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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… In Pinal County, … water shortages mean that farmers no
longer have access to the Colorado River, formerly the
lifeblood of their cotton and alfalfa empires. The booming
population of the area’s subdivisions face a water reckoning as
well: The state has placed a moratorium on new housing
development in parts of the county, as part of an effort to
protect dwindling groundwater resources. Over
the past four years, Arizona has become a poster child for
water scarcity in the United States. Between decades of
unsustainable groundwater pumping and a once-in-a-millenium
drought, fueled by climate change, water sources in every
region of the state are under threat. As groundwater aquifers
dry up near some of the most populous areas, officials have
blocked thousands of new homes from being built in and around
the booming Phoenix metropolitan area.
Gov. Gavin Newsom and his administration are making further
contingency plans to shield the Golden State in case former
President Donald Trump returns to the White House. Newsom and
top budget officials are looking to establish an account the
state can immediately draw on for disasters if Trump refuses to
provide federal dollars for fires, floods and
other emergencies. Newsom said he doesn’t have a dollar
figure for the scenario his administration is discussing ahead
of his January state budget proposal, but described it as “not
an inconsequential consideration.”
New research released today by the Pacific Institute and the
Center for Water Security and Cooperation (CWSC) reveals
existing laws and policies fail to protect water and sanitation
systems from climate change impacts in frontline communities
across the United States. The report, “Law and Policies that
Address Equitable, Climate-Resilient Water and Sanitation,”
examines federal, Tribal, state, and local laws and policies
governing centralized drinking water and wastewater systems, as
well as decentralized onsite drinking water and sanitation
systems. The research demonstrates that most existing US water
laws and policies were developed assuming historical climate
trends that determine water availability would be constant and
that communities’ vulnerability to climate events would be the
same over time. The research specifically outlines how laws and
policies often do not anticipate or help to proactively manage
the impacts of climate change on water and wastewater systems
in frontline communities.
A plan to close Napa Valley’s controversial Clover Flat
Landfill and move waste to the Potrero Hills Landfill in
Suisun City is moving forward. A Waste Connections
representative confirmed Monday at a special Upper Valley Waste
Management Agency meeting that the company will submit a
closure plan to Napa County’s Local Enforcement Agency and
state officials in early 2025. It marked the first time the
closure had been discussed publicly. … Waste
Connections, one of the nation’s largest waste companies, took
over the site from the local Pestoni family, which had owned
and operated the landfill for decades, in 2023, along with
another Napa Valley facility, Upper Valley Disposal Service on
Whitehall Lane. But problems have persisted. That includes
water sampling by regulators in early 2023, which found the
same contaminants in a downstream creek as
those identified at the landfill.
The sound of construction equipment echoed through the quiet
streets of south Salinas as excavation work proceeded along
Park Street and a section of Archer Street earlier this month.
Part of California Water Service’s (Cal Water) extensive
program of infrastructure upgrades currently underway, the crew
was in the process of replacing a section of the approximately
350 miles of water mainline responsible for transporting
potable water within the city’s municipal water distribution
system with 1,871 feet of new 8-inch water main. The mainline
replacement project, which includes swapping out old fire
hydrants as well, began earlier this summer, according to Cal
Water, and is important for water quality and fire prevention
by preventing failure of aging and high-risk pipelines.
Researchers at the United States Geological Survey and the
Arkansas government announced on Monday that they had found a
trove of lithium, a critical raw material for electric vehicle
batteries, in an underground brine reservoir in Arkansas. With
the help of water testing and machine learning, the researchers
determined that there might be five million to 19 million tons
of lithium — more than enough to meet all of the world’s demand
for the metal — in a geological area known as the Smackover
Formation. … Federal researchers also have identified other
potential resources that could produce large quantities of
lithium, including the Salton Sea in Southern
California, where Berkshire Hathaway Energy and other
companies are working to extract lithium from hot liquid pumped
up from an aquifer more than 4,000 feet below the ground by
geothermal power plants.
New groundbreaking research aims to evaluate potential human
health risks from bacteria in surface water systems across four
U.S. states. The project involving the University of Hawaiʻi at
Mānoa will assess the environmental spread of
antimicrobial-resistant pathogens—disease-causing
microorganisms that have evolved to withstand the effects of
antibiotics and other medicines designed to kill them—through
wastewater discharge and agricultural runoff. The three-year
study recently received a $2.4 million grant from the
Environmental Protection Agency. … UH Mānoa
researchers will focus on Kauaʻi’s Hanalei River, where
they will examine how cesspools and animal agriculture
contribute to the spread of antimicrobial resistance. The river
system in Hawaiʻi, along with waterways in Nebraska, New
Jersey and California, were selected to represent diverse
environmental conditions and pollution sources.
California’s waterways are about to get a helping hand from an
unexpected ally: the North American beaver. With the recent
passing of Assembly Bill (AB) 2196, authored by Assemblymember
Damon Connolly and supported by CalTrout, a comprehensive
program for beaver restoration throughout California’s
watersheds is set to begin. This innovative approach leverages
nature-based solutions to promote fish and freshwater
resilience, offering a beacon of hope for our aquatic
ecosystems. … While beavers are admired for their sweet
and adorable charm, they are powerful ecosystem engineers whose
work is vital for maintaining healthy watersheds. Their
dam-building activities create complex aquatic habitats,
improve water quality, and increase biodiversity. By
reintroducing beavers to their native historical range, we’re
not just bringing back a lovable species – we’re deploying
nature’s own environmental restoration experts.
A combination of warmer climate and water mismanagement has led
to the draining of Eagle Lake near Susanville. While
changes could still be made to preserve what’s left, the Bureau
of Land Management says getting the lake levels to where they
were a century ago would take decades of rain without
evaporation — and that’s a scenario that just won’t play out.
Evaporation and winds drop lake levels at Eagle Lake several
feet every year. “You get 3-5 feet of loss every year so
you have to balance that with recharge, and if you don’t, then
the lake just gets smaller and smaller,” said Stan Bales with
the Bureau of Land Management.
Two cancer-causing components have been found in Sebastopol’s
aging water wells, raising red flags among city council
leadership, especially as the city lacks funding to fix its
infrastructure. Specifically, traces of arsenic were detected
in three of the city’s wells, according to a recently released
city report. Tetrachloroethylene, commonly known as PCE, has
been detected in one of those three wells, too. But the levels
of both arsenic and PCE in the city’s drinking water remain
under thresholds deemed dangerous by state and federal
regulators, city officials say. That’s because filtering or
treatment systems have been installed to remove the bulk of the
contaminants, and water from the wells is blended to reduce
them even more.
During the Grand County Board of County Commissioners meeting
on Oct. 1, the commissioners approved signing a letter of
support for the Bureau of Land Management’s application for
funds from the Bureau of Reclamation. The BLM is seeking funds
for a project that affects a half-mile of land on the Fraser
River referred to as the “Fraser River Canyon site,” a 2-mile
section of the Colorado River at Blue Valley Ranch southwest of
Kremmling referred to as the “Confluence Recreation Area site”
and nine parcels of land managed by BLM along 1.7 miles on the
Colorado River near Kremmling, referred to as the “Junction
Butte sites.”
The California Water Association (CWA) [Oct. 21] announced it
has
been selected as the beneficiary of a
prestigious $50 million grant award, to reach $100 million
with matching funds, from the Grid Resilience and Innovation
Partnerships (GRIP) program under the U.S. Department of Energy
(DOE) to accelerate electric grid resilient projects. The grant
program will be implemented across CWA members’ local utility
service areas in partnership with Generac Power
Systems. The aim of the grant is to advance clean energy
solutions across water utility infrastructure to enhance grid
reliability, conserve resources, and protect air quality for
communities throughout California. In collaboration with
Generac, diverse union contractors, local community-based
organizations (CBO,) and workforce development partners, CWA
member water utilities will install clean battery storage
systems at water treatment sites across the state. These
microgrids will allow water utilities to utilize
reliable, clean energy solutions to deliver
uninterrupted water service, even during extreme heat and other
stressors to the state electric grid.
Butte County has launched a Drought Resilience Outreach Project
(DROP) to assist residents with wells that have been damaged by
recent wildfires or drought. The county administration said
that the DROP would allow qualified residents to get their
damaged wells repaired at little to no cost. Funding for this
project comes from the State Water Resources Control
Board. Applications for the program are being accepted
throughDecember 31, 2024, with applications being reviewed in
January. … For those accepted into the program, well
repairs or replacement is expected to begin in April 2025.
Days after the administrator of the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency visited a Los Angeles public housing project
with lead-contaminated water, the agency ordered drinking water
systems nationwide to replace every lead pipe within 10 years.
… But in Los Angeles — where the discovery of contaminated
water in public housing in Watts has shocked officials — the
EPA mandate is unlikely to result in immediate change.
When [EPA Director Michael Regan] joined Mayor Karen Bass
on a visit to the 700-unit Jordan Downs complex this
month, he suggested the brain-damaging element could be from
household plumbing — a critical risk in older homes. It’s a
possibility that highlights the difficulty of eliminating the
threat of lead in California drinking water. Although the
new EPA rule targets lead service lines connecting homes to
water mains, it doesn’t address plumbing inside the building
that can still pose a risk, such as lead soldering, brass
fixtures and interior mains.
The developer of the nationally lauded but controversial Hell’s
Kitchen geothermal and lithium extraction project near the
Salton Sea illegally drained 1,200 acres of fragile wetlands by
dumping dredged fill nearby, according to a settlement
agreement announced on Thursday by the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency. The work was performed on leased Imperial
Irrigation District land as part of Controlled Thermal
Resources’ Hells Kitchen pilot project west of Niland — on hold
due to an unrelated lawsuit — which aims to produce 49.9
megawatts of steam power and 20,000 tons of lithium annually.
The project is the first stage of much larger planned
production of the mineral, which is used in everything from
commercial solar projects to to smart phones.
The California Department of Insurance (CDI) has announced the
launch of a community-based flood program that will provide
payouts if floodwaters reach a predetermined level. The
initiative, which is the first of its kind in the state, is
part of broader efforts to address increasing flood risks
driven by climate change, according to a report from AM Best.
The program is set to begin in Isleton, a small town in
Sacramento County with fewer than 1,000 residents,
according to US Census Bureau data. The town was selected due
to its location in a 100-year floodplain, making it
particularly vulnerable to flooding, according to CDI. The new
flood program will function separately from existing insurance
policies and is intended to supplement current coverages. In
the event of a significant flood, the program will provide
“relatively small” payouts to residents.
Less than two months after the removal of dams restored a
free-flowing Klamath River, salmon have made their way upstream
to begin spawning and have been spotted in Oregon for the first
time in more than a century. Biologists with the Oregon
Department of Fish and Wildlife announced that they found a
single fall-run Chinook on Oct. 16 in a tributary of the
Klamath River upstream of the spot where J.C. Boyle Dam was
recently dismantled. State biologists in California have also
been seeing salmon in creeks that had been inaccessible since
dams were built decades ago and blocked fish from reaching
their spawning areas.
The Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board said
Friday that “significant amounts of contamination” exist on the
650 acres that make up Phillips 66 refinery sites in Wilmington
and Carson, and that it will probably take “years to clean up”
the soil and groundwater. Phillips 66 announced Wednesday, Oct.
16 that it would close the refineries connected by 5 miles of
pipeline by the end of 2025. The Houston-based energy giant
also hired a pair of real estate firms to develop potential
uses for the land. “There is a large amount of pollution in
soil and groundwater at the Carson and Wilmington facilities,”
a spokeswoman for the LA Water Board said via email. “However,
there is ongoing soil vapor and groundwater clean-up and
significant amounts of contamination are presently being
removed at both facilities.” The agency, in a roundabout
manner, said the site cleanup would be monitored carefully.
Managing waterways for ecosystems with minimal loss to existing
water uses is increasingly difficult. As we’ve discussed in the
first two blogs in this series (here and here, now
with Spanish language translations), California and Chile both
struggle with this challenge. Both are mostly dry regions with
deep economic and human dependence on water and very disrupted
and vulnerable native ecosystems. Both also face the dual
challenges of droughts and floods. For the last year, an
international collaboration on environmental flows between
Chile’s Universidad del Desarrollo (UDD)
and Universidad de Talca, and the University of
California, Davis (UCD) focused on these common issues to
draw lessons from California’s experience. … The project
supports further investigation of a functional
flows approach for Chilean watersheds, implemented through
a collaborative portfolio of water management instruments. This
blog summarizes the findings of the research group.
Dissatisfaction is rising about development restrictions along
San Geronimo Creek that were approved by county supervisors in
2022. The county Planning Commission is set to hear an appeal
on Monday from a San Geronimo Valley property owner who has
been ordered to move or demolish several accessory structures
that were built without permits within a restricted area close
to the creek. “This is the first test case that highlights some
of the challenges with the ordinance and how we may need to
work with it and make some allowances for existing developments
to remain,” said Breeze Kinsey, who operates CivicNet, a
planning consultancy, together with his father, former Marin
County supervisor Steve Kinsey. The regulations also might have
played a role in a failed effort by the Two Valleys Community
Land Trust to create five affordable dwellings at 6956 Sir
Francis Drake Ave. in Forest Knolls.
