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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For the last two weeks, a little bird with big feet has turned
a 320-acre marsh in Irvine into one of the hottest birding
destinations in Southern California. Hundreds of birdwatchers
have flocked to the Irvine Ranch Water District’s San Joaquin
Marsh, hoping to catch a glimpse of a juvenile purple
gallinule. It’s the first documented sighting of the rare bird
in Orange County. … What brought the young purple
gallinule to the state is up for debate, but it was no surprise
it chose one of the largest coastal wetlands in Southern
California. The marsh was built in the 1990s to naturally clean
dry-weather urban runoff from San Diego Creek and address the
algae blooms that once existed in Upper Newport Bay, according
to the water district’s website.
The Redwood City Council opted not to widen its levee system
along Redwood Shores as part of a major $200 million upgrade to
the infrastructure addressing sea-level rise and
flooding. At the council’s meeting Monday, city staff
gave an update on the current design options for the Redwood
Shores Sea Level Rise Protection Project. The leading goal of
the project is to meet updated levee height standards
established by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to
reduce flood risk. … The first design proposed a
20-foot-wide levee trail that nearly doubles the trail’s
current width. … The alternative proposal — which
councilmembers largely favored — proposed to maintain the
existing width, but would favor a more natural shoreline design
by incorporating ecological features when possible.
Nearly eight years after the Camp Fire, sediment continues to
reduce storage capacity at Concow Reservoir, prompting the
Thermalito Water and Sewer District to seek state funding for a
major dredging project estimated to cost $50 million to $55
million. The reservoir is the primary drinking water source for
about 12,200 residents in the Thermalito community.
… The district is proposing to remove about 900,000
cubic yards of sediment. [Chris] Heindel [district engineer for
the Thermalito Water and Sewer District] said that represents
roughly 2,000 acre-feet of water storage capacity that has been
displaced since the Camp Fire, though he said removing the
sediment would not restore all of the reservoir’s historical
capacity.
Scientists from the California and Nevada Water Science Centers
attended the 30th annual Lake Tahoe Summit to discuss the work
the USGS is doing in the Tahoe Basin. … The Lake Tahoe
Summit is an annual event that brings local, federal, and state
leaders together to discuss ways to protect Lake Tahoe and
strengthen the partnership underlying the Lake Tahoe
Environmental Improvement Program. Recent USGS projects at Lake
Tahoe include the continued monitoring and analysis of the
impacts of the 2021 Caldor Fire, studying nutrient and sediment
loads flowing into the Lake, and assessing cyanobacteria and
cyanotoxins in the Lake’s nearshore.
The Upper Basin is on the verge of violating the Colorado River
Compact for the first time in the agreement’s 104-year history,
failing to send enough water downstream to the Lower
Basin, Central Arizona Project President Terry Goddard
told KTAR News 92.3 FM. … Nevada filed a
lawsuit Monday, arguing the agreement placed the burden of the
shortages on the Lower Basin, which could negatively impact its
economy. At an Arizona Reconsultation Committee meeting Monday,
Goddard said there are many parallels between Nevada’s lawsuit
and Arizona’s position. … He said it’s possible
Arizona joins Nevada’s lawsuit or files one of its
own.
… [T]he California Indian Freedom Act of 2026 seeks to
ensure that tribes can visit their historically sacred sites
and freely worship. To that end, it would require government
agencies to get tribal consent before pursuing activities that
might disrupt Indigenous practices on land that is now owned by
the state. … A broad coalition of businesses, water
agencies and local governments, led by the California
Chamber of Commerce, says that while the bill’s intentions are
good, they’re lining up against the proposal because of its
methods. … Whether the bill applies to water projects,
including such high-profile proposals as Sites
Reservoir in the Sacramento Valley and the
45-mile conveyance tunnel in the Sacramento-San Joaquin
River Delta, is unclear. … Additionally, with
water bodies defined as potentially sacred
sites under the bill, there are concerns that the new authority
for tribes over state land would extend to California’s
navigable waterways.
As Colorado nears the final month of the 2026 water year,
extreme drought is persisting across the state
as many regions, including the Western Slope, continue to rack
up records when it comes to heat as well as precipitation — and
the lack thereof. “We continue to be way above anything that
we’ve seen in the data record for Colorado,” … said Allie
Mazurek, engagement climatologist at the Colorado Climate
Center, at the Aug. 25 Water Conditions Monitoring meeting of
the Colorado Water Conservation Board. … These
climate conditions have been the driving factors for things
such as dropping streamflows and reservoir
levels to high evaporative demand and soil moisture
deficits as drought conditions persist in 91% of the
state. Seventy-seven percent is experiencing severe or
worse drought.
Solano County supervisors voted Tuesday to oppose a plan that
would have allowed the billionaire-backed California Forever to
use an 18-year-old environmental report in its effort to create
a new shipbuilding facility in the county, throwing a wrench in
the group’s plans. The surprise 3-2 vote effectively kills
the initiative for this year, dealing a blow to Gov. Gavin
Newsom, whose office led discussions on it throughout the
summer. … The proposed “Solano Maritime and
Manufacturing Act” would have exempted 1,350 acres
along the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta from the
California Environmental Quality Act for “maritime and
manufacturing uses,” including infrastructure projects.
… Proponents have pitched a shipbuilding facility as a
potential source of at least 10,000 jobs and an opportunity to
pump up the area’s lagging economy.
In an unfortunate first, state wildlife managers say fragments
of invasive zebra mussel DNA have been found in a stretch of
the Colorado River near Moab. The
discovery is concerning because the tiny striped mussels
pose an outsized threat to rivers and lakes,
clogging pipes, covering beaches with razor-sharp shells and
damaging ecosystems. … The department sees the mussels
as an emerging threat after an infestation was recorded near
Loma, Colorado last year. And while detection of DNA in the
water indicates the presence of an animal somewhere upstream,
the division said it does not confirm that living mussels are
present in the test area.
U.S. Rep. Gabe Vasquez (D-N.M.) on Tuesday announced he had
co-sponsored two federal bills aimed at data center
transparency. Vasquez signed on as a co-sponsor to the FAIR
Data Act, sponsored by Rep. Josh Riley (D-N.Y.), and the Data
Center Water and Energy Transparency Act of 2026, sponsored by
Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-IL). The FAIR Data Act would shield
residential electric customers and small businesses from
shouldering increased energy costs related to large data
centers. The Data Center Water and Energy Transparency
Act of 2026 would require developers to provide state
and local governments that have data centers, or are
considering them, with information pertaining to energy
and water consumption. Companies that don’t comply
would face fines of up to $20,000 per day.
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.
