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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The Water and Resource Conservation group held a meeting at the
local Chico library on Monday morning, where they invited local
members of the community to give their feedback on their
current and future plans. The group called the meeting “Coffee
with Water”. Originally, only seven people had signed up to
attend the event. To the department’s surprise, almost 30
people were in attendance. A main concern for everyone in the
room was the ground-level water, which has been reported to be
at a deficit within Butte County areas like Vina. Many locals
drove from their small towns to express their worries about
another drought and what that could mean for landowners who
mainly live off well water. Members of the conservation group
were able to show maps and future plans that they hope to put
into place, to give peace of mind to those concerned about the
well-being of their homes.
America has water problems. Water stress can be found in almost
every state. New Mexico falls into the category of extremely
high ‘water stress’ for multiple reasons, including climate
change, limited rainfall and reduced volume of water in both
the Rio Grande and Colorado rivers, which are major water
resources for the state. Arizona, California, Nebraska, and
Colorado also fall into the category of water stressed states.
These states struggle with high water demands brought on by
droughts, pollution, population growth, and extreme needs from
industries like agriculture and manufacturing. … Many state
leaders, however, are aggressively planning water
infrastructure projects to increase water supply or provide
more efficient use of available resources to curb the very
negative impacts of water stress. —Written Mary Scott Nabers, president and CEO
of Strategic Partnerships Inc
California officials have joined a legal effort to restore
water to the Kern River after an abrupt shutoff of water dried
up the river and killed thousands of fish in Bakersfield. The
decision by state officials and Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta to
intervene in the court case gives new impetus to environmental
groups as they try to compel the city of Bakersfield and
agricultural water districts to bring back a flowing river.
Bonta announced Monday that he and the California Department of
Fish and Wildlife filed a brief supporting the environmental
groups in the case before the state’s 5th District Court of
Appeal.
Atmospheric rivers are forecast to “drench the West Coast” this
winter, according to a recent meteorological report. Last
winter, the West Coast faced a slew of atmospheric rivers that
caused devastating floods and landslides. The storms also
brought a deluge of rain that supplemented California lakes and
rivers, helping to eliminate the state’s drought.
Meteorologists are again predicting a wet winter for the West
Coast, according to an AccuWeather report published Monday, and
meteorologists are warning of a “big change” expected in the
Golden State by midseason. Atmospheric rivers are a “long,
narrow region in the atmosphere—like rivers in the sky—that
transport most of the water vapor outside of the tropics,”
according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration.
On October 7, 2024, the California Court of Appeal upheld the
Orange County Water District’s (OCWD) authority to manage
the Orange County Groundwater Basin in the
case Irvine Ranch Water District v. Orange County Water
District et al. This ruling ensures the continued ability of
OCWD to achieve sustainable management of the basin, a vital
source that provides 85% of the water for 19 cities and water
districts serving 2.5 million Orange County residents. The
court’s decision reaffirms OCWD’s groundwater management
practices and statutory authority, ensuring the continued
equitable distribution of groundwater across north and central
Orange County. This legal validation allows OCWD to maintain
its proven framework for managing basin resources while
protecting water quality and local water supplies.
California has endured three severe droughts over the past 15
years. Its five largest wildfires in recorded history have all
occurred since 2018. Heat waves with temperatures above 110
degrees are breaking records summer after summer. With that
backdrop, along with a state budget that lawmakers have
struggled to balance over the past year, California voters will
decide the fate of Proposition 4, a bond measure on the
November ballot that would authorize $10 billion in spending to
address climate change and its impacts. The money would
fund a range of programs, from increasing forest thinning to
planting more trees in cities to reduce temperatures during
heat waves. It also would pay for programs to expand water
conservation and recycling, enlarge state parks and create
coastal wetlands to buttress rising sea levels.
At the end of 2022, 65 percent of the Western United States was
in severe drought, the result of a two decades long mega
drought in the Colorado River Basin … However, it was
flooding, not drought, that was making headlines when we began
our research for this story about OpenET, a revolutionary new
online platform geared towards helping farmers and water
managers monitor and reduce water use in watersheds where
supplies were not keeping up with demand. … According to
NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System it will
take more than one wet winter to replenish groundwater in many
parts of the western United States. Groundwater levels across
the California Central Valley and many parts of the Ogallala
Aquifer continue to decline. The need for better water
management remains essential, and yet the data necessary to
support new approaches has not been broadly available.
Enter the OpenET project, a multi-disciplinary, collaborative
effort to make satellite-based evapotranspiration (ET) data
available to the public.
Hydropower is a rapidly developing and globally important
source of renewable electricity. Globally, over 60% of rivers
longer than 500 km are already fragmented and thousands of dams
are proposed on rivers in biodiversity hotspots. In this
Review, we discuss the impacts of hydropower on aquatic and
semi-aquatic species in riverine ecosystems and how these
impacts accumulate spatially and temporally across
basins. … Improvements to flow regulation, fishway
design and sediment redistribution can mitigate these
ecological impacts. Future research should support reforms to
dam operations and design adaptations to balance renewable
electricity development and biodiversity conservation through
systematic basin-scale planning, long-term monitoring, adaptive
management and involving multiple actors in decision-making.
… Currently, the California Public Utilities Commission
(CPUC) is considering a flawed proposal that threatens to
dismantle a mechanism called decoupling, a proven method of
incentivizing water conservation while keeping consumer costs
affordable. Decoupling separates water sales from a utility
provider’s revenue, allowing providers to promote conservation
without compromising their financial stability. This means
essential water use remains affordable while higher usage is
charged at steeper rates, encouraging responsible consumption.
By protecting the economic viability of utility providers,
decoupling has played a crucial role in ensuring reliable water
access and more efficient use of water resources across
California. —Written by Mary Ann Dickinson, founder and past CEO
of the Alliance for Water Efficiency and Tia Fleming,
co-executive director of the California Water Efficiency
Partnership
Following last week’s vote by the San Diego County Board of
Supervisors to delay any formal decision on pursuing a
Superfund designation for the Tijuana River Valley, Supervisor
Terra Lawson-Remer Monday decided to get public support.
Lawson-Remer put out a call on Monday for San Diego County
residents impacted by the Tijuana River sewage crisis to sign
her petition to the Environmental Protection Agency. “The
Tijuana River sewage crisis affects all of our coastal
neighborhoods,” she said. … The board voted 3-2 on Oct.
9 to wait on pursuing the Superfund distinction under the 1980
law which lets the EPA clean up contaminated areas, such as the
infamous Love Canal in Niagara Falls, New York.
… As school districts look to resurface their athletic fields
and cities consider how to update public parks, local leaders
must decide what kind of play surface to install. And, the two
options — natural grass or artificial turf — are sharply
dividing Bay Area residents. Turf, which is made from thousands
of synthetic fibers and crumb plastic infills, is quickly
becoming America’s go-to field material for its ability to
provide a smoother, year-round surface at a lower maintenance
cost than grass. … However, there is strong resistance to the
material too, from those who point out that turf infills
contain PFAS or “forever chemicals,” which
break down slowly and can cause serious environmental harm and
adverse health effects, including cancer.
In March 2023, the rain-swollen Pajaro River burst the seams of
a levee, flooding the rural Northern Monterey County town of
Pajaro in the dark of night and damaging hundreds of homes. In
the last season of Sold Out, we followed the story of the
Escutia family as they set out to find a new place to call
home. Now, a year later, we share their next chapter. The
family’s housing journey was anything but quick or easy. For a
year and a half, they cycled through a shelter, group
homes, and the homes of friends and family members as they
searched for a permanent place they could afford. They vowed
never to return to the floodplain but came up against the
reality that this part of coastal California is the most
expensive rental market in the county, and the number of homes
is limited. In August, the family broke their vow and
moved into a home in Pajaro, right across the street from the
house they fled from when the levee burst.
Living in Southern California, it may frequently cross your
mind: when will the next big earthquake hit? “We’re afraid of
earthquakes because they’re sudden, we can’t predict them, you
don’t see them coming,” seismologist Lucy Jones told Eyewitness
News. … She does, however, point to one specific risk
she says could impact all the Los Angeles metro area – a big
quake along the San Andreas Fault. “Water’s potentially our
worst problem and every one of the aqueducts that bring water
into the Southern California area across the San Andreas Fault,
and will be broken when that earthquake happens,” Jone said.
Comprehensive solutions to fully strengthen the piping network
crossing the San Andreas would help, but for now, she warns
we’re looking at a crippling repair timeline that would likely
become life-altering for millions of people.
The Ukiah Valley Water Authority (UVWA) is gearing up for its
launch on January 1, 2025. The launch will bring together water
districts across the region under one streamlined system. The
October 1, 2024, meeting of the UVWA Executive Committee
outlined efforts to prepare. Jared Walker, General Manager of
Redwood Valley, Millview, and Willow County Water Districts,
and Sean White, Water Manager for the City of Ukiah arrived at
the meeting after spending a day in triple-digit temperatures
with engineers from Carollo Engineering. They toured over 20
sites in the Millview and Willow County Water District. They
planned to spend the following day touring water infrastructure
in Calpella, Redwood Valley, and Ukiah. … The consolidated
service of the new Ukiah Valley Water Authority is expected to
begin on January 1, 2025. Willow County Water District
announced its intention to sign onto the Joint Powers Authority
and join the UVWA.
An ongoing outbreak of botulism, a bacterial illness that
causes muscle paralysis, has killed more than 94,000 birds at
Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge in Northern California, the
worst such outbreak at the lake ever recorded, according to
federal scientists. Affected birds often cannot control their
muscles and often suffocate in the water, said biologist and
ornithologist Teresa Wicks, with Bird Alliance of Oregon, who
works in the area. “It’s a very traumatic thing to see,” Wicks
said. Though local in scale, the outbreak and catastrophic
die-off are tied to global problems including declining
wetlands, increasing demand for limited water resources,
hydrological diversions, and a warming climate. These
kinds of outbreaks can happen around the world and the
phenomenon seems to be on the rise, according to Andrew
Farnsworth, a scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology who
studies bird migration.
… Rice farmers in the Central Valley flood their fields when
the growing season ends, generally around November, and keep
them flooded until February to help the leftover vegetation
decompose. They plant their crop after the fields dry out in
late spring. The program pays rice farmers in the birds’ flight
path to flood their fields a bit earlier in the fall and leave
them flooded later in the spring. This creates habitat when the
migratory birds need it the most, as they fly southward in the
late summer and early fall and pass through again on their way
north in the spring. Daniel Karp, a researcher at UC Davis who
studies conservation in working landscapes and is not involved
in BirdReturns, sees the program as a rare conservation win.
… While it’s far from a complete solution, “it’s this weird
rare circumstance where you have a large industrial-scale
intensive agricultural system that can simultaneously support
wildlife,” Karp said.
… In the Yuba River watershed, we are using these methods
alongside our partners to manage the forests of the Sierra
Nevada and create climate resilience, enhance public safety,
and most relevantly to the name and mission of American Rivers,
protect river health by reducing wildfire risk. The Hoyt-Purdon
Prescribed Fire and Fuel Reduction Project will treat 570 acres
within a 918-acre project area along the South Yuba River at a
strategic location between the river and surrounding local
rural communities. The project will use a combination of the
approaches described above to reduce the risk of wildfire and
increase forest and watershed resilience. The essential design
will reduce the horizontal and vertical continuity of fuels
(e.g. make it so fire can’t carry along the ground horizontally
or get into the tops of trees vertically) to make it easier to
fight a fire should it occur. The project is also designed to
protect ecological function and sensitive species.
One of the first banners used by a coalition of tribes,
environmentalists and other allies in a 20-year struggle to
remove four dams from the Klamath River along the
California-Oregon state line was lovingly hung by some longtime
fish protectors. The vinyl decals, featuring salmon crying to
get beyond the first of the dams, were wrinkled, the banner
itself battle-scarred in places. But the message was still
clear: “Un-dam the Klamath now!” That message became fact at
the end of September, when the final hunks of concrete were
trucked away from the last of the four dams that had impeded
fish migration for nearly a century. The world’s largest dam
removal project to date was complete, and about 500 people came
to a meadow about 10 miles south of the Klamath on Oct. 5 to
celebrate and to look forward to the next phase of restoring an
entire basin the size of West Virginia.
Chinook salmon are facing unprecedented challenges as their
once-thriving populations struggle to survive. A new study
published in the journal Ecosphere suggests that decades of
human activities, including ocean harvest, artificial
propagation and reservoir construction, have not only reduced
the size of these fish, but also disrupted their ability to
spawn successfully. Joe Merz, lead author of the paper and a
research affiliate with the UC Davis Department of Wildlife,
Fish and Conservation Biology, said Chinook salmon play a
crucial role in their ecosystems, and that fisheries management
and habitat changes have weakened their natural reproductive
potential.
… Imperial Valley farmers agreed to leave many hay fields
unwatered for seven weeks this year in exchange for cash
payments from a federally funded program designed to alleviate
the water shortage on the Colorado River. Many farmers decided
that the payments — $300 per acre-foot of water conserved —
would pencil out for them this year, in part because hay prices
have recently fallen. But while the three-year deal is helping
to save water in the river’s reservoirs, some people in the
Imperial Valley say they’re concerned it’s also accelerating
the decline of the Salton Sea and worsening environmental
problems along its retreating shores. With less water running
off fields and into the sea, growing stretches of dry lakebed
are being exposed to desert winds that kick
up lung-damaging dust. At the same time, the lake is
growing saltier as it shrinks, bringing changes to a habitat
that is a vital stopover for migratory birds.
