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 Vik Jolly.
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The headlines below are the original headlines used in the publication cited at the time they are posted here and do not reflect the stance of the Water Education Foundation, an impartial nonprofit that remains neutral.
Top water officials from the seven Colorado River Basin states
will return to the negotiating table next week, reportedly in
sequestered fashion, to try to make headway over how to cut
water use. Starting Monday, the negotiators will meet for four
days in Salt Lake City, sources said, and two people familiar
with the long-stalled talks say attendance will be sharply or
at least unusually limited. Federal officials are convening the
seven-state meeting after a missed deadline in November in the
long stalemate over how to deal with the oversubscribed,
dwindling river. The U.S. Interior Department, which
typically runs the negotiating sessions, has told the states it
wants an agreement among them by Feb. 14.
As of Tuesday, California’s six largest mega reservoirs are 75%
full, holding 26% of their normal historical levels for this
date. … For the mega reservoirs, that is a sweet spot;
enough room to catch much more water for the remaining three
months of wet season. If there’s too much rain, they can
release water to prevent dangerous overflow, as we saw with
Lake Oroville back in February 2017. In fact, Oroville is
already releasing water right now. California farmers get
about 70% of their water from dams and reservoirs.
Reactions are pouring in from national, state and local leaders
following the death of U.S. Rep. Doug LaMalfa. … U.S.
Rep. John Garamendi, D-Fairfield, described LaMalfa as a close
friend and colleague, pointing to years of
collaboration on water infrastructure investments and
watershed protections in the Sacramento Valley. … It
also puts into question congressional influence over the Potter
Valley Project. LaMalfa was an outspoken critic of the
proposed dismantling of project, but opposed retaining the
Scott and Cape Horn dams without a replacement plan. He only
recently began speaking out more about the project, given he
was hoping to earn the vote of the Mendocino County communities
directly impacted by it.
Scientists at UC Berkeley’s Central Sierra Snow Laboratory were
busier than ever this season — even before receiving over 4
feet of snow around Christmas. The modest research
station, located in a forested area a few miles outside
Truckee, meticulously collects snowfall measurements at Donner
Summit, continuing a practice that began nearly 150 years ago.
These records make for one of the world’s longest running snow
datasets, providing important insights into long-term changes
to the Sierra snowpack, a cornerstone of California’s
water supply.
The dreaded, destructive golden mussel has
become an urgent topic among San Joaquin Valley water agencies
prompting near daily meetings on how to combat the tiny mollusk
that is clogging pipes and equipment from Stockton to Arvin.
… After golden mussels were discovered in the
Arvin-Edison Water Storage District late last year, Friant did
a top-to-bottom inspection of the southern reaches of the
Friant-Kern Canal while water demands are low. Crews
looked under bridges, headgates, turnouts — every nook and
cranny where the mussel could attach itself – blasting colonies
with lethal hot water and scraping them off by hand while
chemical solutions are researched.
People are being asked to stay away from the lower Russian
River after an unknown volume of untreated wastewater spilled
from a sewage treatment plant in Guerneville during the
tail-end of a storm that drenched Sonoma County and flooded
many roads across the region. Heavy overnight rainfall — part
of the region’s prolonged atmospheric river — caused storage
ponds at the facility to overflow early Tuesday morning, said
Stuart Tiffen, a spokesman for Sonoma Water, which operates the
Russian River Treatment Plant. Affected residents were alerted
of the spill Tuesday morning, officials said. … Some of
the discharge was traveling a quarter of a mile through a
forested area before it reached the mainstem of the river,
officials said.
A vote last month by the Westlands Water District board to sign
off on the environmental impact report for a massive solar
project on Fresno County’s westside marked a major milestone in
the development of the Valley Clean Infrastructure Plan. … In
addition to generating much-needed electricity, VCIP could
boost Fresno County’s property tax revenues as well as
groundwater supplies. … VCIP will give Westlands and
private farm owners the opportunity to sell or lease land for
solar companies to develop. If Westlands sells land, it will
move onto property tax rolls and boost tax revenues for Fresno
County. … Westlands plans to retain small pockets within
sold parcels for drill sites to pump water into the ground
instead of pumping it out.
One of the biggest and most controversial talking points
surrounding the battle against the January 2025 Southern
California wildfires was water supply – or a lack
thereof. … Then-Los Angeles Fire Department Chief
Kristin Crowley was vocal about the water shortage, criticizing
city officials for not providing enough funds for the fire
department. Gov. Gavin Newsom, days after the blaze
erupted, also called for an investigation into why a
117-million-gallon reservoir in the area was out of
service. But a year has now passed, and some Altadena
residents are still frustrated about the water situation.
With salmon returning to the upper reaches of the Klamath River
following the removal of four dams, the newly established
Klamath Indigenous Land Trust (KILT) has purchased 10,000 acres
of salmon habitat for conservation. … The return of
salmon to the Klamath River has been a bright spot for Pacific
salmon along the U.S. West Coast, where dwindling populations
have resulted in three years of cancelled commercial salmon
seasons. State, federal, and Tribal authorities have invested
heavily in conservation and recovery efforts to help the
population rebound, including the removal of dams and other
fish barriers.
… The Court of Appeal for the Third Appellate District just
upheld a Sacramento County judge’s decision in 2024 that state
authorities have an invalid bond plan to fund the highly
embattled project. Specifically, the appellate court agreed
with the original judge that the state Department of Water
Resources, or DWR, lacks the authority to issue revenue bonds
to pay for the massive tunnel. … Sacramento, Yolo, San
Joaquin, Solano, Contra Costa, Butte and Plumas counties were
major litigants against DWR in the case.
A nonprofit conservation group is accusing federal appraisers
of ignoring water concerns in southern Arizona, leading to
overvalued properties. The Tucson-based Center for Biological
Diversity said it received documents via the Freedom of
Information Act showing that U.S. Department of Housing and
Urban Development (HUD) and Federal Housing Administration
(FHA) appraisers are not including environmental water scarcity
factors in their reports for homes in Sierra Vista and Fort
Huachuca. … He [Center for Biological Diversity
co-founder Robin Silver] fears ignoring environmental
water concerns in the area could lead to a housing crash.
If you read the research on microplastics, these pollutants
appear to be as frightening as they are ubiquitous. … A
study published last month in Science Advances offers some new
clues as to how water may be contributing to their spread.
Scientists already knew that plastics degrade through exposure
to sunlight and repeated weathering by waves, sand or other
debris. But the new study suggests contact with water itself is
also a factor: in both marine and river environments,
researchers found that microbubbles can form on the surface of
a piece of plastic, breaking it down—and releasing tiny,
practically invisible plastic bits into the surrounding water.
Hundreds of homes and businesses in Marin County were impacted
by significant weekend flooding as a large storm and
record-high tides combined to inundate coastal communities,
local officials said Monday. … Local officials said the
incident illustrated the importance of long-term resilience and
flood-prevention projects as climate change intensifies storms
and sea levels rise. For example, a levee built in the
1980s was breached by floodwater on Saturday,
requiring emergency repairs. Marin County Supervisor Mary
Sackett said the county has a plan to replace it, but is still
seeking funding for construction.
… After a relatively slow start to the winter rainy
season, a series of atmospheric river storms has sent
hundreds of billions of gallons of water pouring into
reservoirs across California over the past three weeks, easing
the concerns of water managers and significantly reducing the
likelihood of shortages next summer. … Since Dec. 16,
the state’s largest reservoir — Shasta, a massive 35-mile-long
lake near Redding — has risen by 36 feet. … Similarly,
the water level at Oroville, the state’s second-largest
reservoir, has jumped 69 feet over the same three weeks.
Arizona’s Lake Powell is in trouble. U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
modeling shows the reservoir dropped roughly 36 ft between
December 2024 and December 2025, a decline that is no longer a
warning but an operating condition engineers are designing
around. The drop is compressing the margin between routine
operations and hard infrastructure limits at Glen Canyon Dam as
negotiations over post-2026 Colorado River operating rules
remain unresolved. … Basin representatives have asked
Reclamation to evaluate protecting Lake Powell elevations near
3,490 ft and to study infrastructure modifications that would
allow releases below that level. Any such work would represent
a new class of climate-driven capital investment at one of the
federal government’s most critical water and power assets.
Friant Water Authority and the City of Fresno filed suit in
2016 over a federal government decision in 2014/15 to withhold
San Joaquin River water typically sent 150
miles south down the Friant Kern Canal. The federal Bureau of
Reclamation severely limited their allocation that year due to
extreme statewide drought conditions. … The appeal of the
lower court rulings headed to the Supreme Court in 2025, some
10 years later — and as of Dec. 15, the high court “denied” the
Friant claim without comment sustaining the government’s and
lower court position that the Bureau of Reclamation who
orchestrated the Central Valley Project, owns
the water.
The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday said it would
propose a drinking water limit for perchlorate, a harmful
chemical in rockets and other explosives, but also said doing
so wouldn’t significantly benefit public health and that it was
acting only because a court ordered it. The agency said it will
seek input on how strict the limit should be for perchlorate,
which is particularly dangerous for infants, and require
utilities to test. The agency’s move is the latest in a more
than decade-long battle over whether to regulate perchlorate.
The EPA said that the public benefit of the regulation did not
justify its expected cost.
U.S. lawmakers largely rejected U.S. President Donald Trump’s
proposed budget cuts to NOAA Fisheries in a new compromise
appropriations bill Congress needs to pass before the
government once again runs out of money on 30 January. On 5
January, House and Senate appropriations leaders released a
compromise piece of legislation that will fund the U.S.
Department of Commerce – which houses NOAA Fisheries – through
the rest of fiscal year 2026, which runs until the end of
September. The compromise bill’s spending for NOAA Fisheries
largely aligns with the original Senate version of the
legislation, ignoring the Trump administration’s proposal to
slash the agency’s funding and eliminate programs.
The Klamath Indigenous Land Trust recently purchased 10,000
acres along the Klamath River, signifying one of the largest
Indigenous-led private land purchases in U.S. history
as salmon continue to make their historic return to
the newly revived watershed. The expansive property,
located mostly in California and extending into Oregon,
includes the sites of reservoirs that existed up until
the removal of four of the Klamath’s dams in
2023 and 2024. PacifiCorp owned the parcel for a century prior
to the purchase and partnered with KILT to complete the
transfer, the land trust announced in a news
release last week.
… Writing in Nature Water, Daniele Penna synthesizes
information from almost 700 forested watersheds around the
globe to understand how forest characteristics control flow
pathways. … Structured around eight hypotheses drawn from the
hydrological literature, the study examines the pathways,
dynamics and controls on water contributing to streamflow in
forest watersheds. Some results from the analysis confirm
existing ideas: that forest streamflow is dominated by
pre-event water (rain that fell prior to the event) moving
through subsurface flow paths. However, many results challenge
our preconceptions.
