A collection of top water news from around California and the West compiled each weekday. Send any comments or article submissions to Foundation Writer Matt Jenkins.
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Every morning Marisol Winfrey Herrera’s
three-and-a-half-year-old daughter Jo reminds her to turn off
the tap while washing her hands and brushing her teeth.
… It is what prompted Herrera to join No Desert Data
Center, a residents’ group that opposes two large data centres
coming up on either side of Tucson – the $3.6bn project on the
city’s southeast edge and a $5bn project on its northwest side
in the town of Marana, together known as Project Blue. The
group believes these would consume more water and power
than the city set in the Sonoran Desert can afford.
… “Water was a unifying theme in our campaign. The
Colorado River cuts are looming, and this project would take
water away,” Herrera told Al Jazeera.
The Golden State Salmon Association rang the alarm that the
Bureau of Reclamation intends to manage Shasta Dam this fall in
a way that could once again cook the Sacramento River’s next
generation of Chinook. The dispute centers on cold
water. Salmon eggs need it to survive the fall
spawning season, and a federal biological opinion requires the
Bureau to hold enough behind Shasta Dam to keep temperatures
safe. The State Water Resources Control Board rejected the
Bureau’s management plan on June 10, ruling it would violate
both that opinion and state temperature law. According to
the association, the Bureau has signaled it will proceed
anyway, draining extra water to boost summer deliveries to
Central Valley farms.
Subpar snowfall has turned Utah into a minefield for wildfires
— and recent weather conditions are fanning the flames. As of
June 25, over 140,000 acres had already burned in 354 fires
across the Beehive State. … Areas of Utah that are
3,500 feet and higher — that’s most of the state — could be set
up for a particularly big fire season because of the earlier
snow melt and heavier fuels in forested areas. … This
year is also an El Nino year, which means warmer waters cause
the Pacific jet stream winds to move south — leading to weather
that tends to be warmer and drier in the northern U.S. and
wetter in the southeast. … [I]t can occasionally bring
lots of moisture to the state and help with Utah’s dire
snowpack conditions come winter time.
Water resiliency issues have dominated political discourse in
Cloverdale, where concerns about drought, water rights
and the future of the Russian River loom large,
regularly shaping City Council discussions and election
campaigns. Now, the city is putting another voice at the table,
authorizing Council member Andrés Marquez to represent
Cloverdale in meetings related to a new proposed entity, the
Alexander Valley Water District, as regional conversations over
the area’s water future move forward. … [T]he
authorization marks a notable shift, and it came just two weeks
after a tense exchange on the dais between Marquez and
Vice Mayor Todd Lands over Lands’ role representing the
city on matters involving the fate of two PG&E
dams on the Eel River and related water
diversions into the Russian River. The Cloverdale council
has lodged its opposition to PG&E’s plans to remove those
dams.
A project to bring hundreds of trees, a reclaimed wildlife
habitat and a restored flowing creek to City
Heights is now underway, with officials saying it could also
help prevent future flooding in the area. The plan will allow a
section of Chollas Creek to flow down a natural,
vegetation-lined creek bed — replacing the current 50-foot-wide
concrete channel and restoring 1,350 linear feet of the creek.
It’s the first step in a project from Groundwork San
Diego-Chollas Creek, supported by the City of San Diego, to
help reduce surface runoff and improve water quality.
Lake Powell ‒ the massive Colorado River
reservoir that produces power for millions of homes
across the West ‒ is the emptiest it has ever
been entering the hottest part of the summer. And the
worst is still to come. Although the lake’s levels have briefly
fallen lower in years past, those low-water levels came in the
spring, before melting snow refilled it. This year, that refill
never happened. As a result, Lake Powell will next spring fall
to “minimum power pool,” according to a newly released federal
projection. If the water levels fall below that, the Glen
Canyon Dam would stop generating electricity.
The House Science, Space and Technology Committee approved
legislation Thursday that would standardize how the federal
government studies data centers and their energy and
water use. The committee passed H.R. 9372, the
Data Infrastructure Energy Measurement and Standards Act, 34-1.
Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.) was the lone no vote. The bill,
led by Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-Va.), would direct the
Department of Energy and the National Institute of Standards
and Technology to draw up standards and best practices
for reporting the energy and water use of artificial
intelligence data centers.
Nevada experienced record low snowpacks across northern Nevada
this winter, while summer heat and low precipitation continues
to exacerbate drought in eastern Nevada. Those factors make
protecting Nevada’s limited water resources more pressing than
ever, as legislators prepare to consider a broad reaching
“Omnibus Water Bill” next year. On Wednesday, a workgroup
tasked with evaluating policy updates to Nevada Water Law
presented the Joint Interim Committee on Natural Resources a
bill proposal that would cover a wide range of water related
issues for the 2027 legislative session. … Several details
from the proposed bill were provided to lawmakers on Wednesday
and largely centered on the state’s groundwater,
including a proposal to establish county groundwater
boards and increase funding for the state’s groundwater
retirement program.
… To learn from a city already in the water reuse business,
Mexican officials toured Oceanside’s Pure Water facility on
Tuesday. … Four years ago, Oceanside becamethe first in San
Diego County and the second in California to open a
state-of-the-art purification facility. It turns 3
million gallons of recycled wastewater per day into drinking
water for residents, accounting for 20% of the city’s drinking
water. Mayor Esther Sanchez said years of severe
drought forced Oceanside and other communities in the
western U.S. to think about creating a local water supply, one
that could help them rely less on the Colorado
River and prepare for future droughts. … Sanchez
said she believes a water-reuse approach for Tijuana will work,
as it has for her city.
Two years after crews pulled the last of four dams off the
Klamath River, the question has shifted from whether the fish
would return to how far they can go. California Trout has
answered part of that with a new recovery blueprint
built around steelhead, the wild, sea-running trout
that once climbed the river’s full length before concrete walls
cut them off. The report lays out a long-term plan for
rebuilding steelhead runs across the more than 400 miles of
habitat reopened by the 2024 demolition, the largest dam
removal in United States history. It draws on monitoring that
has already produced surprises, including thousands of Chinook
pushing past the old Iron Gate Dam site and salmon
reaching Upper Klamath Lake for the first time in over a
century.
High-severity wildfires that kill large numbers of trees are
now burning far more acreage in California than they did four
decades ago, according to a UCLA study published Monday. The
study, appearing in the journal Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, found that the area burned by
high-severity fires in California increased thirtyfold between
1985 and 2024, while overall forest acreage burned annually
increased tenfold. Researchers said severe fires, which often
kill entire stands of trees rather than allowing forests to
recover naturally, have overtaken lower- severity fires as the
dominant type of forest fire in California. … Researchers
linked the trend to increasingly warm and dry conditions
associated with climate change, as well as decades of fire
suppression that have allowed dense vegetation and underbrush
to accumulate in many forests.
People who came to the Ukiah Valley Conference Center on
Tuesday evening wanting to weigh in on the future of the Potter
Valley dams did not get to address a room. They got a ticket
number. Most walked in expecting a hearing. What they found was
a waiting room — rows of chairs, mostly empty, and a handful of
federal staffers. … The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
(FERC) is weighing Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s application
to surrender its license for the century-old Potter Valley
Project and decommission it — a plan that calls for
removing the project’s two Eel River dams. … Staff
assured them that the transcript would go up on FERC’s website
in about 10 days.
The San Diego Water Authority approved a 3% wholesale water
rate increase for 2027 on Thursday during a board meeting
largely devoid of members of the public. The utility said an
increase is necessary to meet revenue requirements, operational
needs and fiscal goals. Leaders with the authority said the
rate hike is nothing to celebrate, but the 3% overall increase
in the coming year is below the national rate of inflation and
down from earlier projections close to 6%. They said the lower
increase is due to the impact of two water transfer agreements
this spring.
Authorities have intercepted six watercraft that illegally
attempted to launch on Lake Tahoe amid a campaign to keep
golden mussels and other invasive species out of the iconic
Sierra lake. The boaters stopped this summer by Tahoe Regional
Planning Agency inspectors were attempting to enter the lake
with tampered inspection seals. The wire seals certify a vessel
had either been decontaminated and inspected for invasive
species or was last launched in the Lake Tahoe basin, agency
officials said in a news release. … Inspectors at the
agency’s Meyers inspection station found four invasive golden
mussels aboard a boat bound for Lake Tahoe from the Sacramento
area in May, officials said. Agency officials turned the vessel
over to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
River enthusiasts are dismayed and alarmed by Kern County’s
plan to use riprap – boulders and chunks of rock – to shore up
the bank along Kernville’s Riverside Park, which was damaged
during the 2023 flood. Dumping riprap on the bank of an
otherwise accessible and heavily used section of the Kern River
is a huge missed opportunity, according to local boaters and
others. It can also be dangerous, they say. … The county’s
position is that replacing riprap at Riverside Park is what the
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) disaster recovery
grant will pay for, so that’s the project it’s going to build.
High in the Rocky Mountains, spring-fed streams and ponds have
vanished, leaving patches of cracked mud in what were once
spongy meadows. This year has been so extremely warm and arid
that the mountains have remained largely snowless. The
water-generating source of the Colorado River, its headwaters,
is drying up. … About three-fourths of the
water that’s taken out of the Colorado River is used for
agriculture, producing alfalfa, corn, lettuce, broccoli and
other crops. In Colorado, farmers and ranchers are struggling
with the immediate consequences. They’re leaving many fields
and pastures dry, selling off cows, and bracing for tough
economic times.
The president of the Utah State Senate, who championed a huge
data center beside the Great Salt Lake, was defeated in his
Republican primary on Tuesday night, one of the most
high-profile signs of the voter backlash to data center
projects. … Mr. Adams did not directly represent the
40,000-acre proposed site of the data center in Box Elder
County, a fast-growing farming and industrial area about 60
miles north of Salt Lake City. But he became the focus of
an anti-data-center groundswell because he served as chairman
of a Utah agency that approved initial plans this spring to
build the data center, known as Stratos. … They [voters]
worried about how much energy it would consume and how its
water usage would affect the drought-stricken Great
Salt Lake.
The sea wants to move inland, a fact that’s been known in the
region for over 80 years as agricultural production increased.
But over time, groundwater was pumped faster than could be
replenished, exacerbating the inland march of salty water
beneath Castroville toward Salinas. … Thanks to California’s
Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, passed
just over a decade ago, local water agencies need to decide on
a plan to protect future water supply. … Now, 2026 marks a
pivotal year. All of the groundwater modeling, the public
meetings, the basin boundary decisions and feasibility studies
of the last 10 years culminate in this moment, where local
agencies must push plans across the line into implementation.
Western wildfires start and spread because of a whole host of
factors — wind, temperature, drought, forest health. But
scientists are finding that the most important indicator of
where the next big fire might ignite isn’t held in the trees
themselves, but in the soil their roots are buried in. Recent
studies demonstrate how soil moisture data can help
wildfire experts predict a potential fire’s location and
severity. Those studies could eventually aid in
developing more precise forecasts for fires across the
country. This link, between how moist the ground is under
a forest or grassland and fire risk, is gaining more traction
among scientists due to an increasingly expansive network of
monitoring equipment.
The California State Water Board approved the issuance of a
general use lease to build slant wells on the former site of
the the CEMEX sand mining operation in Marina. The decision
took only a few minutes on Tuesday, but came after over four
hours of public comment from both detractors and supporters.
These wells will draw from seawater and a portion of Marina’s
groundwater to supply California American Water’s desalination
project, which they say will build climate resiliency
and provide water to vulnerable Castroville. …
Marina’s argument is simple, but multifold. Industrial
development stands to compromise the delicate water
table under the city and create permanent ecological
damage, a concern the staff report from the water
board addresses but does not expand on or further investigate.
