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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Residents, boaters, anglers and river lovers had their first
say on the overall relicensing application for Southern
California Edison’s power plant above Kernville and they
uniformly demanded more water be put back into the upper Kern
River. Commenters to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
urged it to reject Edison’s proposed minimum stream flows in
its draft license application and adopt a proposal by the Kern
River Boaters that uses an analysis of the Kern River done by
the California Environmental Flows Framework (CEFF) at
University of California, Davis. It’s time, commenters wrote,
for regulators to give back enough water for the Kern River to
support native cold-water trout, wash down sediment and provide
for more consistent public recreation.
Lake Powell, a vital water source in the Colorado River Basin
that serves 40 million people, has suffered from severe drought
in recent years. Though water levels have recovered from
historic lows, the lake may never be full again, and the
reasons go beyond just climate change and record temperatures.
One often-overlooked factor affecting water availability is the
extensive forest cover throughout the basin, according to Gene
Shawcroft, the Colorado River commissioner of Utah.
The Environmental Protection Agency has largely recovered from
many of the staff exits and budget cuts that occurred during
the Trump administration and, in some ways, has swiftly
rebounded. It has banned toxic pesticides, strengthened
chemical safety protections and imposed strong climate
regulations. Enforcement of pollution laws, which had plummeted
under the Trump years, is starting to climb back up. But with
next week’s election looming, the agency charged with
protecting the environment faces more uncertainty than at any
other time since its creation more than 50 years ago.
… The agency … issued the first-ever limits in
drinking water of PFAS, the “forever”
chemicals linked to cancer and other health problems that are
present in the tap water of hundreds of millions of Americans.
Chemical and manufacturing groups have sued, arguing
the E.P.A. exceeded its authority.
When you imagine a ripe, juicy peach, you might not picture it
growing in a red rock canyon. Centuries ago, however, tribes in
the Four Corners cultivated vast orchards of an heirloom
variety called the Southwest peach. … [Reagan] Wytsalucy, a
plant scientist with the Utah State University extension in San
Juan County and a member of the Navajo Nation, said this peach
was a vital part of the Indigenous diet and trade
economy for hundreds of years. Accounts from Spanish
missions describe sprawling orchards grown by Pueblo Indians as
early as the 1630s. The Southwest peach is smaller and less
sweet than what you find at the supermarket. Its flavor also
varies based on which part of the region it’s from, she said.
Some taste like melon. Others have a hint of cinnamon.
Traditionally, Navajo people would dry peaches to preserve them
for the following year, and one tree could feed a whole family.
As a Canadian company is working to restart one of Utah’s old
uranium mills, federal officials are considering new steps
toward cleaning up radioactive waste at another — showing the
continuing toll of the last surge of uranium development in the
state. … The BLM announced last week that Rio Algom
Mining has developed a proposal to increase
groundwater monitoring at the former Lisbon
Valley Uranium Mill, and the agency is inviting the public to
comment on the draft environmental impact assessment of the
plan. … As millions of tourists drive through Moab every year
to enjoy its singular redrock landscapes, they can see what
looks like a construction site on the banks of the
Colorado River. A sign identifies it as the
“Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action Project,” commonly
referred to as “UMTRA.” The site is another remnant of the
historical uranium milling and mining that has poisoned people
and places across the American Southwest.
Flocks of birds have returned to the shallow waters along
Highway 99 south of Yuba City where fields of rice grew weeks
before, a sure sign that harvest is over and winter is near.
Like most crops throughout the state, by this point in the
year, the rice fields of Montna Farms have been harvested and
stored. Testing of the farm’s medium grain rice has come back
at a typical, high quality, said Jon Munger, Montna Farms vice
president of operations. But it remains to be seen whether this
summer’s heat wave in the Sacramento Valley affected the
quality of rice planted and harvested later in the season.
CalTrout, alongside our state, federal, Tribal, and NGO
partners, launched a comprehensive monitoring program on the
river to track how fish will respond to dam removal and record
fish migration through the former dam sites, informing the
success of dam removal and long-term restoration efforts.
“It’s been over one hundred years since a wild salmon last swam
through this reach of the Klamath River” said Damon Goodman,
Mt. Shasta/Klamath Regional Director for California Trout. “I
am incredibly humbled to witness this moment and share this
news, standing on the shoulders of decades of work by our
Tribal partners, as the salmon return home. While dam removal
is complete, recovery will be a long process. This individual
represents the beginning of the next chapter of recovery for
Klamath River fish and for the communities that depend on the
watershed.”
There is no life without water — therefore access to water
might be considered a human right. However, that has not always
been the case in American water law. A new book explores of
case laws and evolving concepts in how water is governed,
encompassing topics such as climate change, tribal rights and
technologies for accessing water in areas where it is rapidly
disappearing. “Water Law: Concepts and Insights, 2nd Edition”
was co-written by Robin Kundis Craig, Robert A. Schroeder
Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Kansas;
Noah Hall of Wayne State University and Robert Adler of the
University of Utah. “We were lamenting how there were no good
water law books for students in the east. They were primarily
focused geographically on the west, so we decided to write our
own,” Craig said. “We wanted to get into how water law
intersects with common and environmental law. It’s not strictly
a case book, but we updated it, largely for human rights focus
that has been added for water.”
Pyramid Lake in northwest Nevada, just over the California
border, took on the appearance of a spooky witch’s brew several
weeks before Halloween, with striking swirls of green that were
visible from space. The colorful bands in the popular
125,000-acre lake, about 35 miles northeast of Reno within the
Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe Reservation, came courtesy of
cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae. … Also on
the rise in California in recent years, cyanobacteria can
produce toxins that pose serious health risks to
people and animals — including the thousands of
recreation-goers and their pets who visit Pyramid Lake each
year.
As Northern California enters its traditionally wet season, the
city of Sacramento is reminding residents that watering rules
will be adjusted starting Friday, Nov. 1. Starting on that day
and continuing through Feb. 28, businesses and homes are
permitted to use their sprinklers just once a week and the
watering must be during the weekend. … “On average, your
landscape needs about 80% less water per week in November than
it does during the peak of summer in July,” the city writes.
“Rainfall is often sufficient to keep lawns healthy.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday toured wastewater treatment
facilities on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, marking his
first in-person visit to the sites undergoing critical upgrades
to reduce rampant sewage polluting Tijuana and south San Diego
County communities. The California leader started his tour at
the San Ysidro-based South Bay International Wastewater
Treatment Plant, which on Tuesday will begin a yearslong effort
to repair and expand its capacity, which has long been
insufficient for treating Mexico’s sewage. He then traveled to
the San Antonio de los Buenos plant in Baja California, which
also is being overhauled after at least a decade of dumping
millions of gallons of untreated wastewater into the Pacific
Ocean. Years of negligence and underinvestment in wastewater
treatment plants in both countries have resulted in sewage and
toxic chemicals pouring over the border, leaving people ill
with headaches, nausea, respiratory issues and other symptoms.
State water regulators are in the early stages of easing
environmental rules for desalination plants along California’s
coast to boost water supplies as the climate changes. The State
Water Resources Control Board kick-started its process to amend
its ocean protection standards for desalination plants at a
scoping meeting Monday after Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered the
regulator to consider streamlining new projects in August 2022.
Though the board has yet to publish new draft rules, staff said
Monday they were looking to speed permitting, especially for
novel technologies, and clarify how and when to measure and
mitigate the loss of marine life to the highly saline water
that plants discharge back into the ocean. They are also
interested in requiring projects to prove a strong need for the
additional water supply.
Key state officials negotiating the future of the
drought-ravaged Colorado River said Monday that a multi-state
agreement is still in the works, even as “sticky issues”
continue to bar consensus and prompt the Interior Department to
shift back an expected analysis of any plans. Anne Castle, the
Biden administration’s appointee to the Upper Colorado River
Commission, outlined the change in timing for developing the
next operating plans for the Colorado River during a meeting of
the group on Monday. She said the Bureau of Reclamation will
not publish in December a full draft environmental impact
statement analyzing the options, as had been originally
planned. The delay comes as the seven Colorado River states —
Arizona, California and Nevada in the Lower Basin and Colorado,
New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming in the Upper Basin — continue to
debate a potential consensus agreement dictating how the pain
of future cuts to water supplies would be shared.
A years-long legal battle that could result in billions of
gallons of oil being shipped along the Colorado River will go
before the United States Supreme Court in December. The case,
Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, asks the
Supreme Court to review a lower court decision that found there
was insufficient environmental analysis of a railway project in
eastern Utah. That project, the Uinta Basin Railway, would
construct about 80 miles of new track in order to connect oil
production sites with existing train routes. Opponents
said that expansion would increase the risk of hazardous
material spills into the most important waterway in the Western
United States. The concerns prompted a lawsuit from Eagle
County to halt the project. At issue is whether or not the
National Environmental Policy Act requires agencies to consider
environmental impacts beyond the immediate scope of the
project. In August, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C.
Circuit ruled that the Surface Transportation Board erred by
not considering risks to the Colorado
River.
This week, California is set to experience its first widespread
precipitation in months. From Wednesday through Saturday, a
series of cold fronts will bring significant rain and snow,
particularly across Northern California and the Sierra. On
Wednesday, a strengthening low-pressure system will move
southward from the Gulf of Alaska toward California. A strong
cold front attached to the storm will first push into Northern
California on Wednesday, then sweep through the rest of the
state late Wednesday and into early Thursday morning. By
Wednesday afternoon, moderate to heavy rain will develop along
the Northern California coast, with 0.25 to 0.5 inches expected
in just a few hours from Eureka to Crescent City. Precipitation
will spread inland overnight and into Thursday morning,
bringing 6 to 12 inches of snow to the mountains around
Shasta Valley.
Republican Rep. John Duarte and Democrat Adam Gray are running
for California’s 13th congressional district with the hopes of
either keeping the U.S. House of Representatives red or
flipping it to blue. … Duarte and Gray were in Modesto on
Friday for a debate at the State Theatre. Here’s what they had
to say. Duarte was asked how he plans to help Modestans
and the surrounding area if re-elected to the House. “Modesto
here is a thriving community, because we had a vision for the
water rights on the Tuolumne River,” Duarte
said. “If you look at the Modesto Irrigation District and the
history of Modesto, they’re very closely tied.” …“Here in
Stanislaus County, if you go a little bit further out of town
here, You’re going to find Dos Rios, which is the new State
Park– It’s actually the newest in the State of California,”
Gray said. … The Dos Rios state park was established in
partnership with River Partners, who thanked Gray as a
“longtime floodplain advocate.” “They protect us from floods
when we have big wet years off these rivers and you can just
put the water out into these floodplains and they recharge
groundwater,” Gray said.
State water regulators are leaving their options open for how
best to protect endangered fish and distribute water in the San
Francisco Bay and Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta under a draft
plan released Friday. The release intensifies a bruising battle
between environmentalists, tribes and fishing groups on one
side and cities and farmers on the other over managing the
state’s main water hub, which supplies water to most
Californians as well as habitat to migratory birds and
endangered fish like chinook salmon. The State Water Resources
Control Board detailed several alternatives in its draft plan
for meeting state and federal water quality standards,
including requiring minimum flows on the Sacramento and San
Joaquin rivers and tributaries, settling with water districts
that’ve proposed instead to limit their deliveries and pay for
habitat restoration, and a combination of both.
Fast-growing fires were responsible for nearly 90% of
fire-related damages despite being relatively rare in the
United States between 2001-2020, according to a new study.
“Fast fires,” which thrust embers into the air ahead of rapidly
advancing flames, can ignite homes before emergency responders
can intervene. The study, published recently in Science, shows
these fires are getting faster in the Western U.S., increasing
the risk for millions of people. “In California, we’ve been
transfixed by so-called megafires because of their massive
size, but it turns out that the most destructive fires are ones
that grow so fast they can’t be stopped,” said Professor
Crystal Kolden, director of the UC Merced Fire Resilience
Center and a co-author of the study. “Fast fires are the ones
that destroy homes and lives.”
Santa Clara Valley Water District (Valley Water) has announced
the completion of the construction of the last stretch of a
1,736-foot tunnel adjacent to the Anderson Dam in Santa Clara
County, California. By using a specialised micro-tunnel boring
machine (TBM), construction crews drilled the final 347ft,
reaching depths of 30ft below the water’s surface. Last month,
divers and crane operators removed the TBM, lifting sections of
the machine using a large crane. Although the tunnelling work
is complete, additional tasks remain before dam construction
can commence, said the California public agency responsible for
managing the water resources in Santa Clara County. Valley
Water is preparing the downstream creek channel to accommodate
increased water flow from the new outlet tunnel and is
installing a structural lining inside the tunnel to ensure
added support. The Anderson Dam tunnel project is part of the
larger $2.3bn Anderson Dam seismic retrofit project. Upon its
completion, the new, larger tunnel will increase Valley Water’s
capacity to release water from the reservoir in emergencies,
enhancing the dam’s safety measures.
Wind-strewn dust from California’s lithium-rich, shrinking
Salton Sea may be triggering respiratory issues in children who
live nearby, a new study has found. Among the many symptoms —
worse for those young people who reside closest to the saline
lake — are asthma, coughing, wheezing and sleep disruptions,
according to the study, published in Environmental
Research. About 24 percent of children located in this region
have asthma, in comparison to the national rate of 8.4 percent
for boys and 5.5 percent for girls, the authors found. Of
particular concern to the researchers was the fact that these
abnormally high rates affected predominantly low-income
communities of color around 150 miles southeast of Los Angeles.
