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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Imperial County’s much-lauded Lithium Valley in California’s
southeast corner has been bypassed for a second time by federal
officials for critically needed funding, a key state official
said on Wednesday. Noemi Gallardo, a member of the California
Energy Commission who oversees reviews of proposed geothermal
projects tied to lithium production, told The Desert Sun/USA
Today Network that she was concerned that the U.S. Department
of Energy had for a second time not selected any company
seeking to produce lithium in California to receive a portion
of $3 billion allocated by the Biden administration. Instead,
25 projects in 14 other states were chosen, for a total $600
million per year through 2026. … Jared Naimark, California
mining organizer with the environmental group Earthworks, said
he thought her remarks might have been directed at his group
and Comite Civico over their lawsuit challenging
county approvals of Controlled Thermal Resources’ Hells Kitchen
geothermal and lithium project. The litigation
questions water supply, air pollution and earthquake risk
assessments.
If the Delta Conveyance Tunnel is granted all necessary
permits; if the California Department of Water Resources can
create a plan to raise $20 billion; if the Water Resources
Control Board extends water rights to the State Water Project;
and if a dozen or more lawsuits are won; then construction on
one of this century’s most ambitious civil engineering projects
will commence. The year would be 2035. It would be preceded by
five years of infrastructure upgrades in the Delta region.
Stronger bridges and streets will lay the way for machines of
every scale to safely traverse the tunnel’s 45-mile path from
Sacramento to the Bethany pump station at Stockton.
… The California Air Resources Board (CARB) will vote
next month on whether to lock in the subsidies, which the
Golden State has for years been offering to industrial dairies
for installing technology that deploys bacteria to break down
animal waste and then repurposes it as “renewable natural
gas.” California officials argue these anaerobic digesters
are environmentally beneficial because they capture methane, a
gas produced by dairy cows that is about 28 times more potent
than carbon dioxide. But environmental groups and some
residents of California’s Central Valley contend the
technology also generates dangerous byproducts and encourages
the propagation of polluting factory farms in vulnerable
communities. … Water and air pollution
linked to CAFOs, the authors warned, is
disproportionately impacting low-income populations and
communities of color. In Tulare County, they added, about 67
percent of residents are Hispanic/Latinx and 18.2 percent are
living in poverty.
… The construction of the 445-acre-foot Windy Gap Reservoir
in 1985, built near the headwaters of the Colorado River to
help divert water to more than a million people in the state’s
northern Front Range cities, cut that section of river in two.
Its dam constricted high seasonal flows, leading to sediment
build up, while the reservoir’s shallow basin increased
temperatures downstream. Major food sources for trout vanished.
The fish population was decimated. … But things are
starting to change, again, this time for the better. A $33
million project now in its final stages is being
hailed as a way to reverse the damage and revive the once
pristine waters. The Colorado River Connectivity
Channel, a roughly mile-long waterway carved along the south
side of Windy Gap, reunites the river upstream of the dam near
Granby. The connection allows for greater flow levels that will
keep sediment moving downriver, balance water temperatures and,
officials hope, restore aquatic health.
While the dust-up between water districts in Monterey and San
Luis Obispo counties over access to water in Nacimiento
Reservoir won’t qualify as a water war, it’s fair to call it a
skirmish. At issue is a pair of applications filed with the
state Water Resources Control Board, or simply Water Board, by
a water district from Monterey County’s southern neighbor – the
Shandon-San Juan Water District and its Groundwater
Sustainability Agency. That water district is asking the state
to approve applications to take additional water from
Nacimiento Reservoir. In a written report to the Monterey
County Board of Supervisors on Oct. 8, Ara Azhderian, the
general manager of the Monterey County Water Resources Agency,
or WRA, explained that the Shandon water district is asking the
state for permission to appropriate 14,000 acre-feet at Santa
Margarita Lake on the Salinas River southwest of Atascadero in
San Luis Obispo County, and from Nacimiento Reservoir, also in
San Luis Obispo County, or SLO.
Oakland Unified School District began this school year with
some unsettling news: the drinking water in the district’s
schools had tested positive for dangerously high levels of
lead. The district had found high levels of lead in the water
during tests conducted over spring and summer, but it didn’t
share those results with parents and staff until this August.
Lead testing hasn’t been required in California schools for the
last five years. That means Oakland Unified is unusual among
California school districts in that it knows that there’s a
lead problem at all.
… In California, the most important calendar may be the
“water year,” which also begins on October 1, because how much
the state’s reservoirs have in storage and how much nature
provides in the form of rain and snow are existential factors
in the lives of nearly 40 million people. … The current
water year begins with healthy water savings. After two
relatively wet winters, including the blockbuster 2022-23
season that ended several years of drought, major
reservoirs have close to 100%, or above, of historic October
levels. … That should be enough to carry the state through a
relatively dry 2024-25 winter, which is possible because
meteorologists see a 71% chance that the season will be
dominated by a La Niña condition in the Pacific
Ocean. It often — but not always — tends to push the jetstream
to the north, bringing heavier precipitation to the Pacific
Northwest but reducing rain and snow to the south, meaning
California. —Written by Dan Walters, opinion columnist
Sonoma Water has announced plans to update its climate change
models for the Russian River watershed using the latest
available data. Sonoma Valley and the City of Sonoma both
are contractors with the agency, and receive water from the
Russian River. The agency will partner with Flint HydroScience,
LLC to incorporate new climate projections into its Basin
Characterization Model, which is used to estimate stream flows
and analyze potential impacts to water supplies. … The
$86,000 project will utilize new climate data from the Coupled
Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 that are included in the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Assessment Report.
This represents the most current scientific projections of
future climate conditions.
Lake Tahoe — the largest freshwater alpine lake in
North America — is world-famous for its clear blue water, but
the lake faces a multitude of threats requiring constant care
and vigilance to keep it that way. “We’re more than a bumper
sticker,” said Laura Patten, the Natural Resource Director at
the League to Save Lake Tahoe, better known as Keep Tahoe Blue.
“We really rely on the science to figure out what is happening
in the lake.” Patten and other scientists studying Lake Tahoe
say climate change and recreation pose the biggest threats to
the lake in the 21st century. Longer and hotter periods of
heat, more extreme fire seasons, and erratic precipitation
patterns in the winter all play a part in Tahoe’s water
quality. … It’s important to understand Tahoe’s crystal
“blue” water is actually clear. The clear water reflects the
blue sky and absorbs red light, making the water appear
brilliant hues of blue. The clearer the water — or the better
the water’s quality — the bluer the lake.
As California prepares for future cycles of water scarcity, the
Legislature continues to prioritize enhancing regulations to
address critical water supply needs, secure the rights of
diverse water holders, and protect essential environmental
resources. On September 22, 2024, Governor Newsom signed AB 460
into law, a bill that significantly increases fines for
unauthorized water diversions and other violations of state
orders related to water use. AB 460 was introduced in response
to limitations in existing California Water Code provisions
that capped the maximum fines for violations of appropriative
water diversions and uses to $500 per day.
Long term exposure to arsenic in water may increase
cardiovascular disease and especially heart disease risk even
at exposure levels below the federal regulatory limit (10µg/L)
according to a new study at Columbia University Mailman School
of Public Health. This is the first study to describe
exposure-response relationships at concentrations below the
current regulatory limit and substantiates that prolonged
exposure to arsenic in water contributes to the development of
ischemic heart disease. The researchers compared various time
windows of exposure, finding that the previous decade of water
arsenic exposure up to the time of a cardiovascular disease
event contributed the greatest risk. The findings are published
in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.
The Biden administration has told Colorado River negotiators it
no longer plans to issue its draft set of plans for managing
the waterway in December, leaving the next major move in the
battle over the West’s most important river to the next
president. The federal plans for the waterway are of increasing
importance since the seven states that share it are deadlocked
over new rules to govern the river after 2026. The Interior
Department’s Bureau of Reclamation had said for months that it
intended to issue them as part of a draft environmental impact
statement at the end of the year. But in recent weeks
bureau officials have told states and water users that they
will instead release only a list of reasonable options for
governing the waterway, which would later be analyzed as part
of the environmental impact statement.
The weeks around Halloween in California usually bring cooler
weather, Christmas decorations in stores, leaves to rake and
umbrellas opening for the first time since spring. So far this
year it’s still dry. No major rain is forecast through the end
of October. But that doesn’t mean the state is heading for
water shortages. Because the past two winters have been
wetter-than-normal, California’s major reservoirs are currently
holding more water than usual for this time of year. That’s
giving the state — which has suffered through three severe
droughts over the past 15 years — a welcome water-supply
cushion, experts say, as this winter season approaches.
Water managers in Kings County have heard nothing but crickets
from state Water Resources Control Board staff for more than a
month. While they would like feedback on how to best revise
their groundwater sustainability plans, managers in the Tulare
Lake subbasin instead are operating in separate silos,
tailoring those plans to their own groundwater sustainability
agency (GSA) boundaries. … The subbasin was the first of
six San Joaquin Valley regions to face scrutiny by the state
Water Board, the enforcement arm of the Sustainable Groundwater
Management Act. … Board members voted in April to put the
region on probation, which requires well metering,
registration, fees and extraction reports. All of that was put
on hold after a Kings County judge issued a preliminary
injunction in a lawsuit brought against the Water Board by
the Kings County Farm Bureau. The Water Board has appealed
the injunction. Since that injunction, Water Board staff ceased
communicating with water managers in the region on advice of
legal counsel.
Registration closes Friday for our 2024 Water
Summit, set for next Wednesday, Oct. 30, in
downtown Sacramento with conversations focused on our
theme, Reflecting on Silver Linings in Western Water. Get
your
ticket to our premier annual event by Friday at 5
p.m. Water Education Foundation members can take advantage of a
$100 discount on registration! This event is a prime
networking opportunity for the water professionals in
attendance and general sponsorship opportunities
are still available, but this Thursday is the deadline to grab
a coveted sponsor spot! View details of the
various sponsorship
levels and benefits here. Now in its 40ᵗʰ year,
the Water Summit will gather leading experts and top
policymakers for conversations on the promising advances
that have developed from myriad challenges faced in managing
the West’s most precious natural resource.
The board of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern
California voted to allow more time to complete an
investigation into accusations against General Manager Adel
Hagekhalil, who was placed on leave more than four months ago
in response to harassment allegations by the agency’s chief
financial officer. The board’s decision will extend
Hagekhalil’s leave of absence until an investigator has
finished interviews and submitted a report on the findings.
… The outcome is expected to determine whether
Hagekhalil is fired or reinstated as the top manager of
California’s largest urban water supplier. During more than
three years on the job, he has called for transforming the
agency and has focused on adaptation to climate change, in part
by reducing reliance on water supplies from distant sources and
investing in local water supplies.
There’s a growing perception that there’s a water affordability
crisis in California, but as with most water issues, the
reality is more complex. PPIC Water Policy Center founder and
senior fellow Ellen Hanak sat down for a conversation with PPIC
adjunct fellow and water economist David Mitchell to learn
more. … Is there a water affordability issue in the
state right now—and if so, what’s causing it? Water rates have
been rising faster than inflation for a long time now. In the
late 1980s, observers lamented how crazy cheap water service
was, because a lot of the costs around procuring and delivering
water were not reflected in water bills. That’s changed now,
which is partly why water service costs have risen. Also, there
are now many more drinking water quality requirements and
environmental safeguards associated with producing water, and
these requirements contribute to rising costs.
California has one of the most ambitious and highly engineered
water delivery systems on the planet, and it’s being eyed for a
new extension. The Delta Conveyance Project is Governor Gavin
Newsom’s proposal for a 45-mile underground tube that would tap
fresh water from its source in the north and carry it beneath a
vast wetland to users in the south. The Delta is the exchange
point for half of California’s water supply, and the tunnel is
an extension of the State Water Project, which was built in the
1960s. It’s a 700-mile maze of aqueducts and canals that sends
Delta water from the Bay Area down to farms and cities in
Central and Southern California. This is a local story about a
global issue, the future of water. In a three-part series of
field reports and podcasts, Bay City News reporter Ruth
Dusseault looks at the tunnel’s stakeholders, its engineering
challenges, and explores the preindustrial Delta and its
future restoration.
As temperatures rise, particularly in alpine
regions, lakes are feeling the
heat. Research published in the
journal Science, led by researchers at the
Carnegie Institution for Science, indicates that
climate change impacts critical winter
processes including lake ice conditions.
Changes in lake ice conditions impact the
function of ecosystems and the communities that live nearby.
With climate affecting this critical winter process one can
ask, what other critical changes to freshwaters might occur
from changing winters whether at Lake Tahoe, or the
small lakes and streams in the mountains of
California and Nevada? … There are many ways climate
change can and will impact western alpine lakes. Changing
snowpack and winter conditions can extend plant growing seasons
for lakes in the summer, increasing the
opportunities for invasive species to take hold within
a lake or expand their range.
As a young girl growing up on the Southern Ute Indian
Reservation, Lorelei Cloud learned the value of water in life
lessons every week outside her uncle’s home. “I lived with
my grandparents in an old adobe home they had remodeled. We
didn’t have any running water and so we always hauled water to
our house,” says Cloud, Vice Chairman of the Southern Ute
Indian Tribe in southwest Colorado. … Those early memories –
of water scarcity, not abundance – have helped shape Cloud’s
work today as a state leader in water conservation, and as a
champion for Tribal voices in water decision-making in
Colorado. Native American Tribes hold some of the most
senior water rights in the Colorado River Basin and have
thousands of years of knowledge about water management. But
they have been historically excluded from decisions around
allocations and management of the river and water resources.
And on many Reservations, including the Southern Ute, access to
clean, safe drinking water is still far from universal.
