-feet—greater than the 8
million-acre-foot average annual urban water demand in
California that the state’s Legislative Analyst’s
Office reported in 2021. It’s the equivalent to 12-times the
annual water use of Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Washington, DC,
combined, the think tank that advocates for clean energy and
sustainable development found.
The world’s biggest oil, gas and cement companies are partly
responsible for California’s water shortages, a new study
finds, with their planet-warming emissions shown to
reduce the state’s snowpack by an annual amount roughly equal
to what would fill Shasta Lake. The study, published
Tuesday, is one of the first to attempt to quantify the impact
of climate change, and specifically industrial pollution, on
water supply and demand in the western United States.
The results suggest that emissions have significantly
undermined water security in the West. The
research appears in the Communications Earth and Environment
journal. It comes as part of the growing field of climate
attribution, which seeks to disentangle the drivers of various
climate problems and pave the way for solutions.
Our 42ⁿᵈ
annual Water Summit is the Foundation’s premier
event of the year and returns to Sacramento October 29 with
leading policymakers and experts addressing critical water
issues in California and across the West. Just one year after
the signing of Senate Bill 72, the Summit will
feature a panel discussion of California’s 2028 Water
Plan update as it undergoes a legislatively mandated
shift from being just a guidance document to a blueprint
providing a framework for implementation of actions. Capacity
is limited and filling up quickly, so register here
while seats are available!
One answer to Utah’s brutal drought could be a
large metal structure that looks like a football goal post at
the foot of the La Sal Mountains near Moab. … State agencies,
water utilities, ranchers and ski resorts across the parched
Western United States are increasingly spending millions each
year on new ways to create more rain and snow.
They’re betting on a growing body of research showing the
interventions could squeeze at least a little bit more water
from storm clouds. The practice, known as cloud seeding, has
been used for decades. It has typically involved injecting
particles of silver iodide into clouds from airplanes or from
the ground to nudge precipitation to fall. Drought fueled by
climate change is driving a quest for new ways to try it.
Extreme rainfall can send huge amounts of sediment rushing off
hillsides and into streams. But a new USGS study finds that
even an exceptionally wet year may deliver only a small
fraction of that sediment to San Francisco Bay—far short of
what is needed to help coastal wetlands and shorelines keep
pace with rising sea levels. That finding highlights a
paradox for coastal managers: climate change may produce more
intense rainfall and more landslides, but the additional
sediment generated by those events is still not enough, and
does not necessarily reach the coast quickly enough, to bring
much benefit to vulnerable Bay shorelines and wetlands.
… San Francisco Bay’s tidal wetlands and shorelines
depend on sediment to build elevation and maintain their
position as sea level rises.
In February 1998, almost a year’s worth of rain fell in
downtown Los Angeles, as a series of powerful Pacific storms
rocked California amid a “Super” El Niño. Deadly landslides
struck Southern and Central California, wiping out hillside
homes, and powerful waves pounded the state’s shoreline. These
waves destroyed a large section of the famous Santa Monica Pier
and caused widespread coastal flooding in San Francisco Bay
communities. Many Californians who experienced that event still
consider it to be the benchmark for how a Super El Niño can
alter life in their state. Now, with another Super El Niño
setting in — this time likely to be the strongest on record —
many are calibrating their expectations based on what happened
then.
… For years, the importance of water temperature for salmon
survival has been accepted. But scientists and fisheries
managers have had trouble drawing a direct link between warmer
water and the death of eggs or juveniles. But now Johnson and a
team of researchers from UC Davis and NOAA have some answers.
According to a report released Friday, the scientists have
identified a 15-day window when fertilized salmon eggs need
cold water to survive. Without it, their prospects for survival
are slim. … What they found was that, despite salmon
naturally spawning over the course of a few summer months, the
survivors came from redds that were fertilized in a very short
one- to two-week period. That indicates that many of the
fish that spawned outside of that window did not have offspring
that survived.
Coronado Mayor John Duncan challenged the validity of San Diego
County’s public health safety testing for ocean water at the
Aug. 18 City Council meeting. The tense conversation
focused on a relatively new testing protocol implemented in May
2022 to check the sewage levels coming from
Tijuana. Before adopting the method, known as Polymerase
Chain Reaction (ddPCR), the county relied on Enterolert – a
culture-based protocol standardized nationwide by the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA approved a pilot
program for the ddPCR protocol in 2021 and stated that a study
had “found good agreement” between the two
methods. However, beach closures in Coronado jumped
significantly after the county started using the ddPCR
testing.
… Appraisals is about water rights and marriage
and local farms and parenting and zoning laws and grandmothers,
which is to say it is about the emotional impacts of climate
anxiety in rural spaces, how these issues put us at odds with,
or, more hopefully, draw us closer to the people we love. … I
did not want to write a memoir, and I did not want to write
essays. I wanted to write a novel in which the water crisis of
the American West was “redeemed by the imagination.” For models
of how to keep the polemic from overpowering the personal, I
turned to other writers working in the subset of climate
fiction that I call contemporary agrarian.
In a major escalation of tensions between the seven states that
share the Colorado River, Nevada officials have filed a federal
lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s order for cuts
in water use. The complaint, filed early Monday morning in the
U.S. District Court of Nevada, asserts that the federal
government’s operating plan unlawfully authorizes the federal
government to reduce the state’s allocation of the
river by up to 71 percent annually, or a 213,556 acre-feet
reduction. Such a cut would slash the state’s share of
water far past its actual use, which came in at 198,000
acre-feet last year. Lawyers for the Colorado River Commission
of Nevada, the Southern Nevada Water Authority and the state as
a whole requested an injunction to halt
implementation.
Earth’s oceans were warmer than any day in recorded history
Friday due to a combination of long-term human-caused global
warming and short-term effects of El Niño. The average sea
surface temperature of 21.1 degrees Celsius, or 70
degrees Fahrenheit, breaks the old record of 21.09
degrees Celsius set many times in early 2024 during the most
recent El Niño. … Record ocean heat will have
cascading effects on global weather throughout the coming
months. Warmer seas provide storms with more energy
and moisture, which will make rainfall heavier and floods more
likely in parts of the world. That may include
California, as the arrangement of this El Niño
is shaping up similarly to those that have soaked the state in
the past.
City and county officials, labor unions, and environmentalists
packed the intimate Loma Linda City Council chamber to share
their views at the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control
Board’s Friday meeting on proposed new sweeping water runoff
regulations. Part of the state’s environmental agency, the
Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board is
proposing new regulations to decrease pollution in
water from storm drains and flood control channels
across large areas of the Santa Ana River Basin, with what is
known as the “Regional MS4 Permit.” … Though the Santa Ana
Water Board members did not vote to adopt MS4 – the
vote is scheduled for a Sept. 11 meeting – several
city and county officials made it clear in the City Council
chamber that they disapproved of the proposed
regulations.
The U.S. Forest Service acknowledged that its plan to roll back
protections on 45 million acres of national forest land could
impact endangered species, water supplies and
wildlife habitat across Arizona and the Southwest. The
agency filed a proposal on Aug. 18 to rescind the “roadless
rule,” which set aside over 60 million acres of forests and
grasslands within national forests as roadless areas.
… The Forest Service’s plan notes that rescinding the
roadless rule would increase soil erosion and sediment
pollution for about 24 million Americans. In the
Southwest, the repeal could affect 739 water intake
locations and nearly 2 million people, according to the
plan.
Irrigators in the Klamath Basin moved fast to stop an avian
botulism outbreak that threatened to kill up to 140,000 ducks,
saving most of the birds by using the basin’s
flow-through system. The outbreak killed around 13,000
birds. Irrigators used part of the basin’s flow-through system
to circulate water and prevent the disease from spreading
further. “Our managers and our staff have done a phenomenal job
of moving water around, circulating it, trying to keep water
moving,” said Scott Seus, president of the Klamath Water Users
Association. “Dead water is dead ducks.” Low water
levels created stagnant conditions that allowed the botulism to
develop. By moving water into refuges, irrigators
began solving the problem.
