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 Central Arizona Project is pulling financial
support for cloud-seeding efforts meant to boost snowfall in
the Colorado River headwaters, the latest casualty of
a widening Colorado River water war. CAP had provided some
$447,000 to the program in Wyoming, Colorado and Utah
last year, and would have provided up to $525,000 in
the coming year, rising gradually to $750,000 by 2036. Instead,
the CAP board’s majority rejected renewal at a
time when states are fighting over the river and
there’s no clear documentation of where the water ends
up. The board on Nov. 5 decided not to renew a 10-year
agreement that in the past used funds from water agencies in
all seven Colorado River states to spray silver iodide
molecules into advancing storms in the Rocky Mountains to
squeeze more precipitation. The collaboration is meant to boost
the flows that all seven states rely upon, though some of the
detractors questioned whether any of the resulting water
actually reaches Arizona.
The state’s water rights office says there is excess
water – up to 1.13 million acre feet – going unused on the
Kings River, which could open the system to a flood of
water seekers. The Administrative Hearing Office (AHO)
will hold a hearing Jan. 19, 2027 to delve
into whether the Water Resources Control Board should revoke
the 1967 “fully appropriated stream” designation on the Kings
River. If that happens, it would open the river to new
water permit applications, according to the AHO’s
hearing notice. This all stems from a legal fight that
started in 2017 when the the Semitropic Water Storage District
in Kern County filed an application for Kings River flood
flows. … Applicants had been battling it out through
various AHO proceedings, with the last one held in
2024. So, the recent AHO notice came as a bit of a
surprise that applicants said they were carefully sorting
through.
Come January, Torrance will start implementing a ban on
using drinking water on nonfunctional turf throughout the
city. The City Council this week unanimously approved
amending a local ordinance to implement the ban, and discussed
when it will go into effect and how it will be enforced. A
second reading and approval of the amendment will take place
before the end of the year. This amendment is required by state
law through Assembly Bill 1572, which was
signed into law in 2023. The bill establishes a phased
prohibition on using potable water – or drinking water – on
nonfunctional turf. … AB 1572 determined that
using potable water to irrigate nonfunctional
turf – ornamental lawns that are not regularly used
for recreation or public gatherings – is “wasteful and
incompatible with state policy related to climate
change.”
State officials have approved the final key permit
needed to build the largest new reservoir in California in 50
years, which supporters say will supply water to
millions of Californians from the Bay Area to Los Angeles to
reduce the impacts of droughts — but opponents worry will harm
the environment. On Wednesday night, the State Water Resources
Control Board voted 5-0 to provide water rights to
Sites Reservoir. The proposed 13-mile-long
off-stream reservoir would be built in rural ranchlands in
Colusa County, 70 miles northwest of Sacramento near the town
of Maxwell. With two 300-feet high earthen dams and 9 other
smaller dams 20- to 100-foot-high, the project would divert
water from the Sacramento River during wet
winter months to supply water to 24 million Californians and
500,000 acres of farmland in the Central Valley during dry
periods. Estimated to cost $6.2 to $6.8 billion,
the plan is designed to offset climate change, which
threatens to melt the state’s Sierra snowpack in the coming
decades. … Construction is set to begin by next
July.
The polls have closed on the latest seasonal outlook for
California, and the results are unanimous. All 51 forecasts of
one of the world’s leading seasonal models call for a
wetter-than-normal December through March in the San Francisco
area, with the average forecast at about 26 inches of rain,
nearly double the normal. The forecasts, released Thursday by
the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, also
anticipate a wetter than normal winter for cities up
and down the state amid the extremely strong El Niño.
… The model data puts just about every part of
California at high likelihood for above-average precipitation
over the next few months. In the Sierra, that should
eventually translate to above-average snowfall, but the
bulk of the snow may not come until after Christmas as
warm temperatures could keep snow restricted to higher
elevations, with rain below the snow line.
Other water and weather forecast news around the West:
Two years after President Donald Trump won Arizona with 52
percent of the vote, Democrats are poised to win a trifecta in
the state House, Senate and governor’s office, and could
potentially win every statewide elected position. The
battleground state’s blue wave could fundamentally alter how it
responds to increasingly deadly heat and persistent
drought brought on by climate change. Central to
the Democrats’ wins, party members and candidates said, was
their focus on addressing the state’s growing energy demand and
declining water resources, which are
increasingly top issues for Arizonans. … Taken together,
the Democrats’ wins present an opportunity for major changes to
how the state approaches climate change and energy policy,
potentially paving the way for new renewable energy development
and groundwater regulations.
The sewage-tainted water from the Tijuana River is traveling
further north than previously suspected, suggesting communities
beyond Imperial Beach may face potential health risks,
according to a new study. University of California Riverside
researchers, in cooperation with scientists from University of
California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography,
discovered that the polluted water from the U.S.-Mexico border
can flow roughly 22 miles up the San Diego County coast before
releasing pollutants in the air near the pier at Scripps in La
Jolla. The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports,
found that wastewater chemicals unable to survive that distance
in the air instead remained in the ocean. Currents then carried
them north before they escaped into the atmosphere near the
pier.
A nearly 500-yard side channel along Redding’s Riverview Golf
and Country Club is being restored to improve habitat for
salmon and steelhead in the Sacramento River, the Sacramento
River Settlement Contractors (SRSC) announced. The SRSC is a
coalition of irrigation and reclamation districts, mutual water
companies, cities, partnerships and landowners connected to the
Sacramento River from Redding to Sacramento. They said the
project, scheduled to begin Monday and Tuesday, Nov. 9-10, is
designed to give young fish places to feed, rest and shelter
from strong currents and predators as they migrate toward the
ocean, while creating more spawning habitat for adult
fish. Project leaders said sediment buildup and overgrown
vegetation had turned the channel into a warm, stagnant area
that was unsuitable for fish under most river flows.
Desert springs are remote pools of water, an unexpected and
unlikely sight in a landscape defined by dryness. For
millennia, they sustained life across the western United
States, guiding migration and shaping where people settled.
They are living archives, holding both human and natural
history in the same small patch of ground, rare lifelines that
sustain biodiversity, cultural history and hydrological systems
far out of proportion to their size. Their depletion is often
gradual, easy to miss without some memory of what these places
once were. … “Hidden Waters” acts as a witness to what
remains, a memory to hold on to. Some springs will not return
to what they were. But the act of making their decline visible
refuses to let them slip quietly into absence.
California water regulators have approved a permit for
Sites Reservoir, clearing the way for
construction of the state’s first new major reservoir
in decades. Plans call for two large dams about 300
feet high, as well as nine smaller ones, holding water pumped
from the Sacramento River and inundating about
15,000 acres in a valley northwest of
Sacramento. After a heated debate, the State
Water Resources Control Board voted unanimously late Wednesday
to approve the water right permit for the
reservoir near the community of Maxwell.
… State officials and managers of water agencies said
the $7 billion reservoir will be a critical part of
California’s efforts to adapt to climate change.
… Construction is scheduled to begin next year and
conclude in 2034. Opponents, including environmental
activists and fishing advocates, urged the board to reject the
permit, saying the reservoir would siphon too much
water out of the Sacramento River and harm salmon and other
native fish.
The weather is dry for the moment, but signs across the
atmosphere are painting a clear picture for when the first
atmospheric river will bring rain to California. As El
Niño begins to lock into the atmosphere, it will continue
toset up patterns like the one we will see
next week, with lower pressure just offshore and a
lingering dome of high pressure across the central United
States. Patterns like this that hold in place for a week
or more are exceptional at squeezing out oceanic
moisture in the form of atmospheric rivers. … And
the first of the season for Central California is
taking shape for next week. … Early projections
show Sacramento could receive its entire November rain
average — nearly two inches — in the short window.
Other areas statewide could see similar numbers, with a general
trend for more rain falling in Northern California. … An
early look at what this would mean for Sierra snow
shows several feet.
Other California El Niño forecast and preparation news:
Heavy rains pounded Arizona and the Four Corners region in
recent weeks, and the effects were nearly impossible to miss.
Storms drenched places like Flagstaff, Winslow and Durango,
Colorado, surging through rivers, across streets and into
homes. Steady rain made for a soggy Halloween in the Phoenix
area. Floods made it hard to reach the polls in some parts of
Navajo Nation. For all of the ways those rains reshaped
life in the Southwest recently, they barely made a dent in the
region’s water supply crisis. … The Central
Arizona Project, which brings water from the Colorado River to
the Phoenix and Tucson areas, keeps a close eye on upstream
conditions. Even after days of soaking rain, those
conditions hardly changed.
Across Arizona’s high country, mountain streams are getting a
little busier as wildlife crews return Gila trout to
their native waters. In October, the Arizona Game and
Fish Department and its partners stocked the threatened
fish in Chase and Bonita creeks along the Mogollon Rim,
tosupport the species’ recovery. The
fish were supplied by the Mora National Fish Hatchery in New
Mexico, operated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which
has been breeding and raising Gila trout since 1999, according
to the Game and Fish department.The effort is part of a
broader campaign to rebuild populations of Gila trout, which
remain classified as threatened under the Endangered Species
Act of 1973. … Each individual trout was
measured and implanted with a microchip tag before release so
an AZGFD biologist can track how the fish grow, survive and
disperse throughout the watershed over time.
Voters made it clear this week that they want to see limits put
on data centers for artificial intelligence, passing 40 of 41
proposed ballot measures that would place restrictions
on some of the more than 2,000 new facilities planned for
communities around the nation. Water and power top the
list of ratepayers’ concerns. But calculating how much each
data center draws from local resources is an elusive task, with
operators typically reporting usage figures companywide instead
of site by site. Giant 1-gigawatt AI data centers from the
likes of Meta, Google, Amazon and SpaceX can consume up
to 10 million gallons of water per day, according to
Shaolei Ren, a data center researcher and professor at
University of California, Riverside. The exact number varies
greatly depending on what type of hardware is inside a data
center, where it’s built, and what method is used to
cool the servers and the building as a whole.
Katrina and Terry Tolbert have been arrested and accused of
diverting more than 4 million gallons of water from the
Town of Palmer Lake through a buried pipe at their
property off Highway 105, according to police records reviewed
by KRDO13 Investigates. The investigation began after a
water department employee noticed the town was losing far more
water than it could explain. His audit showed monthly losses
rose from a few hundred thousand gallons to more than 1 million
in October 2025. The losses stayed high even after crews found
and repaired several leaks. … These concerns were
further heightened by the fact that the alleged theft
occurred while the Town was under water emergency restrictions,
requiring residents and businesses to conserve this critical
resource.
Incumbent John Varela of Morgan Hill led in his bid for
re-election while fellow incumbent Rebecca Eisenberg of Palo
Alto trailed in her effort to win a second term in the race for
the Santa Clara Valley Water District Board. At 11 p.m.,
Varela, the former mayor of Morgan Hill, led challenger Jimmy
Forbis, 58%-41% in District 1 in the South County. Eisenberg,
an attorney who formerly worked for PayPal and other tech
companies and who was censured twice by fellow board members
for misconduct, trailed former Los Altos Mayor Pete Dailey
57%-42% in District 7, which includes parts of the Peninsula.
In District 6, representing San Jose, Phuong Nguyen, a staff
member for state Sen. Dave Cortese, D-San Jose, led non-profit
director Milan Balinton 54%-45%. The largest water
agency in Silicon Valley, the district is a government agency
that provides water and flood protection to 2 million
people.
The Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board has proposed
a $4.1 million settlement with the former and current owners of
a South Lake Tahoe, California, property to address
tetrachloroethylene (PCE) contamination affecting municipal
drinking water supplies. … The settlement is intended to
protect drinking water supplies affected by a groundwater plume
originating from dry-cleaning activities at the property
between 1972 and 1979. … If approved, the
settlement would establish a 59-year groundwater monitoring and
response program using monitoring wells to detect elevated PCE
levels before they reach municipal wells. It would also fund
groundwater treatment as needed, compensate the water providers
for past and ongoing impacts and continue remediation at the
contamination source through measures such as soil vapor
extraction and targeted groundwater treatment.
Toxic waste dumped into the Tijuana River can travel up to 7
times farther than previously thought before evaporating into
the atmosphere, significantly degrading air quality across a
20-mile radius in San Diego, according to a new study from UC
Riverside. Published in Scientific Reports, the research
details how this untreated sewage, which is a mix of household
wastewater, industrial discharge, and urban runoff, enters the
Pacific Ocean at Imperial Beach. These wastewater chemicals
remain submerged in ocean currents long enough to drift
northward along the San Diego coastline before venting into the
atmosphere. This mechanism explains why pollution linked to the
Tijuana River was found near the Scripps Institution of
Oceanography pier in La Jolla, approximately 22 miles north of
the river’s mouth.
A parade of El Niño-fueled storms has boosted southwest
Colorado’s snowpack. The 9NEWS Weather Impact Team said
Colorado’s statewide snowpack stands at 125% of average
for November 3, the highest level for this point in
the winter season since 2022, driven largely by storms in the
southern part of the state. … The snowpack
measure, which began October 1, averages all eight of
Colorado’s key river basins. [Meteorologist Chris]
Bianchi cautioned that the 125% snowpack figure is a little bit
of a misleading stat because of a sharp divide across the
state. Northern Colorado’s percentages are in most cases
well-below average, while southern Colorado has two,
three, or even four times the snow typical for this time of
year. The snow has come at a steep cost in the
southwest, with flooding events in Pagosa
Springs and the Piedra and San Juan rivers.
California’s State Water Resources Control Board committed to
public scoping hearings on Trinity River water quality
and flow issues after hours of debate and testimony
from tribal communities on Oct. 29. The decision came after
dozens of tribal members testified that the Bay-Delta
process failed to address major impacts on the Klamath-Trinity
River system. Most of the Trinity River, the Klamath’s
largest tributary, is diverted to the
Bay-Delta for use by agribusiness interests.
… The resolution the board added to the Bay-Delta Plan
falls short of what counties, tribal members and environmental
advocates requested. Those requests included a water
rights hearing, protections for federal flow
decisions and changes in temperature standards.
