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.
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El Niño is often portrayed as a predictable event that has the
same effect whenever it appears. In reality, however, the
effects of El Niño are not guaranteed. … Classic El
Niño years have historically meant wetter winters for the
Southwest and warmer, drier winters for the Pacific Northwest
and northern continental US. However, judging from the
occasional “drier than average” winters in the Southwest shown
in Figure 5, El Niño is complex and its outcomes are not
guaranteed. … During those periods of time when the
MJO [Madden-Julian Oscillation] is in its “enhancing phase,”
with respect to El Niño: we can expect more precipitation in
the Southwest U.S. (in the Lower Colorado Basin, certainly, but
… how far north into the Upper Basin this might extend is
anyone’s guess).
A community nonprofit opposed to the development of a lithium
mine and geothermal power plant in California’s arid Imperial
County asked a state Court of Appeal panel on Thursday to
reconsider their petition aimed at halting the development of
the project. Comite Civico del Valle argued to the panel the
Imperial County Board of Supervisors violated the California
Environmental Quality Act after it approved the project based
on a flawed and inadequate analysis of the project’s
environmental impacts in 2024. Attorney Doug Carstens
argued to the three-justice panel the project’s environmental
impact report overstated the water availability in Imperial
County and did not fully appreciate the impact the project
would have on an agricultural region that already suffers from
strained water resources.
The trunk line that ruptured early Thursday, sending thousands
of gallons of water rushing down Sunset Strip and surrounding
communities, was installed 110 years ago and has emerged as the
latest example of L.A.’s struggles to overhaul its aging water
system. The break was on a riveted steel pipe from 1916 that
forms the major arteries for water delivery from reservoirs and
tanks to smaller distribution mainlines across Los Angeles. The
section of the Sunset Trunk Line was slated to be replaced in
2031, according to the utility. … In 2019, the Los
Angeles Department of Water and Power said roughly 29% of the
city’s pipes were over 80 years old, approaching their typical
lifespan of 100 years. Utilities have been struggling to
keep the system going, given funds are limited for any kind of
major overhaul of the aging pipes.
A critical year is ahead for the nation’s two largest
reservoirs, with no relief after a record-low snowpack
and a continuing drought. A comment posted on
the Colorado River Basin’s Facebook page Wednesday
morning might have said it best: “Not enough water in the
Monsoons to help. There’s only 2 things that can save Mead and
Powell right now: 150 percent Colorado Rockies snow pack for 5
consecutive years, or God himself.” Projections released
Wednesday show Lake Mead dropping to the lowest
levels seen since Hoover Dam was built in the 1930s,
falling to 1,035.86 feet in November. That’s about 6½ feet
lower than Lake Mead’s level today at noon — 1,042.52 feet.
Lake Mead is the nation’s largest reservoir,
butit’s currently at 27% capacity.
A court ruling is prompting San Diego to propose new water
rates that eliminate discounts for conservation — requiring
rate hikes for low-volume users and cheaper water for
high-volume users. But the rate hikes for low-volume users are
smaller than previously estimated, because plaintiffs in the
court case agreed to a $40 million settlement — despite the
courts awarding them $118 million. Another factor allowing
the city to soften the proposed hikes: Costs for wholesale
water are shrinking, thanks to the County Water Authority
securing deals to sell excess supply to water agencies in
Riverside County. The court ruling against the city is
having a major impact across California by
casting doubt on the rate structures of all water agencies that
reward conservation — nearly every water agency in the
state.
A ballot measure that would overhaul one of
California’s most powerful and controversial environmental
laws has a commanding lead less than three months
before voters begin casting ballots in the statewide November
election. Proposition 45, which would make substantial changes
to the California Environmental Quality Act, has the support
73% of likely voters, with 24% opposed and 4% undecided,
according to a poll released Wednesday evening by the Public
Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan research group in
San Francisco. If approved by a majority of voters, the measure
would set a 365-day limit on environmental reviews for a range
of projects, including new reservoirs, desalination
plants, forest thinning to reduce wildfire risk,
apartments, housing subdivisions, roads, bridges, public
transit, hospitals, solar farms, wind farms and battery storage
facilities.
The state program that helps bring solutions for Californians
with contaminated drinking water is facing a major drop in
funding. At a meeting in Sacramento last week, state officials
presented estimates that grant money to help communities get
clean drinking water, including by drilling new wells or
connecting to nearby water systems, could fall from
$941 million in the current fiscal year to about $103 million
in 2027-28. Both state and federal funds are going
away. Some at the meeting called it a looming “fiscal cliff.”
On a summer afternoon in the Sierra Nevada, a mountain pond can
look calm and still, reflecting granite peaks and alpine sky.
But beneath the surface, these small, shallow waters are
anything but stable. In fact, they are among the most thermally
variable aquatic ecosystems on Earth, with water temperatures
sometimes swinging more than 20°C (68°F) in a single day.
According to new research published in the journal Ecosphere,
the force driving much of that variability begins months
earlier: winter snowfall. The study found that
snowpack largely determines how mountain ponds function during
the summer, influencing water temperature, nutrient levels and
the abundance of tiny aquatic animals that support the rest of
the food web.
The contamination of a Cheyenne water system by a Meta data
center underscores the worries residents have about more than
two-dozen data centers that are and could be consuming
Wyoming’s energy, water and landscape. Water
officials announced in June that they had traced an unusual and
dangerous bacterium called Cupriavidus gilardii, which can
sicken people, to an industrial user first identified by the
Wyoming Tribune Eagle as a contractor for a Meta data center.
Pinpointing the source of contamination came months after the
discovery of the bacterium in late February. … As
Wyoming communities grapple with a surge of rural zoning
changes to enable construction of data center computer
warehouses and offices, the pollution raises questions about
developers’ and tech companies’ assurances.
Recent monsoon rains helped boost flows in the San Pedro River,
but the benefits are only temporary in the midst of a
historically dry year. The river, which flows about 140 miles
through southeastern Arizona, has been threatened by myriad
factors including climate change and nearby groundwater
pumping. In late June, an important registering station along
the river registered zero flow. The Charleston gage, near
Sierra Vista, showed the river as completely dry. Joanne
Roberts, board president of the nonprofit Friends of the San
Pedro River, said that it went dry due to a combination of
factors — prolonged drought, climate change, mining and other
human uses. She said the river had only gone dry one or two
times in recorded history.
Investigators are still trying to determine who hacked into the
controls for Pixley Irrigation District’s main turnout off of
Deer Creek last month. A gate got stuck in “manual” mode
when it should have operated remotely in automatic mode.
Pixley’s water resources superintendent Kirk Masters called the
incident a “hiccup” that was discovered on June 22, the first
day of the district’s summer water run. Masters reported it at
Pixley’s July 9 board meeting and said the problem was
rectified within two hours. Masters said in his report
that he was told it was Iranian hackers, but that has not been
confirmed. … This incident comes on the heels of an
Iranian hacker group attempting to gain access to California
Water Service’s operational systems in Bakersfield, Visalia and
Chico.
A decades-old plan to move 1.25 million acre-feet of
groundwater out of the Mojave Desert has cleared a
major federal hurdle after the Trump administration
approved a 50-year permit to convert a dormant oil and
natural gas pipeline into a water conduit stretching roughly
162 miles across Southern California. … The U.S. Bureau
of Land Management limited its environmental review to the
pipeline conversion, excluding groundwater pumping and its
potential effects on the aquifer, springs and wildlife. The
agency said withdrawals would occur on private property under
state and local oversight and were outside its regulatory
authority. That distinction lies at the heart of the
latest fight over Cadiz: The BLM reviewed the pipeline
crossing federal land but not the groundwater pumping needed to
supply it, or the wider impacts of that pumping on the
Mojave ecosystem.
As the water level at Lake Hodges remains low, neighbors fear
what could happen if a wildfire tears through their valley
again, as it did nearly two decades ago — this time with a much
smaller water barrier to slow the spread. Efforts continue to
urge the City of San Diego, which owns Hodges Dam, to raise the
lake level from 280 to 295 feet. … Four years ago, the city
completed a risk assessment for Hodges Dam that found its risk
score exceeded industry standards. … According to the
city, the report concluded that lowering the lake to no more
than 280 feet was necessary to reduce “potential life loss in
the event of a dam failure.” … Paul Bernstein, whose
home overlooks the lake, along with Del Dios Town Council
President Kevin Kidd and Councilmember Brian Caldwell, believes
the city’s analysis, which led to the lower water level, was
flawed and failed to consider important upstream impacts that
would result if the lake level dropped.
Since invasive golden mussels arrived in California a couple of
years ago, officials up and down the state have scrambled to
come up with solutions to their rapid spread. For months, state
and local water agencies tried things like hot water treatments
and scraping of docks. … For the most part, efforts to
eradicate the newly established species fell short. Instead,
statewide water managers leaned on prevention and education,
hoping to stem the movement of mussels between bodies of water
by imposing boat hull inspections and cleaning protocols at
lakes and reservoirs. Recently, though, a water district in
Kern County used a copper treatment to effectively kill
golden mussels that had established themselves
locally. Officials said the move, which worked on full-grown
mussels and ones that had not yet attached, represents a tool
for water managers in the battle against the destructive
species.
There are a few locations where anglers congregate
shoulder-to-shoulder to toss spinners in search of salmon, and
for the first time since 2022, bankies will have the ability to
wear out a shoulder and avoid flying hooks starting July 16
from the Carquinez Bridge east to the Woodson Bridge on the
Sacramento River. … There was a season on the Mokelumne,
American, and Feather Rivers in 2025, but the main river, the
Sacramento, was off limits due to the extremely poor
salmon returns to the upper river in 2022. This year’s
returns on the Sacramento are also threatened by water releases
out of Shasta Dam. In addition to the Sacramento River, inland
anglers will enjoy a full season on the Feather,
American and Mokelumne rivers. For the Central Valley,
the general fall-run salmon fishing season will open on July 16
and close on Dec. 16.
A billion-dollar cleanup at one of Utah’s most popular
recreation destinations is almost complete, and a new report
hints at what might be in store. The U.S. Government
Accountability Office spent a year auditing the Moab Mill Site,
a Cold War-era uranium processing facility sandwiched between
the Moab, the Colorado River and Arches National Park.
… The Moab Mill Site operator dumped processed
rocks in an unlined tailings pond, which contaminated the
surrounding groundwater with uranium and ammonia, threatening
the nearby Colorado River. … As of this year, according
to a report released Wednesday, the government has removed 16
million tons of tailings, loading them on rail cars at the Moab
site and shipping them 30 miles away to a landfill near
Crescent Junction specifically designed to house the tailings.
In an effort to address the historic-low water level at Lake
Mead, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California
Tuesday approved an agreement with the federal government to
help add water to the reservoir. On Tuesday, Metropolitan’s
Board of Directors approved an agreement with the U.S. Bureau
of Reclamation, which will provide the agency up to $65
million to keep up to 200,000 acre-feet of its Colorado River
supplies in the lake this year. … The board
also approved two other agreements with the Quechan Tribe and
Bard Water District, allowing the federal government to fund
the addition of up to 19,000 acre-feet of conserved
agricultural water to Lake Mead annually in 2027 and 2028.
As artificial intelligence fuels a new wave of data center
development across California, lawmakers are grappling with how
to support the growing industry while protecting the
state’s limited water supplies. Two bills moving
through the Legislature would give state and local officials
a more complete picture of data centers’ water
demands. AB 2469 would require developers to disclose
projected water use before local governments approve new
facilities, while AB 2619 would require operators to report
actual water use annually once the facilities open.
… Following the Bureau of Reclamation’s release of its formal
Draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the post-2026
operational guidelines, the state [Ariz.] is locked in a
strict era of limits. Under federal fallback models analyzed in
the EIS, Arizona faces structural water cuts that could gut its
Central Arizona Project allocation by as much as 77 percent.
Because Arizona holds the most junior water rights on the river
system, it must take the brunt of the reductions
first. The resulting crisis is fundamentally shifting the
state’s economy, forcing a direct collision between traditional
legacy industries and a booming tech sector, while engineering
a historic transfer of socio-political power back to Native
American tribes.
A massive and much-anticipated housing development tied up in
litigation could potentially be back on again in a small town
that borders the Central Valley and Bay Area. The question
remains, however: Will there be enough water for it and
the surging population nearby? … In 2024,
local water agencies adopted the Delta-Mendota Subbasin
Groundwater Sustainability Plan, which included Patterson.
… [T]he city of Patterson decided to single out the
Keystone Ranch development and attempted to impose the cost of
building a groundwater recharge facility on
the development, then later denied the project wholesale on
April 1, 2025. The California Department of Housing and
Community Development, or HCD, found that the city’s review of
the project is inconsistent with the state housing agencies.
