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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This morning [July 27], the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission – the agency overseeing Pacific Gas and Electric’s
effort to decommission two dams on the upper Eel River – told a
Southern California water agency that its late bid to take over
the project, along with the water rights that come with it,
will not be allowed to proceed. In making its decision, FERC
staff told the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District that it
presented no compelling argument as to why it should be
allowed to intervene in the case more than eight months after
the deadline to do so had passed. … Elsinore
Valley now has 30 days to ask the commission to revisit the
decision, according to the notice.
Some farming towns in California’s Central
Valley have sunk by more than 11 feet in recent
years because of groundwater pumping, the extraction
of water from underground aquifers using wells and electric
pumps for drinking, farming and industry. … New research from
UCLA and Caltech has outlined a way to detect when temporary
land subsidence becomes permanent and irreversible. The
research, published this week in Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences, uses satellite imagery to
identify the “abrupt transition to irreversible
damage.” Researchers hope this will give decision
makers new tools to keep an eye on water resources.
A U.S. plan for sharing the waters of the drought-stricken
Colorado River would require Arizona, California and Nevada to
cut their water use by a fifth in the next two
years and to make even deeper reductions later, a
senior water official from one of those states said on Monday.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss
sensitive matters, said the plan should also include
reductions for Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and
Wyoming. … The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is
expected this week to adopt a short-term
proposal by Arizona, California and Nevada, known as
the Lower Basin states, to cut their water use by 1.6 million
acre feet in 2027 and 2028, for a total of 3.2 million acre
feet, equivalent to cutting their current allotment by 21%,
the state official said.
… Welcome to one of the hottest and driest summers metro
Denver has seen in years, notwithstanding scattered monsoon
rain relief last week in pockets of the Front Range. And the
critical buffer the state relies on — stored water in
reservoirs — is shrinking steadily, hobbled by the lowest
recorded snowpack in Colorado since 1941. … Cities and
towns are grappling with whether to boost limits on water
consumption, especially with forecasts calling for high
temperatures to remain in the 90s well into this week. And
don’t be surprised if a citation arrives in your mailbox, as
new monitoring technology gives water providers a
precise view of who is complying with watering rulesat any hour — and who is trying to get away
with an extra helping of forbidden H2O.
The Water Education Foundation is proud to announce the release
of a Spanish-language edition of its widely used
Layperson’s Guide to California Water. For years,
our Layperson’s
Guide to California Water has helped readers
understand the complex systems, policies and challenges that
have shaped and continue to influence management of
California’s water supply. The new Spanish-language version reflects the
organization’s commitment to ensuring that even more
Californians have access to reliable, easy-to-understand
information about the state’s most critical natural resource.
The guide’s English version was updated by Foundation writer
Matt
Jenkins earlier this year, allowing the
translation to include the most recent information.
California Department of Water Resources (DWR) director Karla
Nemeth left the department last month after nearly nine years
of service. Before she takes over as the director of the
Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA), we sat down
with her to talk about how DWR changed during her tenure, what
(still) keeps her up at night, and what advice she’d offer
California’s next governor. … [Nemeth:] If I could sit down
with the next governor, I would first urge him to
become familiar with the incredibly dynamic nature of
California’s hydrology and how we manage it. …
Second, get behind the backbone infrastructure projects:
large-scale groundwater recharge, large-scale water recycling,
the tunnel, and Sites Reservoir. They are big, but they are the
most affordable solutions over the long haul.
Hurricane Genevieve on Monday became the first Category 5 storm
in the eastern Pacific Ocean since Hurricane Kristy in 2024,
with winds peaking at 160 mph, and the strongest July Cat 5 in
the basin since 2002. … The hurricane’s remarkable
intensification is fueled by a deep pool of anomalously warm
water directly linked to the rapidly strengthening El
Niño, which works to greatly warm sea surface
temperatures in this part of the ocean. … It also means
that the hurricane season will last longer. That distinction
itself is important for California. Typically, water
temperatures are starting to cool down in October and November,
marking the tail end of hurricane season. With El Niño still
strengthening, that window for tropical cyclone
development will last longer into fall when the
atmospheric pattern that governs our weather is set to change.
… Around dinner time on July 31, 1976, a storm system stalled
high in the sky above the center of the canyon, which stretches
between Estes Park and Loveland. Over the course of an hour,
the clouds unleashed more than 7 inches of rain,
swelling the river encased in the narrow canyon by a
foot every three minutes. By the end of the storm the
following day, the system had dumped the equivalent of the
area’s normal yearly rainfall on the canyon. … The 1976
flood was one in a series of disasters that prompted the
creation of incident command centers — which serve as a central
hub for decision-making for all agencies responding to a
crisis. … The emergency system in the 1970s was primarily
focused on nuclear threats … and then expanded to
encompass floods, tornadoes, hurricanes and other
disasters.
As a data center developer moves its project forward on federal
land in Boulder City using an unusual
regulatory mechanism, a heated land use debate has sparked
appeals and a resolution in Congress that would ban data
centers on federal land. On Monday, the Center for Biological
Diversity and the Sierra Club jointly filed a petition for a
stay to the Interior Board of Land Appeals, asking a judge to
halt construction while an appeal is processed. … While
building the solar project would have required the use of
25 acre-feet of water, building the data center would
need 560 acre-feet. … That water might come from
Boulder City’s wastewater treatment plant —
the only one in the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s purview
that doesn’t send treated water back into Lake Mead.
But if no deal is reached with the city, questions remain about
where that water may come from.
Two years ago, the Bay Area’s 40 publicly owned wastewater
treatment agencies got some hard news. They had 10 years to
upgrade their facilities to reduce pollutants entering
the bay by 40%, at an estimated cost of $11 billion.
At a Thursday meeting of the San Francisco Bay Regional Water
Quality Control Board, a pathway was initiated for certain
projects to get a deadline extension, if they qualify and are
moving as quickly as possible. The 2034 deadline was
established when the water board tightened the rules for
issuing the permit required to discharge treated effluent into
Bay Area waters. The move was in response to massive fish kills
in 2022 and 2023 caused by consecutive algae blooms.
This fog-shrouded patch of coastal forest in the heart of Yurok
Country was tended by the tribe for millennia. … Now, as the
land heals from the scars of a long-running lumber mill, it has
been returned to its original stewards, who will operate it as
a public gateway to Redwood National and State Parks about 50
miles south of the Oregon border. … The announcement comes as
California’s most populous Indigenous nation works to reclaim
its homelands, a mission inscribed in its constitution. The
Yurok Tribe has so far regained 60,000 acres — about 12% — of
its 500,000-acre ancestral territory, which stretches along
the North Coast and the Klamath River.
… Prairie Creek [is] key habitat for coho
salmon, which are federally protected in this portion
of California. The stream has the potential to be particularly
productive because its headwaters are already protected under
the jurisdiction of Redwood National and State Parks.
After more than three years of negotiations among the seven
Colorado River Basin states, the federal government is
preparing to release its plan for managing the shrinking river.
The U.S. Department of the Interior and Bureau of Reclamation
say they expect to release the Final Environmental Impact
Statement for post-2026 Colorado River operations this week.
The document is expected to identify the federal
government’s preferred approach for operating Lake Mead and
Lake Powell after the current guidelines expire.
… An earlier draft examined five possible approaches but
did not identify a preferred alternative. The final document
should provide a clearer picture of the direction the Trump
administration intends to take.
A South Carolina federal judge ordered the Trump administration
to fund hundreds of environmental justice grants it illegally
canceled last year, a decision that could impact $20 million in
federal funding rescinded from the Walker River Paiute
Tribe in Nevada. … The federal climate program
was terminated in May 2025 following two executive orders
issued by President Donald Trump targeting funding for
renewable energy and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts at
the federal level. … In Nevada, the program’s termination
eliminated a $20 million EPA grant that would have
funded a multi-year climate resiliency plan to deliver
water, energy, and food infrastructure to about 1,200
tribal members who live on the Walker River Reservation. … A
portion of the grant was also earmarked for avital water infrastructure project to protect
health and safety on the reservation.
The official tally shows Kern County water districts are only
willing to chip in $11.7 million of $33 million
requested by the state toward the planning phase of
the so-called delta tunnel, according to figures presented at
the July 23 Kern County Water Agency meeting. The agency, which
administers the State Water Contract on behalf of 13 local
water districts, called “member units,” voted Thursday to
approve a funding agreement with the Department of Water
Resources that included the reduced amount for planning and
pre-construction costs of the 36-foot diameter Delta Conveyance
Project. That leaves DWR with a 20% funding gap in
the $300 million it needs for this phase.
From some parts of Highway 101, the Salinas Valley can look
like one long, uniform stretch of agricultural fields.
But the groundwater basins that lie beneath the surface tell a
different story, one of interconnectivity, fragmentation and
different interests depending what end of the valley you’re on.
Groundwater is the source for roughly 96% of all water used in
the Salinas Valley. For more than a century, it has been the
foundation for Monterey County’s agricultural industry. But as
generation after generation has sipped from thousands of straws
up and down the valley, groundwater levels have dropped
and the salty waters of Monterey Bay have seeped in to fill its
place. … The [Sustainable Groundwater
Management] act created the Salinas Valley Basin Groundwater
Sustainability Agency, which next month must decide on
a plan to stop the salty march.
… The Quartz Valley Indian Reservation, a group of about 400
Native Americans whose ancestors once lived throughout the
remote border region, was awarded a $25 million loan from the
state this week to buy the Scott Valley property. … As a
condition of the loan from the State Water Resources
Control Board, the tribe will help restore the land,
which is part of a watershed seen as crucial to the health of
theKlamath River Basin. … [T]he land
encompasses the creeks that give rise to the Scott
River, a salmon-rich tributary of the Klamath River,
long central to Native American tradition. In recent decades,
the Scott River has gotten increasingly low, the result of
drought, warming temperatures and agricultural water
diversions — a problem that has prompted state
water restrictions and ongoing controversy over water
management.
… Stratos developers say the project would bring an initial
$30 million to the county and a permanent 2,000 skilled jobs,
higher than the 50 jobs data centers typically provide,
according to a 2024 Virginia legislative audit of the industry
in that state. In terms of water, backers say the
project wouldn’t draw directly from the Great Salt
Lake and would use two kinds of cooling systems to
keep servers from overheating: a closed-loop system circulating
liquid and air-based cooling. They’re also seeking
water rights for more than 13,000 acre-feet — enough
to supply 26,000 households per year — saying those rights are
attached to the land they’re buying. But they contend the data
center would use less water than the ranchers
there do now.
The founders of a Colorado company said they’ve found a way to
boost rainfall by at least 10% in certain locations, using
technology that could help mitigate the persistent
Colorado River water crisis. However, an
abiding distaste for “cloud seeding” in Wyoming has hampered
efforts here so far, representatives of Rain Enhancement
Technologies say. Randy Seidl, the company’s CEO, and chief
meteorologist Jeff Chagnon told Cowboy State Daily their system
relies solely on solar-generated electricity, not cloud-seeding
chemicals. They’ve built rain-making facilities in
Utah and Colorado, but when they’ve approached Wyoming
officials their message has been conflated with the
“cloud-seeding umbrella,” Seidl said.
Any wildfire can become a threat to life and property. But in
Northern California, the most destructive fires can also change
the forests and snowpack that help feed the region’s
rivers and reservoirs. That connection is a growing
concern in the American River watershed, which
helps supply water for approximately 2 million people. A
new watershed resilience plan funded by California’s Department
of Water Resources looks at how climate change could affect the
American, Bear and Cosumnes watersheds in the decades ahead.
The impacts include hotter summers, more extreme precipitation,
longer droughts, shrinking snowpack, more frequent wildfire and
earlier runoff into reservoirs.
Homeowners in a development near Patterson no longer have to
worry that a water agency 200 miles away could cut off their
taps. A contract was signed late this week between the Kern
County Water Agency and Western Hills Water District that will
keep water water flowing to the 600-home Diablo Grande
development in the western foothills of Stanislaus County. The
agency agreed to deliver up to 1,500 acre feet a year to
Western Hills, which serves Diablo Grande exclusively, and
forgive $14 million in debt the agency said it was owed. The
agency signed off on the contract Thursday and Western Hills
agreed to it on Friday. The agency will charge Western Hills
$37,500 per year, with an escalation clause, as an
“administration fee,” according to the contract.
