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.
The Upper Basin is on the verge of violating the Colorado River
Compact for the first time in the agreement’s 104-year history,
failing to send enough water downstream to the Lower
Basin, Central Arizona Project President Terry Goddard
told KTAR News 92.3 FM. … Nevada filed a
lawsuit Monday, arguing the agreement placed the burden of the
shortages on the Lower Basin, which could negatively impact its
economy. At an Arizona Reconsultation Committee meeting Monday,
Goddard said there are many parallels between Nevada’s lawsuit
and Arizona’s position. … He said it’s possible
Arizona joins Nevada’s lawsuit or files one of its
own.
… [T]he California Indian Freedom Act of 2026 seeks to
ensure that tribes can visit their historically sacred sites
and freely worship. To that end, it would require government
agencies to get tribal consent before pursuing activities that
might disrupt Indigenous practices on land that is now owned by
the state. … A broad coalition of businesses, water
agencies and local governments, led by the California
Chamber of Commerce, says that while the bill’s intentions are
good, they’re lining up against the proposal because of its
methods. … Whether the bill applies to water projects,
including such high-profile proposals as Sites
Reservoir in the Sacramento Valley and the
45-mile conveyance tunnel in the Sacramento-San Joaquin
River Delta, is unclear. … Additionally, with
water bodies defined as potentially sacred
sites under the bill, there are concerns that the new authority
for tribes over state land would extend to California’s
navigable waterways.
As Colorado nears the final month of the 2026 water year,
extreme drought is persisting across the state
as many regions, including the Western Slope, continue to rack
up records when it comes to heat as well as precipitation — and
the lack thereof. “We continue to be way above anything that
we’ve seen in the data record for Colorado,” … said Allie
Mazurek, engagement climatologist at the Colorado Climate
Center, at the Aug. 25 Water Conditions Monitoring meeting of
the Colorado Water Conservation Board. … These
climate conditions have been the driving factors for things
such as dropping streamflows and reservoir
levels to high evaporative demand and soil moisture
deficits as drought conditions persist in 91% of the
state. Seventy-seven percent is experiencing severe or
worse drought.
Solano County supervisors voted Tuesday to oppose a plan that
would have allowed the billionaire-backed California Forever to
use an 18-year-old environmental report in its effort to create
a new shipbuilding facility in the county, throwing a wrench in
the group’s plans. The surprise 3-2 vote effectively kills
the initiative for this year, dealing a blow to Gov. Gavin
Newsom, whose office led discussions on it throughout the
summer. … The proposed “Solano Maritime and
Manufacturing Act” would have exempted 1,350 acres
along the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta from the
California Environmental Quality Act for “maritime and
manufacturing uses,” including infrastructure projects.
… Proponents have pitched a shipbuilding facility as a
potential source of at least 10,000 jobs and an opportunity to
pump up the area’s lagging economy.
In an unfortunate first, state wildlife managers say fragments
of invasive zebra mussel DNA have been found in a stretch of
the Colorado River near Moab. The
discovery is concerning because the tiny striped mussels
pose an outsized threat to rivers and lakes,
clogging pipes, covering beaches with razor-sharp shells and
damaging ecosystems. … The department sees the mussels
as an emerging threat after an infestation was recorded near
Loma, Colorado last year. And while detection of DNA in the
water indicates the presence of an animal somewhere upstream,
the division said it does not confirm that living mussels are
present in the test area.
U.S. Rep. Gabe Vasquez (D-N.M.) on Tuesday announced he had
co-sponsored two federal bills aimed at data center
transparency. Vasquez signed on as a co-sponsor to the FAIR
Data Act, sponsored by Rep. Josh Riley (D-N.Y.), and the Data
Center Water and Energy Transparency Act of 2026, sponsored by
Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-IL). The FAIR Data Act would shield
residential electric customers and small businesses from
shouldering increased energy costs related to large data
centers. The Data Center Water and Energy Transparency
Act of 2026 would require developers to provide state
and local governments that have data centers, or are
considering them, with information pertaining to energy
and water consumption. Companies that don’t comply
would face fines of up to $20,000 per day.
U.S. authorities are investigating a data breach at a small
maker of water utility technology, highlighting infrastructure
cybersecurity threats even though the Kansas firm was
apparently not part of a suspected Iranian-affiliated campaign
against water plants in Minnesota and other states starting in
July. The company and the FBI confirmed the attack at
Micro-Comm in Olathe, Kansas, which has not previously been
reported. Responsibility was claimed by Barracuda, a relatively
new ransomware group that says it is motivated by profit and is
not government sponsored. … The Micro-Comm breach
highlighted the complexity of securing local U.S. water systems
and the vendors that support them from increasing cyberattacks
on computer systems embedded in the nation’s critical
infrastructure.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced
the availability of $10.8 million in grant funding to support
training for the water sector workforce. The agency said
enhancing recruitment and training for workers in the water
sector is more important than ever in light of anticipated
retirements, aging water infrastructure, evolving technologies
used in the sector and emerging risks like cyberattacks.
Nationally, drinking water, wastewater and stormwater systems
are facing a shortage of qualified workers due to expected
retirements. … EPA said the new grant builds on the agency’s
recent roundtable in which it led discussions on how to help
recruit and retain individuals into meaningful careers in
water. The roundtable also identified opportunities where EPA
can help reduce barriers and improve interstate coordination.
Colorado once again has sidestepped the Trump administration’s
opening of 45 million acres of U.S. wildlands through a
separately negotiated “roadless rule” that the U.S. Forest
Service says it will respect even while it rescinds protections
in dozens of states. Colorado will keep roadless
protections for the 4.2 million acres of protected lands
negotiated under the administration of Republican Gov. Bill
Owens in 2012, a Forest Service spokesperson said.
… Environmental groups with Colorado offices welcomed
news that the Forest Service would not touch the Colorado and
Idaho pacts. But they noted that hunters, anglers and hikers
will be affected by roads that cut up wildlife habitat in
surrounding states. “Fish and wildlife don’t know state
boundaries,” said Corey Fisher, Missoula, Montana-based public
lands policy director for Trout Unlimited.
It’s a hot, mid-summer day but a welcome breeze keeps a team of
bird conservationists cool as they walk along an earthen levee
in Suisun Marsh, a flat expanse between San Francisco Bay and
the Delta. … The team is here to track the effectiveness of a
program called BirdReturns, which helps birds in California’s
vast Central Valley. … But the Central Valley has lost 95% of
the wetlands where migrating birds once rested and refueled.
BirdReturns pays farmers and wetland managers to flood
strategic points during the late spring through early fall dry
season, providing temporary wetlands when and where birds need
them. … Now BirdReturns has expanded to include Suisun Marsh
duck clubs, which account for about half of this 115,000-acre
managed wetland.
Just days after the federal government released new plans for
sharing water from the shrinking Colorado River, it is getting
sued by one of the states impacted by the plan. Water officials
in Nevada filed a lawsuit against the Interior Department on
Monday morning. … Arizona’s leaders are still
figuring out how to respond to the
lawsuit. … Much of the recent chatter
about Colorado River lawsuits has been focused on Arizona, and
a legal move called a “compact call.”
… Nevada’s lawsuit does something different. It alleges
that the federal government violated procedural laws
while drawing up its new plans for managing the river.
In short, the lawsuit argues that Interior failed to check
certain legally required boxes while writing its new strategy.
The California Supreme Court dealt a blow to a local
government’s ability to seize water utilities on Monday,
ruling that courts get the final say on whether a
public utility is necessary. Apple Valley, located in
San Bernardino County, California, will have to go back to the
drawing board for its plans to take over the privately owned
water utility, Apple Valley Ranchos Water Company. In a
unanimous decision sending the case back down to a California
appeals court, the California Supreme Court sided with
the utility company in the latest in a decade-long eminent
domain dispute between Apple Valley and the utility
company. … The case goes back to at least 2010
when investment firm Carlyle Infrastructure Partners bought
Apple Valley Ranchos Water Company and raised the rates
significantly.
Electric power generation for data centers is a threat to
water supplies even in states outside the arid
Southwest, according to a report published Tuesday by
the think tank Ceres. Data centers in the seven states with the
highest concentrations of them use about 3.4 trillion
gallons of freshwater for electric power generation every
year, but few electric power producers have connected
increasing power demand to water supply risks, says the report,
“The Water Behind the Watts.” That volume of water adds up to
10.4 million acre-feet—greater than the 8
million-acre-foot average annual urban water demand in
California that the state’s Legislative Analyst’s
Office reported in 2021. It’s the equivalent to 12-times the
annual water use of Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Washington, DC,
combined, the think tank that advocates for clean energy and
sustainable development found.
The world’s biggest oil, gas and cement companies are partly
responsible for California’s water shortages, a new study
finds, with their planet-warming emissions shown to
reduce the state’s snowpack by an annual amount roughly equal
to what would fill Shasta Lake. The study, published
Tuesday, is one of the first to attempt to quantify the impact
of climate change, and specifically industrial pollution, on
water supply and demand in the western United States.
The results suggest that emissions have significantly
undermined water security in the West. The
research appears in the Communications Earth and Environment
journal. It comes as part of the growing field of climate
attribution, which seeks to disentangle the drivers of various
climate problems and pave the way for solutions.
Our 42ⁿᵈ
annual Water Summit is the Foundation’s premier
event of the year and returns to Sacramento October 29 with
leading policymakers and experts addressing critical water
issues in California and across the West. Just one year after
the signing of Senate Bill 72, the Summit will
feature a panel discussion of California’s 2028 Water
Plan update as it undergoes a legislatively mandated
shift from being just a guidance document to a blueprint
providing a framework for implementation of actions. Capacity
is limited and filling up quickly, so register here
while seats are available!
One answer to Utah’s brutal drought could be a
large metal structure that looks like a football goal post at
the foot of the La Sal Mountains near Moab. … State agencies,
water utilities, ranchers and ski resorts across the parched
Western United States are increasingly spending millions each
year on new ways to create more rain and snow.
They’re betting on a growing body of research showing the
interventions could squeeze at least a little bit more water
from storm clouds. The practice, known as cloud seeding, has
been used for decades. It has typically involved injecting
particles of silver iodide into clouds from airplanes or from
the ground to nudge precipitation to fall. Drought fueled by
climate change is driving a quest for new ways to try it.
Extreme rainfall can send huge amounts of sediment rushing off
hillsides and into streams. But a new USGS study finds that
even an exceptionally wet year may deliver only a small
fraction of that sediment to San Francisco Bay—far short of
what is needed to help coastal wetlands and shorelines keep
pace with rising sea levels. That finding highlights a
paradox for coastal managers: climate change may produce more
intense rainfall and more landslides, but the additional
sediment generated by those events is still not enough, and
does not necessarily reach the coast quickly enough, to bring
much benefit to vulnerable Bay shorelines and wetlands.
… San Francisco Bay’s tidal wetlands and shorelines
depend on sediment to build elevation and maintain their
position as sea level rises.
In February 1998, almost a year’s worth of rain fell in
downtown Los Angeles, as a series of powerful Pacific storms
rocked California amid a “Super” El Niño. Deadly landslides
struck Southern and Central California, wiping out hillside
homes, and powerful waves pounded the state’s shoreline. These
waves destroyed a large section of the famous Santa Monica Pier
and caused widespread coastal flooding in San Francisco Bay
communities. Many Californians who experienced that event still
consider it to be the benchmark for how a Super El Niño can
alter life in their state. Now, with another Super El Niño
setting in — this time likely to be the strongest on record —
many are calibrating their expectations based on what happened
then.
… For years, the importance of water temperature for salmon
survival has been accepted. But scientists and fisheries
managers have had trouble drawing a direct link between warmer
water and the death of eggs or juveniles. But now Johnson and a
team of researchers from UC Davis and NOAA have some answers.
According to a report released Friday, the scientists have
identified a 15-day window when fertilized salmon eggs need
cold water to survive. Without it, their prospects for survival
are slim. … What they found was that, despite salmon
naturally spawning over the course of a few summer months, the
survivors came from redds that were fertilized in a very short
one- to two-week period. That indicates that many of the
fish that spawned outside of that window did not have offspring
that survived.
Coronado Mayor John Duncan challenged the validity of San Diego
County’s public health safety testing for ocean water at the
Aug. 18 City Council meeting. The tense conversation
focused on a relatively new testing protocol implemented in May
2022 to check the sewage levels coming from
Tijuana. Before adopting the method, known as Polymerase
Chain Reaction (ddPCR), the county relied on Enterolert – a
culture-based protocol standardized nationwide by the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA approved a pilot
program for the ddPCR protocol in 2021 and stated that a study
had “found good agreement” between the two
methods. However, beach closures in Coronado jumped
significantly after the county started using the ddPCR
testing.
