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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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.
… This year, Ruby Ranch enrolled two alfalfa fields in Utah’s
Demand Management Program, which pays Colorado River
water users to temporarily and voluntarily send water
downstream. … Utah is betting that voluntary
conservation like this can help protect the state as the
Colorado River shrinks and the seven states that depend on it
fight over who should use less. … With no deal reached, the
Bureau of Reclamation moved forward with a plan that requires
the Lower Basin to conserve 1.25 million acre-feet of water
next year, with steeper cuts possible in the future. The plan
includes no mandatory cuts in the Upper Basin, just a
goal to conserve 200,000 acre-feet per year.
… New Mexico has a Strategic Water
Reserve Program, which includes leasing 20,000 acre-feet of
water per year from the Jicarilla Apache Nation.
Wyoming created a program similar to Utah’s
earlier this year, and Colorado just approved
a near-term water contribution program in mid-September.
A $40 million deal to sell more than 40% of Montecito’s
State Water Project rights to a massive North County
housing proposal passed a big test Tuesday. In a 5-0 vote,
directors of the Montecito Water District approved a
non-binding letter of intent in support of the transaction,
paving the way for a Spring 2027 purchase agreement with
developers of Solomon Hills, 4,000 homes planned between Orcutt
and Los Alamos. … The approval came over
objections and concerns raised by residents who recalled tight
years of water rationing. Some in the room questioned
whether relinquishing 1,400 acre feet, or 42.4%, of the
district’s annual State Water interests might weaken its
ability to deliver. More specifically, they questioned
whether the district’s increased reliance on desalinated water
from Santa Barbara in recent years might become a big
liability.
El Niño is arriving on the West Coast in a major way. In the
coming days, sea levels off Southern California are
expected to begin rising by half a foot or more and then stay
elevated for months, as an enormous pulse of wave
energy generated by El Niño travels up the coast, lifting the
water as it goes. … But this pulse is coming on top of
several other factors that are raising the seas off California
and increasing the threats from coastal flooding,
erosion and saltwater intrusion. … By unlucky
coincidence, the tidal cycle off California will also be
peaking in the coming months. And ocean swells are likely to be
amped up this fall and winter by El Niño-fueled storms.
Conservationists sued the Trump administration Tuesday to
challenge the expansion of a heavy metal mine they say will
carve up one of Arizona’s ecologically important mountain
ranges. In consultation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service, the U.S. Forest Service approved the expansion of
Australian company South32 Hermosa’s mineral extraction
operations to 52,438 acres in the Patagonia Mountains
of southern Arizona. … The plaintiffs claim the
Forest Service also violated the National Environmental Policy
Act by failing to provide an adequate analysis of the project’s
threats, including its effects on groundwater and other public
resources. … Groundwater pumping would draw down
the water table by as much as 250 feet and may reduce
or even eliminate surface water flows.
In the wide-open plains of northern Colorado, just about 12
miles from the Wyoming border, construction crews are digging
underground as part of a project designed to store
water and help communities prepare for drought.
FrontRange H2O is building the infrastructure for the Vita H2O
Project, which will store and supply water to customers
in Northern Colorado. Brent Waller, CEO of FrontRange
H2O, describes the aquifer as a massive underground reservoir.
… Waller said the aquifer is more than 50 times
the size of Colorado’s Blue Mesa Reservoir, providing
a large potential storage resource. … “It is a
drought-resilient tool as well,” Waller said. “So in good wet
years, we can reverse the system and bring the water back to
the aquifer for storage and recovery later.”
As former Hurricane Polo weakened over northwestern Mexico on
Tuesday evening, the storm’s remnants battered the U.S.
Southwest, flooding roadways and forcing residents in
small New Mexico towns to evacuate over concerns about a dam
failing. … By Tuesday evening, the New Mexico
Department of Transportation reported flooded roads and debris
on highways across the state, while parts of Arizona had become
especially drenched, leading to several water rescues. That is
after storms rolled through parts of the U.S. Southwest
overnight Monday, saturating the ground, which can make
flooding worse. … The potential failure of the
dam in south central New Mexico prompted evacuations in three
small communities with hundreds of residents along
the Rio Grande.
As the Trump administration seeks cuts to federal weather
research and changes to disaster response, lawmakers are
examining whether artificial intelligence, satellites, and
other emerging technologies can improve the nation’s ability to
predict floods, wildfires, and other disasters and deliver
timely warnings to communities. The House Science Committee
heard from disaster-response technology companies on Sept. 15
as the Trump administration seeks deep budget cuts to the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and
other federal weather programs. The hearing, titled “Innovation
In Disaster Prevention: Advancing Technology For Prediction And
Response,” featured disagreement over federal disaster
policy.
The corporate technology giants building data centers to power
the artificial intelligence boom are changing America’s natural
landscape. Although data centers long predate generative AI,
hundreds of massive, or “hyperscale,” facilities are now
sprouting up around the country. Many of these data centers are
going up in areas that were once farmland or desert.
… The surge in data center construction has sparked
significant public backlash, with communities citing concerns
about their impact on local water and power supplies, among
other issues. … Thirty states have introduced or adopted
legislation or taken other actions to address some of these
concerns, including the impact of data centers on utility
costs.
The newly signed California state budget includes $5 million
for a Los Banos groundwater treatment project. … The
funding is intended to help the city address hexavalent
chromium, also known as chromium-6, in its groundwater supply
and comply with drinking-water requirements. The project
predates the new state budget allocation. State Water Resources
Control Board funding documents identify the City of Los Banos’
“Hexavalent Chromium Treatment Projects” as a drinking-water
project and classify the city’s water system as serving a
disadvantaged community. Those state documents list an
estimated population of 48,896 and 12,069 service connections
associated with the Los Banos water system.
… A few years ago, local farmers partnered with the State,
local water agencies and community organizations through
LandFlex to reduce groundwater pumping where those reductions
could make the greatest difference. … Since its launch
in late 2022, the California Department of Water Resources
(DWR) reports that LandFlex has awarded $23.3 million to six
Groundwater Sustainability Agencies and helped save more than
100,000 acre-feet of groundwater while protecting approximately
16,500 drinking water wells. The program also reduced
over-pumping, supported recharge and helped protect critical
water infrastructure from land subsidence. Those results should
matter as California decides how to continue investing
Proposition 4 funding. –Written by Frank Mendonsa, dairy farmer and board member
of Western United Dairies.
… Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill aimed at shoring
up the Delta’s aging levees and protecting the
region and vital water infrastructure from flooding and sinking
land. In his veto message, Newsom said the
more than $170 million for repairing levees, aqueducts
and canals and other projects already included in the state
budget made the measure
redundant. … A network of 1,100 miles of
federal and non-federal levees lines Delta waterways and
protects the region from flooding.Many of these aging
levees do not meet current “construction standards and could
fail at water levels well below the top of the levee,”
the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said in 2018. The
price tag for fixing them: roughly $3.3 billion,
according to the state’s Delta Stewardship Council.
The Las Vegas Valley Water District will fine businesses and
homeowners associations in the new year if they
continue to use water from Lake Mead to irrigate grass it has
deemed “nonfunctional.” A page on the water district’s
website said that beginning Jan. 1, irrigation of decorative
grass will be classified as water waste and come with fines.
Those fines, if approved, will range from $80 for a
first offense on a water meter sized for most residential homes
to $5,120 for the fifth offense on the largest water
meter size. It’s the first time Southern Nevada water managers
have told the public how they intend to enforce
Assembly Bill 356, a controversial 2021 law that banned using
Colorado River water to irrigate turf that agencies
consider nonfunctional or decorative.
Walter Hardesty has raised hay and cattle south of Elk Grove
long enough to watch groundwater turn from a
private worry into a regional one. Soon, he expects to manage
it from his phone. The Harvest Water Program is set
to deliver recycled water to his ranch in 2027, and he
will order it through an app for a set date and
duration. Then, an automated valve at the edge of his property
will do the rest, all the while giving the aquifer beneath his
fields and his wells, which will be run about half as often,
time to recover. That, in essence, is the promise at the
center of a nearly $597 million public project. … The
Harvest Water Program is billed by SacSewer, the Sacramento
Area Sewer District, as California’s largest
agricultural water recycling project.
… According to the District’s materials, it will
deliver up to 50,000 acre-feet of recycled water a
year.
The Southwestern United States was facing heavy rain and the
potential for flash flooding through early Wednesday as
moisture from two far-off storms streamed into the region. The
flood threat was focused over New Mexico and Arizona on Monday
and will begin to shift east into Texas and the Plains Tuesday
into Thursday. One to three inches of rain was forecast to fall
across much of the region, including in parts of
Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Colorado
and Texas, and some isolated areas could receive up to seven
inches. Flood watches were in effect, and forecasters said
more urgent flash-flood warnings were likely over the
next few days.
Daniel Swain has made a name for himself studying the extremes
of a warming planet. Fires, floods, droughts, heat, storms: if
it’s a record breaker, Swain has probably studied it. As
a weather and climate research scientist at UCLA’s Institute of
the Environment and Sustainability, Swain has dedicated his
life to understanding so-called “outlier
events” and how climate change is
super-charging them. … Based on a recent study
in Science, the current El Niño is likely the
strongest in over a millennium. … In a recent interview,
Swain and Inside Climate News reporter Nina Dietz
discussed why this El Niño is unlike anything we’ve
seen before, and what it could mean for California and
beyond.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed two bills targeting the health
effects of the Tijuana River sewage crisis. One orders the
state’s first update in more than a half-century to its
hydrogen sulfide air standard. The other requires workplace
protections for lifeguards, park rangers and others working
outdoors in the Tijuana River Valley. Senate Bill 58, by state
Sen. Steve Padilla, directs the California Air Resources Board
to update the state’s air quality standard for hydrogen
sulfide, which has not been updated since 1969, according to
Padilla’s office. Senate Bill 1046, by Sen. Catherine
Blakespear, directs Cal/OSHA to develop workplace standards to
minimize exposure to cross-border pollution. Newsom signed the
bill Sunday, according to Blakespear’s office. Both laws take
effect Jan. 1, 2027.
Pima County staff held an open house downtown Monday, to
discuss the proposed rules. The meeting came just days after
the county approved a 120-day moratorium on new data center
developments. Currently, Pima County only allows data centers
in its most intensive industrial zones The proposed rules would
formally define what data centers are and establish guidelines
regarding the energy and water used by data centers as well as
noise levels. … Under the draft regulations, the county
would require data centers to use closed-loop water cooling
systems. This technology allows water to be recirculated and
reused. Projects would also need certified access to an
adequate supply of both water and energy.
n the tiny community of Shaver Springs in the Fresno County
foothills, residents say the water is so brown it leaves stains
in their bathtubs, tiles and clothing. They say it’s been like
this for years. But they’ve only now gotten attention outside
of their community. At multiple public meetings in the last
month, residents and other advocates have shown up with their
concerns, telling county leaders they need to address the
community’s water system as well as high water bills.
… The State Water Resources Control Board lists Shaver
Spring’s water quality as “failing” in its drinking water
database known as SAFER. But the water board has stopped short
of stating Shaver Springs’ water is undrinkable. A
statement from the agency said that, while there is no risk to
ingesting the water, “alternative drinking water supplies
should be used due to the increasing levels of uranium and
gross alpha in Well 7.”
State funding aimed at helping farmers and ranchers implement
water conservation techniques is helping address a variety of
drought-related problems, administrators, scientists and
farmers told New Mexico lawmakers on Monday. They asked
legislators to double the program’s funding next year as the
state continues to suffer from record low snowpack and drought
conditions. A presentation in front of the Water and Natural
Resources Committee during its meeting in Taos noted that 80%
of New Mexico’s water benefits agriculture, and this year’s
record low snowpack and ongoing drought conditions have
negatively impacted farmers’ and ranchers’ ability to produce
crops and raise livestock.
… The steep grades of diversion dams and other human-built
structures can block fish from traveling upstream. Fishways
provide a ramp bypass fish can navigate to restore their range.
These fish-friendly structures are especially important in
times of drought – as Colorado has experienced this year –
because water levels decline, and fish are more likely to
become isolated in smaller pools, which could threaten their
survival if the pools continue to shrink or if the water warms
to dangerous levels. … Most fishways are designed for
game fish, like trout and salmon, but [Researcher Chris] Myrick
and his students design ladders for little fish in
Colorado. Small fish are an important part of the food
web; they eat insects and feed waterfowl and game fish. They’re
also an indicator of water quality; if small fish are thriving,
their environment is healthy.
