A collection of top water news from around California and the West compiled each weekday. Send any comments or article submissions to Foundation News & Publications Director Chris Bowman.
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Ukiah Fire Chief Doug Hutchison knew what kind of hassle the
city was getting into by acquiring some 763 acres of overgrown,
fire-starved forest on the city’s western edge—but it seemed
worth it. There, Doolin Creek’s two forks merge and run through
a steep canyon, eventually heading straight through the city
and emptying into the Russian River. Steelhead trout, which
swim most of the way up the Russian River’s 110 miles to spawn
in its tributaries, and year-round resident native fishes like
sculpins and roaches, are kept cool by big trees shading the
creek. California nutmeg, fragrant like sandalwood, has been
spotted here, and spiky chinquapin. Also, the manzanita and
chamise are so thick in places that it’s hard to walk through.
If a big hot fire rolled through here, it would be very bad for
the wildlife, the forest, and the community. The city has taken
on the property to mitigate those fire risks and protect the
watershed.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has issued a
Unilateral Administrative Order to the Havasu Water Company [in
Southern California by the Colorado River] to take a series of
steps to prevent further violations of the Safe Drinking Water
Act. The EPA specifically cited the company’s failure to adhere
to the Act’s drinking water regulations.This included violation
of the maximum allowable level for total trihalomethanes.
Trihalomethanes are the byproducts that may form during the
disinfection process and may threaten human health through
long-term exposure at levels above federal limits.
The federal government has released a 584-page document
detailing possible solutions to an invasive species that poses
“an unacceptable risk” to another fish that’s listed as
threatened. When it’s all said and done, officials want to give
smallmouth bass a cold shower — or a cool bath, anyway — to
discourage them from reproducing. Make no mistake, the U.S.
Bureau of Reclamation’s plan is a detailed “Cool Mix” strategy
on how to reduce the threat to the humpback chub in the
Colorado River below Glen Canyon Dam. Smallmouth bass are
voracious predators, and they’ve started to establish
populations below the dam where the chub is struggling to
survive. Biologists say the bass will feed on the chub, their
eggs, and pretty much anything else that will fit in its mouth.
… The vast majority of Tricolored Blackbirds spend their
whole lives in California. A handful breed in Oregon,
Washington, Nevada, and Baja California, and at least 20 of the
birds were spotted last year in Idaho. Most, however, nest in
the San Joaquin Valley, and many are known to breed a second
time in the early summer months—often 50 to 100 miles north in
the wetlands and willows of the Sacramento Valley. It’s here,
too, that the birds feed on rice in the fall. They often browse
the paddies alongside other blackbirds—including the very
similar Red-winged Blackbird—that farmers can legally cull as
pests. This has inevitably led to losses of Tricolors over the
years. Although the species’ native
nesting habitat has been almost entirely removed from
California, they’ve adapted with varying success to shifting
land use. Where vineyards and orchards have replaced grassland
and marsh, the blackbirds have mostly disappeared.
The Salton Sea is more than a district priority, and it is
disheartening to learn that many state officials view it as a
problem for only our local officials to solve. Over the next
few weeks Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Assembly and the Senate will
make crucial decisions about our state budget and a potential
Climate Resilience Bond. It is vital for them to understand
that protecting the Sea is a statewide priority. The Salton Sea
is surrounded by several unique and rapidly growing communities
across Riverside and Imperial counties, ranging in size from
231 residents in Bombay Beach to approximately 44,000 residents
in El Centro. All these communities face significant health
risks and environmental justice concerns related to the Salton
Sea and a number of other issues in the region. -Written by Dora Cecilia Armenta, who has lived with
her family of four in Salton City for 29 years. She is an
active community partner with Leadership Counsel for Justice
and Accountability; and Mariela Loera, the Eastern
Coachella Valley Regional Policy Manager with the Leadership
Counsel for Justice and Accountability.
Back in 2003, farmers in California’s Imperial Valley agreed to
send some of their Colorado River water to cities on the coast.
The deal was touted as a win for thirsty Californians and a
boon for efforts to conserve water. But the deal also caused
dangerous pollution for those living near the Salton Sea,
according to a new study published in the American Journal of
Agricultural Economics on Wednesday. For the study, researchers
looked at 20 years of daily air pollution data collected from
around the inland and heavily saline Salton Sea between 1998 to
2018. As the water-transfer program reduced agricultural runoff
that replenishes the sea, once-underwater lakebed was exposed
to wind, leading to increased dust and air pollutants that can
cause heart and respiratory issues, they found.
Los Angeles area legislators are leading the charge to combat
chemicals connected to leukemia, ADHD, hearing loss and breast
cancer — and more — through a series of proposed environmental
laws. … [L]egislators are also trying to do better by
California’s kids, whose developing brains and immune systems
are particularly vulnerable to the harmful effects of
chemicals. … Assemblymember Holden wants to see a crackdown
against the state’s longtime enemy of lead in drinking water —
a potent neurotoxin that can cause irreversible damage to
children’s intellectual development, hearing and ability to
concentrate. In 2018, Holden authored a law requiring
licensed child care centers in the state to test their tap
water for lead contamination. The results came out last year
and found that one in four centers had lead levels above the
allowable threshold.
The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to hear San Francisco’s appeal
of a ruling that tightened offshore water pollution standards
and said the city was failing to adequately protect swimmers
and bathers from discharges of sewage into the Pacific. The
ruling, due next year, could limit the authority of federal and
state environmental agencies. The issue is whether — as
San Francisco and other local governments contend —
environmental laws require them only to limit water pollution
to amounts set in advance, such as specific discharges per
million parts of water. Federal and state regulators argued
that the city was still violating its legal duty to prevent
dangerous pollution from bacteria and other contaminants from
flowing through its Oceanside Water Pollution Control
Plant into the ocean.
The president of the Navajo Nation has signed the resolution
approving the historic Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights
Settlement Agreement. In doing so, he joined officials from the
Hopi and San Juan Paiute tribes. Before the historic signing,
Navajo speaker Crystalyne Curley pointed out how many Navajo
live off 10 to 30 gallons of water a day, a fraction of the
average American home. “Just even having the efficiency,
the convenience of turning on a faucet of water, that’s
something that’s going to change the livelihoods of many of our
Navajo people,” she said. Navajo president Buu Nygren said the
tribes need the agreement to survive. “Through COVID, through
all the national news over the last several years, people truly
understand the need for water on Navajo,” Nygren said. But
Nygren warned: If we don’t settle the water rights for the
Navajo Nation, the Hopi tribe and the San Juan Paiute, it’s
just another form of genocide.”
Every two years, scientists, legislators, and community members
meet to discuss the health and future of our beloved San
Francisco Bay. At this year’s State of the Estuary
Conference, which is taking place this week at the Oakland
Scottish Rite Center across from Lake Merritt, harmful algae
blooms, wetland restoration, and emerging contaminants are a
few of the items up for conversation. According to event
organizers, the conference will serve as a hub for in-depth,
timely conversations about the concerns, interests, and hopes
of those “who are impacted by and working to improve, conserve,
and monitor the health of the estuary.” … One of
the key topics discussed at Tuesday’s conference was the study
and understanding of harmful algal blooms, often referred to as
HABs within the scientific community.
As the American West faces intensifying water challenges, water
managers, landowners, and water users are increasingly turning
to the Groundwater Accounting Platform as a data-driven tool
that enables them to track water availability and usage with
user-friendly dashboards and workflows. This critical tool is
now available throughout California to support sustainable
groundwater management practices. Unsustainable groundwater
pumping across much of the West has endangered long-term water
supplies and lead to millions of dollars of infrastructure
damage from sinking land. The Groundwater Accounting Platform
empowers users to manage long-term, and helps communities avoid
undesirable outcomes and maintain clean water supplies at lower
costs. Additionally, this critical functionality supports
Groundwater Sustainability Agencies as they manage resources in
priority basins under the Sustainable Groundwater Management
Act.
Monsoon Awareness Week – the annual effort by state, local and
federal agencies to prepare the public for these awesome, often
dangerously powerful storm patterns – is nearly upon us. As for
the monsoon storms themselves? Well, they will arrive.
Eventually. Maybe later than usual this year. But,
nevertheless, the message remains: Be prepared. Oh, sure, they
make some fun of our appropriation of the term “monsoon” in
India where rainfall at the peak of the summer monsoon season
in June and July averages 16-20 inches and where one uniquely
situated village averages 107 inches in July alone. But the
often fierce winds driving moisture from the Mexican tropics
into our arid Sonoran Desert region have a character and power
of their own.
For more than a decade, some residents of the tiny Richmond,
Rhode Island, neighborhood of Canob Park drank and bathed using
tap water that had been tainted by gasoline that leaked from
storage tanks buried under service stations a few hundred yards
from their homes. They spent years battling oil companies,
dealing with the daily misery of boiling most of their water
and wondering about lasting damage to themselves and their
children. The Canob Park disaster sparked a national
outcry in the 1980s to clean up and regulate the thousands of
underground tanks storing petroleum, heating oil and other
hazardous chemicals across the United States. It’s a program
that continues today, where the tanks are a leading cause of
groundwater pollution even after more than a half-million sites
have been cleaned up.
In the third week of May 2024, the water temperatures in the
lower Sacramento River recorded at Wilkins Slough increased to
72oF, well above the 68oF water quality standard (Figure 1).
These warm water temperatures occurred in a wet spring of an
Above Normal water year that is following a Wet water year. The
water temperature spike occurred between prescribed pulse flow
releases from Shasta Dam in May (Figure 1). Three pulse
flows were prescribed this spring to promote and assist
migration of juvenile salmon into the lower Sacramento River
and the Delta. After the second pulse in early May, the lower
river flow was allowed to drop to a drought-level 5000 cfs,
causing the high water temperatures. Shasta Reservoir was
virtually full at 4.3 MAF during all of May. The Central Valley
Basin Plan’s water quality objective for the lower Sacramento
River is 68oF maximum “during periods when temperature
increases will be detrimental to the fishery.” (P. 3-14).
“Have you ever heard of nurdles?” I have posed this question
countless times while tabling at events and giving talks across
San Diego County. “They are pre-production plastic
pellets,” I explain while pouring a few out of a jar into the
palm of my hand, adding, “Just about everything made out of
plastic starts with nurdles. They are melted down and poured
into molds to create plastic cutlery, beach toys, milk jugs…you
name it!” I then reveal that I collected the nurdles on
display from North County San Diego beaches, emphasizing
that ”they easily escape during manufacturing and can also
be lost when transported in trucks, shipping containers, and
freight trains.” Despite sharing this information with people
of all ages for years, it hadn’t occurred to me that the
nurdles I find might originate from the rail corridor that
transects the beach communities that I frequent in Northern San
Diego.
Is climate action on extreme heat a human right? It was a
provocative opening question that I posed to the science
education graduate students in my climate justice course at San
José State University. Put another way: Is a government’s
failure to take action on the climate crisis a violation of
human rights? The question of human rights, climate justice,
and vulnerable groups recently emerged in the news in two
different cases an ocean apart, with drastically different
outcomes. However, they were connected by an ever-pressing
issue: extreme heat and human health. In one case, a group of
women known as the Swiss Senior Women for Climate Protection
argued before the European Court of Human Rights that by
failing to meet climate sustainability goals and create
accountability measures, the Swiss government had violated
their human rights. -Written by Tammie Visintainer, an assistant
professor of science education at San José State
University.
Rising seas and extreme storms fueled by climate change are
combining to generate more frequent and severe floods in cities
along rivers and coasts, and aging infrastructure is poorly
equipped for the new reality. But when governments and planners
try to prepare communities for worsening flood risks by
improving infrastructure, the benefits are often unfairly
distributed. A new modeling approach from Stanford University
and University of Florida researchers offers a solution: an
easy way for planners to simulate future flood risks at the
neighborhood level under conditions expected to become
commonplace with climate change, such as extreme rainstorms
that coincide with high tides elevated by rising sea levels.
The approach, described May 28 in Environmental Research
Letters, reveals places where elevated risk is invisible with
conventional modeling methods designed to assess future risks
based on data from a single past flood event.
Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge, located in far Northern
California, harbors what remains of a once vast, shallow lake.
On a recent April morning, I toured the area with John
Vradenburg, supervisory fish and wildlife biologist for the
Klamath Basin Refuges. … The Klamath Basin National
Wildlife Refuges are a complex of six refuges straddling the
Oregon-California border — remnants of vast wetlands that once
expanded and contracted with the seasons, breathing an almost
unfathomable abundance of life into the dry region. A century
or so ago, flocks of geese and swans darkened the sky. There
were masses of white pelicans; hordes of grebes, ducks, and
ibises; eagles and hawks in profusion. On Lower Klamath Lake,
which sprawled nearly 100,000 acres, boats conveyed tourists
from the Klamath River to the lake’s southern tip.
California Water Institute Interim Director Laura Ramos has
been appointed to the California State Water Board’s Wastewater
Needs Assessment (WWNA) Advisory Group. The WWNA is a four-year
assessment project, that began in July 2023, to provide
information on and strategies to address California’s
water-related sanitation system needs. This first-of-its-kind
study has two phases: • Phase I, understanding
baseline conditions of California’s wastewater infrastructure
and • Phase II, identifying wastewater systems of
concern and potential solution As part of the Advisory
Group, Ramos will advise the WWNA project team to develop a
statewide assessment for Californians’ equal and human right to
sanitation and safe wastewater management and critical
wastewater infrastructure needs.
The Biden administration has announced that Southern
California’s plan to build the largest wastewater recycling
plant in the nation will be supported by $99.2 million in
federal funds, an investment that officials said represents a
down payment toward making the region more resilient to the
effects of climate change. The proposed facility, called Pure
Water Southern California, is projected to cost $8 billion.
When completed, it will recycle enough wastewater to produce
150 million gallons of clean drinking water each day — enough
to supply about half a million homes. … Plans for the
facility in Carson call for taking treated wastewater that is
currently released to the ocean and purifying it using advanced
technologies to produce drinking water. That purified water
will be used to recharge groundwater and will also be sent
directly into the region’s distribution system to be mixed
with other supplies.
