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.
Subscribe to our weekday emails to have news delivered to your inbox at about 9 a.m. Monday through Friday except for holidays.
Please Note: Some of the sites we link to may limit the number of stories you can access without subscribing. Also, 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.
While photos of littered beaches and floating garbage patches
are unsettling, perhaps the most problematic plastic is barely
visible to the naked eye. Called microplastics — chunks less
than 5 millimeters across — these bits have been detected
everywhere from Arctic sea ice to national parks. These
pervasive particles are harder to clean up than larger
plastics, allowing them to accumulate in the environment and
inside living creatures. As their quantities rise, UC Davis
researchers are racing to understand the risks they pose to
ecosystems, animals and humans. “If these things are
getting into our drinking water sources, we
should really care,” said Katie Senft, a staff research
associate at UC Davis’ Tahoe Environmental Research Center,
“especially if they’re not going anywhere and we don’t know the
long-term implications.”
The California Water Institute at Fresno State is positioning
its current projects to help inform work related to
California’s Proposition 4, a $10 billion climate resiliency
bond that overwhelmingly passed on the November ballot.
The historic measure is the largest single climate bond in
state history and includes $3.8 billion for state water
projects that address drought, flood and water supply issues.
The California Water Institute targets some of those key areas
with two grant-funded programs already underway; the Unified
Water Plan and Climate Resiliency through Regional Water
Recharge in the San Joaquin Valley. … Under
the Unified Water Plan, the California Water
Institute partnered with Water Blueprint for the San
Joaquin Valley for a two-year, $1 million project awarded
by the Bureau of Reclamation to track various water projects
happening across the Valley. It’s an effort to compile the
information into a single, unified water plan that could
inform future investments.
Other Proposition 4 and election-related articles:
A strong and prolonged atmospheric river is expected
to affect northwest California this week, with
moderate to locally heavy rainfall bringing the potential for
rapid rises in rivers, streams and creeks across the region,
the National Weather Service said. The atmospheric river—a
narrow corridor of concentrated moisture originating from
the Pacific—marks one of the strongest storms to hit the
region this season. The river storm is expected to bring a
deluge of torrential rain, flooding and hazardous conditions to
the region later in the week.
President-elect Donald J. Trump said Friday that Gov. Doug
Burgum of North Dakota, his pick to run the Interior
Department, will also serve as the administration’s point
person to coordinate energy policy across the federal
government. In that role, Mr. Burgum will be charged with
executing Mr. Trump’s vision of a government that drives up
fossil fuel production while it demolishes environmental
regulations. Mr. Burgum will be “chairman of the newly formed,
and very important, National Energy Council,” Mr. Trump wrote
in a statement, “which will consist of all departments and
agencies involved in the permitting, production, generation,
distribution, regulation, transportation, of ALL forms of
American energy.”
… Less than a month after [four dams on the Klamath River
came down] … salmon are once more returning to spawn in
cool creeks that have been cut off to them for generations.
Video shot by the Yurok Tribe show that hundreds of salmon have
made it to tributaries between the former Iron Gate and Copco
dams, a hopeful sign for the newly freed waterway. … The
Klamath River flows from its headwaters in southern Oregon and
across the mountainous forests of northern California before it
reaches the Pacific Ocean.
An international team of scientists using observations from
NASA-German satellites found evidence that Earth’s total amount
of freshwater dropped abruptly starting in May 2014 and has
remained low ever since. Reporting in Surveys in Geophysics,
the researchers suggested the shift could indicate Earth’s
continents have entered a persistently drier phase.
The state Water Resources Control Board on Friday canceled a
Jan. 7, 2025 probation hearing for the Kaweah subbasin in order
for staff to more thoroughly study a groundwater plan submitted
in June that may prove to be protective of the aquifer and
domestic wells. … No one was more elated than the managers of
the three Kaweah groundwater sustainability agencies (GSAs).
… Less than a year ago, Kaweah’s groundwater managers were
locked in a near stand off over coordination, groundwater
accounting and other basics required under the Sustainable
Groundwater Management Act.
Just outside Canyonlands National Park in San Juan County,
rancher Matt Redd walked to a spot where two of his pastures
meet. One side is growing alfalfa and other traditional grazing
crops with wheel line irrigation. The other is home to a
lesser-known grain called Kernza. … Perhaps the most
beautiful thing about it, though, is how little water Kernza
needs compared to the neighboring pasture. Even though this
summer brought Utah record-breaking heat, Redd didn’t
water it from July through September. … That means more
of his ranch’s water can stay in nearby creeks that flow toward
the Colorado River.
The Bureau of Reclamation [on Nov. 15] released the final
Environmental Impact Statement for the Long-Term Operation of
the Central Valley Project and State Water Project, a
significant document that analyzes revised operating rules for
one of California’s major water storage and conveyance systems.
… Prepared in accordance with the National Environmental
Policy Act, the Environmental Impact Statement analyzes five
alternatives reflecting a reasonable range of options for
the operation of dams, powerplants, and related facilities of
the Central Valley Project and Delta facilities of the State
Water Project.
… This is Governing Gavin. There is no greater example that
has revealed the two Newsoms than one of California’s
most contentious issues: Water. … Governing
Gavin was proposing some additional environmental flows
combined with more habitat restoration. It was a
proposal backed by various water users known as the Voluntary
Agreements. These water users were also threatening to back
away from this plan if SB 1 passed and Trump’s new operating
rules for the Delta were blocked by the Legislature. Newsom
wanted his Voluntary Agreements. While it was clear that Newsom
did not want SB 1 to reach his desk, Atkins moved it there
anyway, all but daring the governor to veto the bill. Which he
did. Newsom attempted to belittle the legislation. It, for
example, did not “provide the state with any new authority to
push back against the Trump administration’s environmental
policies.” Yet how precisely can any state legislation
magically increase a state’s authority against any federal
government? -Tom Philp is an editorial writer and columnist for The
Sacramento Bee
The number was, and is, eye-opening: $10.8 billion. That’s an
estimate issued by city leaders in San Bernardino County for
how much their taxpayers might have to pay, over the next two
decades, to meet possible new standards for cleaning the water
that flows out of their streets and yards and farms and into
the culverts, creeks and tributaries connected to the Santa Ana
River Watershed, a stretch that includes much of San
Bernardino, Orange and Riverside counties. Leaders from 17
cities and agencies in San Bernardino County made that $10.8
billion claim during a public hearing in September, in Cypress,
that involved representatives from all three counties. Their
estimate was part of a broader negotiation over the details of
the region’s next MS4 permit, a federally mandated document
that will set limits on how much pollution can legally flow
into local waters and, by extension, the ocean.
With President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Robert F.
Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human
Services, many Americans are wondering whether they’re in for a
future without fluoridated water. Kennedy, who has widely
spread falsehoods about vaccines causing autism and other false
medical claims, has vowed that the Trump administration will
“advise all U.S. water systems to remove fluoride from public
water” as soon as the 47th presidency begins. One place in the
country that can offer a glimpse of the fluoride-free life sits
just outside the Bay Area: Davis. It is among a handful of
communities including Portland, Ore.; Albuquerque; and the
state of Hawaii that have made the choice to go without the
cavity-preventing additive. Towns in Sonoma and Marin counties,
as well as Gridley (Butte County), a small community, have also
opted to go without fluoride.
Rudy Fischer, a recent transplant to the state and a former
businessman, will become Arizona’s newest voice in the state’s
struggle with historic uncertainty on the Colorado River.
Fischer won a place as the only new member on the Central
Arizona Water Conservation District’s board of directors this
year. He will replace Jennifer Martin-McLeod, who did not seek
re-election. Fischer will begin his six-year term on Jan. 17,
becoming one of 15 board members, including four incumbents who
were returned to office. The election adds a relative
newcomer to Arizona’s water world as the state forges through
interstate negotiations over strained supplies in the Colorado
River. The CAWCD board, which can influence Arizona’s
negotiating positions on the river, will take on the arrival of
critical long-term water cuts on the river during Fischer’s
term.
Recently, there has been a spate of calls for modifications to
Marin County’s streamside conservation area (SCA) ordinance.
… The final ordinance, which took effect in July 2022
… resulted in a setback of 35 feet, even though the
science called for a 100-foot minimum. … Central California
coho salmon continue to be endangered. … A major reason these
beautiful animals continue to be threatened is the cumulative
loss of creekside habitat … —Written by Ken Bouley, executive director of the Turtle
Island Restoration Network
The Oakland Unified School District is one of the few districts
in California that has continued to test lead levels in
drinking water years after it was no longer required by state
law. In 2017, an extension to the existing law (AB-746), also
known as the California Safe Drinking Water Act, required
districts to sample water from at least five faucets in every
school and report the findings to the state by July 1,
2019. State funding for lead testing ended after the
deadline. The law resulted in school districts getting a
snapshot of lead contamination in their drinking water at that
time. But because of the one-time requirement that districts
test only a small sample of faucets, and exemptions for charter
and private schools, there are no statewide records that offer
an accurate representation of lead presence in California
schools currently. Seven years after the law went into effect,
school districts and communities, including Oakland, are still
grappling with how to keep lead out of drinking water.
Many high-performing, water-saving fixtures and appliances are
designed like straws, supplying only enough water to satisfy
one’s thirst. But the pipes that bring that water into
Americans’ homes are sized more like fire hoses. Oversize
plumbing pipes move water inefficiently, wasting money and
increasing the risk of waterborne diseases. And water
efficiency is especially important as climate change makes
droughts more frequent and severe. Efforts to right-size
plumbing pipes to match the intake of water-saving products are
slowly gaining traction, but homeowners and designers of
multiunit properties who want to use these more sustainable
pipes need to demand them during the project design phase.
The jewel-like lakes of the High Sierra in Yosemite National
Park are awe-inspiring sights. But for more than a hundred
years they’ve also been biologically disrupted, stocked each
year with non-native fish, which in turn destroyed the
population of Sierra Nevada Yellow-legged frogs that once
covered their shores and filled their depths. With that loss,
the entire ecosystem shifted.
… More than a century ago, agents secretly working for Los
Angeles posed as farmers and ranchers as they bought land and
water rights across the Owens Valley. Their scheme laid the
groundwork for the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct,
which in 1913 began sending the valley’s water to the growing
city 233 miles away. Residents were so enraged in the 1920s
that some carried out a series of attacks on the aqueduct,
blasting it with dynamite. But there was also one major
nonviolent protest, an act of civil disobedience 100 years ago
that is being commemorated this weekend with a series of free
community events in Lone Pine. In that defiant act of
resistance on Nov. 16, 1924, a group of about 70 unarmed men
took over an aqueduct spillway and control gates north of Lone
Pine and began releasing all the water back into the dry
channel of the Owens River. That act, called the Alabama Gates
occupation, grew as more than 700 residents of all ages came to
celebrate the takeover during four days of festivities,
bringing food and barbecuing as the protest became a community
picnic.
This blog is the first in a series featuring interviews with
scientists from the Center for Watershed Sciences to learn what
sparked their passion to pursue a scientific research career.
Kicking off the series we interview Jonathan Walter, a
Senior Researcher and quantitative ecologist at CWS, who works
on issues relating to the stability and resilience of aquatic
ecosystems and organisms.
President-elect Donald Trump [has tapped] North Dakota Gov.
Doug Burgum [R] to lead the Interior Department, a role
overseeing roughly 500 million acres of federal land and more
than a billion acres offshore that will be key to his plans to
boost U.S. oil and gas production. … If approved by the
Senate, Burgum would steward hundreds of millions of acres of
federally owned lands and waters … Interior also
oversees dwindling water resources across the American West
amid a climate-change-fueled megadrought. Interior officials
last year brokered an agreement with the states along
the Colorado River to conserve an unprecedented amount of their
water supply in exchange for $1.2 billion in federal funding.
Other Burgum and Interior Department/Reclamation articles:
