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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Buildings and vast stretches of pavement in dense cities trap
and generate heat, forming urban heat islands. Similarly, urban
development can boost rainfall. Around the world, these
so-called urban wet islands have seen precipitation almost
double on average over the past 20 years, according to a study
published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences of the United States of America. “What we knew
up to now has been very focused on particular cities,” said
Jorge González-Cruz, an urban climatologist at the University
at Albany in New York who wasn’t involved with the work. Places
such as Beijing and Houston have served as case studies showing
that cities can influence temperature, rainfall, and storms.
But the new study shows that the phenomenon occurs at a global
scale. The analysis revealed certain factors that influence the
wet island effect.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday appeared to side with the City
of San Francisco in its unusual challenge of federal water
regulations that it said were too vague and could be
interpreted too strictly. The outcome could have sweeping
implications for curtailing water pollution offshore and would
deal another blow to the Environmental Protection Agency, which
has faced a string of losses at the court over its efforts to
protect the environment. The case has given rise to unusual
alliances, with the city joining oil companies and business
groups in siding against the E.P.A. In arguments on Wednesday,
it was the conservative justices who seemed the most aligned
with a city best known as a liberal bastion. At its core, the
case is about human waste and how San Francisco disposes of it
— specifically, whether the Clean Water Act of 1972 allowed the
E.P.A. to impose generic prohibitions on wastewater released
into the Pacific Ocean and to penalize the city.
The value of farmland in parts of the San Joaquin Valley,
California’s agricultural heartland, has fallen rapidly this
year as commodity prices lag and implementation of the state’s
Sustainable Groundwater Management Act casts a shadow on the
future of farming in the region. In 2014, when SGMA was
adopted, the value of farmland without reliable surface water
access began to decline. But within the past several months,
those values have plummeted, according to appraisers, realtors
and county assessors. “It’s very dramatic,” said Janie Gatzman,
owner of Gatzman Appraisal in Stanislaus County, who until last
month served as president of the California chapter of the
American Society of Farm Managers and Rural Appraisers.
… The sharp drop in land values this year—a decade
after SGMA was adopted—came as implementation of the law ramped
up. This year, state regulators intervened for the first time.
Humanity has thrown the global water cycle off balance “for the
first time in human history,” fueling a growing water disaster
that will wreak havoc on economies, food production and lives,
according to a landmark new report. Decades of destructive land
use and water mismanagement have collided with the human-caused
climate crisis to put “unprecedented stress” on the global
water cycle, said the report published Wednesday by the Global
Commission on the Economics of Water, a group of international
leaders and experts. … Disruptions to the water cycle are
already causing suffering. Nearly 3 billion people face water
scarcity. Crops are shriveling and cities are sinking as the
groundwater beneath them dries out.
Our Water
Summit on Oct. 30 will take a deep dive on issues
critical to our most precious natural resource in the West but
it’s so much more. During our event, you’ll also have a
chance to network with people from across the
water community from municipal water agencies
to irrigation districts, farming and lending organizations to
state and federal agencies that manage or regulate water to
environmental and other nonprofit organizations. Karla
Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water
Resources, will deliver the opening keynote and
participants will be treated later in the day to a
presentation by visual artists whose work seeks to expand
perspectives on how we relate to water.
It was an idea crafted by the Utah State Legislature to help
ensure that water saved through conservation and other efforts
could make it downstream to places like the Great Salt Lake and
Colorado River. But so far, no farmer has taken the state up on
it. “The truth is that we haven’t had the upswelling of support
and the response for a lot of change applications. And it’s
something, I think, that we are looking into, making sure that
we understand why,” said Great Salt Lake Commissioner Brian
Steed. The Utah State Legislature has spent hundreds of
millions of dollars on “agriculture optimization,” which
are incentives to get farmers and ranchers — Utah’s top water
user — to switch to new technologies that grow crops with
less water. … “Change water applications” then allow a
water rights holder who saves water through conservation to
donate or lease it to someone downstream or places like the
Great Salt Lake or Colorado River.
It seems like an impossible task, cataloging all – or at least
most – of the various water projects underway and planned in
the San Joaquin Valley including new recharge basins, canals,
connections and more. But that’s the near Sisyphean effort two
valley water organizations have been working on over the past
year under a $1 million Bureau of Reclamation grant. The goal
is to have a central report where water managers, as well as
state and federal officials with potential funding, can see
what’s ongoing and where infrastructure gaps exist.
Residents of Imperial Beach in southern San Diego County filed
a lawsuit Tuesday against the operators of an international
wastewater treatment plant — alleging that the site has failed
to contain a cross-border crisis that has long contaminated
their community. The plaintiffs said they are seeking to hold
the plant’s managers accountable for severe environmental and
public health effects that have resulted from an influx of
untreated sewage, heavy metals and other toxic chemicals.
Imperial Beach, which sits just a few miles north of the
U.S.-Mexico border, has long been the recipient of untreated
wastewater that comes from the Tijuana metropolitan region and
ends up on the beaches of San Diego County.
There are few government agencies more central to daily life in
Los Angeles than the Metropolitan Water District of Southern
California, which spends billions of dollars each year ensuring
that 19 million people have enough to drink, in part by
importing hundreds of billions of gallons from the Colorado
River and Northern California. There are also few agencies more
prone to bitter power struggles. The latest drama could reach a
tipping point Monday, when Metropolitan’s board will consider
firing the agency’s general manager — with potentially huge
consequences for our water supplies, depending on whom you ask.
PPIC Water Policy Center senior fellow Ellen Hanak testified at
the Assembly Select Committee on Permitting Reform on October
16, 2024. Here are her prepared remarks. … During our
many discussions with stakeholders over the years, one
consistent theme has emerged: the time and cost of permitting
to undertake water projects both large and small. … While
each individual permitting requirement was introduced to meet a
well-intended policy goal, the cumulative effect can be
daunting, causing years of delay and escalating costs, and even
outright preventing actions that would serve the greater good.
In short, permitting challenges are keeping us from taking
timely action to build water system resiliency, while
increasing affordability challenges.
With the snip of a ribbon Tuesday, Colorado water managers
officially opened a new waterway in Grand County that
reconnects a stretch of the Colorado River for the first time
in four decades to help fish and aquatic life. The milelong
waterway, called the Colorado River Connectivity Channel,
skirts around Windy Gap Reservoir, where a dam has broken the
natural flow of the river since 1985. The $33 million project’s
goal is to return a stretch of the river to its former health,
a river where aquatic life thrived and fish could migrate and
spawn. But getting to the dedication ceremony Tuesday took
years of negotiations that turned enemies into collaborators
and can serve as a model for future water projects, officials
say.
Like many states, California is facing a growing number of
climate-related extremes: The annual acreage scorched by
wildfires in the state increased fivefold between 1972 and
2018, and burns are also growing more intense. In addition,
excessive rain is increasing flooding, landslides, and erosion,
which can devastate terrain already reeling from fire damage.
Large amounts of soil are prone to eroding after a wildfire,
especially if heavy rainfall occurs within a year of the
burn. Dow et al. studied 196 fires that occurred
between 1984 and 2021 and found that postfire sediment erosion
increased statewide during this period. They used a combination
of postfire hillslope erosion modeling and measurements of
debris flow volume from both real and modeled events.
Along coastal California, the possibility of earthquakes and
landslides are commonly prefaced by the phrase, “not if, but
when.” This precarious reality is now a bit more predictable
thanks to researchers at UC Santa Cruz and The University of
Texas at Austin, who found that conditions known to cause slip
along fault lines deep underground also lead to landslides
above. The new study, led by UC Santa Cruz geologist Noah
Finnegan, used detailed data from two landslide sites in
Northern California that researchers have identified and
closely monitored for years. Finnegan and his co-author then
applied a model originally developed to explain slow fault slip
and eventually landed on a striking result: The model worked
just as well for landslides as it did for faults. The finding
is an important breakthrough suggesting that a model designed
for faults can also be used to predict landslide behavior. And
in California, where slow-moving slides are constant and cost
hundreds of millions of dollars annually, this represents a
major step forward in the ability to predict landslide
movements—particularly in response to environmental factors
like changes in groundwater levels.
A coalition of water users, businesses and conservation
organizations filed a lawsuit Tuesday in Utah’s 7th District
Court, seeking to overturn a water permit given to an
Australian mining company that seeks to extract lithium from
groundwater in theGreen River. Living Rivers and Great Basin
Water Network say they have been working with community members
in Green River for more than a year to ensure that groundwater,
surface water, ecosystems, farms and residents face no harm
from Anson Resource’s project proposed for the banks of the
Green River. The coalition’s filing targets a recent decision
by the Utah State Engineer to approve a water rights
application for the novel lithium mining operation along the
Colorado River’s largest tributary.
Nearly 40% of Arizona’s water comes from the Colorado River.
But that could drastically change in the coming years. What
happens next is a key question for the Central Arizona Water
Conservation District and a key question driving its November
5th election. CAWCD candidates explain the fight over the
Colorado River during an Oct. 8, 2024 Arizona Republic
forum.
The 30-acre pear orchard in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River
Delta has been in Brett Baker’s family since the end of the
Gold Rush. After six generations, though, California’s most
precious resource is no longer gold – it’s water. And most of
the state’s freshwater is in the delta. Landowners there
are required to report their water use, but methods for
monitoring were expensive and inaccurate. Recently, however, a
platform called OpenET, created by NASA, the U.S. Geological
Survey (USGS), and other partners, has introduced the ability
to calculate the total amount of water transferred from the
surface to the atmosphere through evapotranspiration. This is a
key measure of the water that’s actually being removed from a
local water system. It’s calculated based on imagery from
Landsat and other satellites. “It’s good public
policy to start with a measure everyone can agree upon,” Baker
said.
For Pasadena native John T. Morris, the practical majesty and
history of the Morris Dam runs close to home, as his
grandfather was its lead engineer. “He was the founding general
manager of the Pasadena Water Department and chief engineer,”
Morris said of his grandfather, Samuel Brooks Morris. “He
started in the mid-1920s, planning for the Pine Canyon Dam
because he knew we would have to have a place to store water.”
Dedicated in May of 1934 by former President Herbert Hoover, a
personal friend, it became known as the Morris Dam, situated in
the San Gabriel Mountains above Azusa. Marking its 90th
anniversary, and celebrating its unique role and progressive
design, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) will
officially recognize it as a National Historical Civil
Engineering Landmark, Wednesday, Oct. 16.
After ten years of rapidly intensifying drought and extreme
weather, California Governor Gavin Newsom has launched the
state’s first strategy to restore and protect populations of
salmon for generations to come. Salmon are described as being
central to religions, creation stories, the health and
subsistence of California’s Native Tribes, plus a
multi-million-dollar fishing industry. However, historic
crashing salmon populations led to the Newsom Administration
requesting a Federal Fishery Disaster to support impacted
communities at the end of 2023, with Tribes having to cancel
their religious and cultural harvests for the first time ever.
Poway’s average residential customers could see a nearly $33
bimonthly increase on their water bill next spring. The city
has planned for 6 percent annual water rate increases since
January 2022. The increases are considered adjustments for rate
increases by the city’s water supplier, San Diego County Water
Authority (SDCWA). On Jan. 1, 2025 customers will see an
increase of $23.51 to their bimonthly billing period. Also
starting Jan. 1, an additional $9.32 charge could be added if
the City Council approves another 3 percent adjustment on the
bimonthly water bills. Actual bill amounts will vary based on
the amount of water households consume.
County, state, and federal officials held Wednesday morning a
groundbreaking ceremony near this unincorporated town for the
$11.7 million Niland Sanitation District Wastewater Treatment
Plant and Collection System Improvements Project. “The county
today conducted a groundbreaking ceremony on the much expected
Niland wastewater treatment plant,” Imperial County Executive
Officer Miguel Figueroa said in an interview. “This plant will
not only help us serve better the community of Niland, but also
grow and expand future capacity needs as Niland and its region
grows, obviously considering renewable energy development
coming down.” According to the county official, the wastewater
treatment plant will help better serve local residents and the
future growth of the Lithium Valley and the additional
expansion of the geothermal energy plants.
