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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Tübatulabal Tribal Chairman Robert Gomez sat quietly for most
of the four-and-a-half hour meeting Oct. 23 about the adequacy
of studies on the impacts of Southern California Edison’s
Kernville power plant – Kern River No. 3 (KR3). Then he calmly
rolled in what could be a mini-grenade, just as things were
wrapping up. Gomez said the Tübatulabal tribe
was disenfranchised back in 1995 when KR3’s current license,
set to expire in 2026, was being discussed. The tribe had
hoped to get 1% of the gross revenue from commercial rafting on
the river, which, Gomez said, has since become big business.
But the tribe was shut out of the process, he said. “In the
interim, between 1995 and now, I’ve discovered a document from
the Bureau of Indian Affairs,” he said. “A tribal member had
asked the BIA back in 1914 for assistance because someone was
trying to take her water rights.” The Bureau of Indian
Affairs wrote back affirming the tribal member did in fact own
those rights.
… In 2024, Northern Nevada was under a blizzard warning in
the spring and Southern Nevada shattered heat records in the
summer. By fall, most of the state was in some level of drought
— despite the 2024 water year wrapping up Sept. 30 with mostly
normal numbers. Now, water scientists and wildfire experts are
looking for signs of what 2025 might hold for the state but
it’s largely still up in the air — according to the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Climate
Prediction Center, the region has an equal chance of having
above, near or below-normal precipitation in 2025.
… The region has been battered by extreme weather whiplash in
recent years, with sweltering summer heatwaves and long
stretches of drought alternating with furious winter storms and
spring floods. Fires that roar across the hillsides, consuming
homes and the treasured land around them, have terrorized the
town and others that dot the California mountainsides time and
time again. Residents who have paid a heavy toll to recover
from and prepare for these extreme elements are increasingly
worried that, along with fire dangers, a boost in tourists will
drain their waning water supply, overwhelm
infrastructure and put additional strain on the delicate
ecosystems.
A sprawling ranch that crosses ridgetops, valleys and redwood
forests in the Santa Cruz Mountains, formerly eyed for luxury
homes and once part of a still-pending quarry proposal, is
being spared from development and turned into a preserve.
Peninsula Open Space Trust announced Monday that it has paid
$15.65 million for 1,340 acres of ranchlands southwest of
Gilroy with plans to permanently protect the site for wildlife,
clean water, carbon sequestration and tribal
value. Land trust officials say the property became a top
priority for preservation because of its location along a thin
corridor that animals use to get in and out of the Santa Cruz
Mountains from the south. The beneficiaries, they say, include
local mountain lions, which have struggled to find safe ways to
leave the region to breed and stay genetically strong.
Anyone violating California’s water diversion laws is in for a
sharp wake-up call. Violators will no longer be subject to
minimal penalties but will face stiffer ones. According
to the Los Angeles Times, the California legislature passed
Assembly Bill 460 in late August, and the Valley AG Voice noted
Governor Gavin Newsom signed it into law at the end of
September. The bill increases fines for violations and helps
the State Water Resources Control Board enforce the penalties
for curtailing water use. The bill will prevent violators
from getting off with minimal fines and continued
violations.
… Moving to make the most of its natural resources, companies
want to tap its lithium-rich groundwater to create
rechargeable batteries, the sunlight that warms its desert
stretches for solar power and the uranium veins
concentrated underground to fuel nuclear reactors. Western
Uranium & Vanadium Corp. announced in January
2023 that it planned to build a new uranium mill just
miles from the city of Green River, to process ore from its own
mines in Utah and Colorado and from other mining businesses.
Approaching two years later, earlier timelines for starting up
the proposed Maverick Minerals Processing Plant have been
delayed from 2025 and 2026. In a recent interview, CEO George
Glasier said that 2028 is “more realistic based on our progress
so far.”
… The Arizona Department of Water Resources announced
Wednesday [Oct. 23] that, for the first time ever, it was
beginning the process of creating an Active Management Area
within the boundaries of the Willcox groundwater basin, setting
the stage to finally regulate groundwater in the region where
dozens of wells have run dry over the past decade.
… It’s a significant attempt by the state to rein in the
overconsumption of groundwater that has plagued rural Arizona
for decades and that, in the face of climate-driven drought, is
becoming harder to ignore. AMAs are the one tool the state
currently has to deal with water shortages in rural Arizona.
… [Jared Lorraine, president and CEO of Nichols Farms] said
he sees pistachio production reaching 2 billion pounds within
the next 10 years. However, that’s not without some challenges.
“In the coming years, California’s agriculture industry is
going to face water limits under the requirements of the
state’s [Sustainable Groundwater Management Act] regulations,”
he said. “I see it potentially reaching a 2-billion-pound
industry, but I think SGMA is really going to slow that pace
down, just [based] off of what the numbers look like.” The
Sustainable Groundwater Management Act was passed in 2014 and
requires local agencies to adopt groundwater sustainability
plans for high- and medium-priority groundwater basins, and
they must meet those sustainability goals within 20 years of
implementing the plans. Lorraine said about 5 million acres of
pistachios are irrigated within the San Joaquin Valley. He
estimates about 20% of those acres will be taken out of
production due to the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act.
With Colorado and the southwest looking at an increasingly
hotter and drier future, researchers with Colorado State
University in the Grand Valley are looking into how alternative
hay crops respond to drought and whether they can use less
water than the thirsty alfalfa grown throughout the region. On
Tuesday, The Water for Colorado Coalition hosted several tours
along the Colorado River corridor looking at different water
conservation projects. The last stop was at the CSU Western
Colorado Research Center where Dr. Perry Cabot, a research
scientist with CSU, is conducting trials on alternative forage
or hay crops.
San Francisco has long used the Pacific Ocean as its toilet. In
heavy rains, the city on the hill cannot store all the storm
runoff and sewage that flows toward an oceanside treatment
plant in a single old pipe, so some heads out to sea. Now, in a
case with national implications, San Francisco is hoping that
the U.S. Supreme Court will allow it to pollute the ocean on
occasion without violating the federal Clean Water Act.
Although San Francisco has lived under this regulatory
construct for decades, it has now decided to test the limits of
federal regulations with a right-leaning high court known for
restricting environmental laws. —Written by Tom Philp, columnist with The
Sacramento Bee
The Marin Municipal Water District is seeking $4 million in
grants to fund two of its dam projects. The district board
unanimously approved two grant applications for the state
Department of Water Resources’ safety and climate resiliency
program. The grants would give up to $2 million for each
project. The funds would go toward repairing spillways at
various dams and replacing valves and actuators at Phoenix and
Lagunitas dams. Actuators help control water flow. “This
opportunity for the submission of these proposals seems like
it’s quite new, or this is a new program focused on the
maintenance of dams that predate a certain period,” Ranjiv
Khush, the board president, said at its meeting on Oct. 15.
“It’s a great opportunity that’s come up from our department
resources and I was really excited to see that we jumped on
it.”
Keyes Community Services District general manager Ernie Garza
wants the people of Keyes to know that they don’t have to be
“afraid of the faucet.” Earlier this month, construction began
on a long-awaited water filtration project in Keyes that will
eliminate the chemical called 1,2,3-trichloropropane from being
a threat to the town’s drinking water system. In 1992, 123
TCP was added to the list of chemicals known to the state
to cause cancer, pursuant to California’s Safe
Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act. It has been used as
a cleaning and degreasing solvent and also is associated
with pesticide products, according to the State Water Resources
Control Board.
The Los Angels River is many things to many people and on one
recent Saturday evening, for Ashley Sparks, it was art. She was
one of a few dozen people who sat down at the river’s edge for
the opening of an art activation called “What Water Wants” by
Roston Woo. … “What Water Wants,” part of PST ART: Art &
Science Collide, is a half hour audio presentation that
involves music, ambient sounds and narration — a kind of guided
meditation that is available on your phone at any time through
a QR code posted near Lewis MacAdams Riverfront Park.
When the Trump administration presented a new plan exporting
more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta five years
ago, state officials and environmentalists objected that the
new rules would increase the chances that salmon, smelt and
steelhead would go extinct. Now, state and federal agencies are
nearing the finish line on a replacement plan that could boost
water supplies for cities and some growers but, according to a
federal analysis, could be even more harmful to the estuary and
its fish. The Trump administration rules, critics say,
fail to adequately protect endangered fish, while
increasing Delta water exports to some Central Valley farms and
Southern California cities. But the new proposal from the Biden
and Newsom administrations — developed mostly by the U.S.
Bureau of Reclamation and California Department of Water
Resources — does not fix what environmentalists considered
deal-breaking flaws in the Trump rules. Rather, they say, it
worsens them, and could lead to lower survival and accelerated
declines in fish listed as threatened or endangered.
A federal district court judge ruled last week that the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers violated the National Environmental
Protection Act and the Clean Water Act when it approved
expanding a Colorado reservoir. But a footnote to that decision
is even more significant, experts and environmentalists say,
with potentially far-reaching impacts on water management in
the West and current negotiations to cut back use of the
declining Colorado River. Since 2002, Denver Water, which
supplies 1.5 million people in the Denver metropolitan area,
has been seeking to expand the Gross Reservoir. … The
diversion of more water from the already over-appropriated
Colorado River would threaten the wildlife that depend on the
waterway and put the state at risk of violating the guidelines
that regulate the river’s water supply, environmentalists have
argued. Senior federal judge Christine Arguello agreed, noting
that diverting more water from the Colorado River could result
in forced reductions for the state.
Gov. Katie Hobbs and the Arizona Department of Water Resources
have made the first move toward regulating the use of
groundwater in the state’s rural southeast that is being
rapidly being drawn down through agricultural use. The state
agency said Wednesday it will hold a public hearing Nov. 22 to
present data and hear comments about the possibility of
designating what is known as an “active management area” for
the Willcox Groundwater Basin in Arizona’s Cochise and Graham
counties. In the meantime, the basin is closed to new
agriculture use while the department decides whether to create
the management area southeast of Tucson that would allow it to
set goals for the well-being of the basin and its aquifers.
Approximately 71 to 95 million people in the Lower 48 states –
more than 20% of the country’s population – may rely on
groundwater that contains detectable concentrations of per- and
polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS, for their
drinking water supplies. These findings are according to
a U.S Geological Survey study published Oct. 24. The
predictive model results can help members of the public, water
suppliers and regulators understand the potential for PFAS
contamination, guide future studies and inform strategic
planning for water resources. USGS scientists are the
first to report national estimates of PFAS occurrence in
untreated groundwater that supplies water to public and private
wells. This research also provides the first estimate of the
number of people across the country who are potentially
affected by PFAS-contaminated groundwater.
Major reservoirs across California are performing above or near
their historical average, but a dry summer has contributed to
falling water levels. Regardless of the plunge, most of
the Golden State’s major reservoirs are in a much better state
than at their lowest point in 2022. After years of drought,
several reservoirs in California reached concerningly low water
levels in the summer of 2022. However, an abnormally wet winter
that followed alleviated much of the state’s drought and
replenished the lakes. A similarly wet winter last year brought
a deluge of rain to the state. Reservoir water levels rose
across the state, with several reservoirs nearing their
capacity in 2023 and 2024, including the state’s two
largest reservoirs, Lake Shasta and Lake Oroville.
… We need to take action to protect the largest estuary on
the West Coast, as well as those who suffer as the environment
declines, including Delta communities, Tribes, and salmon
fishermen. … The Central Valley Flood Protection Board has
adopted a new Central Valley Flood Protection Plan to respond
to this growing risk. A cornerstone strategy is to restore tens
of thousands of acres of floodplains along Central Valley
rivers. That will allow floodwaters to spread out and sink into
groundwater aquifers – rather than threaten communities like
Stockton. … When existing agricultural land is restored
as native floodplain habitat, it no longer needs irrigation.
Restored habitat consumes some water – provided through natural
precipitation and river flows. But even so, restoring
floodplains reduces net water use. That saved water can be
dedicated to restoring rivers. —Written by Rick Frank, professor of environmental
practice at U.C. Davis School of Law and Julie Rentner,
president of River Partners
… In the western United States, extensive fires are now
commonplace. … The area of land burnt each year increases
exponentially with aridity. And climate change is making the
fire season in the western United States both warmer and drier.
… In the past six years, just three fast-moving
wildfires — in Paradise, California, in 2018; the 2021 Marshall
fire in Colorado; and the 2023 fire in Lahaina, Hawaii —
destroyed thousands of homes and together took more than 150
lives. As well as spreading flames and choking smoke, fires
increase the likelihoods of water pollution, flooding and
mudslides by, for example, killing vegetation that would
otherwise regulate water run-off and stabilize soils.
Other wildfire research and climate change articles:
