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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As the chances of a ‘super’ El Niño continue to rise — now 81%,
according to federal scientists — researchers are looking back
to 2015 and 2016, when a Pacific heat wave combined with a
strong El Niño threw some of the West Coast’s most important
commercial fishing fleets into turmoil. … Salmon also
suffered [in 2016], partly because drought had affected inland
rivers, where Chinook and Coho migrate to spawn, eggs hatch,
and salmon fry swim back downstream to the ocean. But warmer
oceans are also often bereft of the high-energy prey these
juvenile salmon need for rapid growth when they reach the
saltwater. … [T]he upcoming El Niño is likely to
be a mixed bag for California’s salmon. If the system
brings a lot of rain, which can happen during an El Niño, that
big water will benefit salmon who are in their river stages.
But the warm ocean water will be a blow to juvenile salmon, and
that won’t show up until two or three years later.
… From Tucson to Phoenix, residents are using significantly
less water per person than they did a generation ago. Cities
credit everything from replacing thirsty grass lawns
with desert landscaping to installing more efficient plumbing
fixtures and encouraging conservation through rebate
programs. The result is a surprising trend: Arizona
has added hundreds of thousands of residents while many
communities have reduced the amount of water each person uses
every day. … Across the Valley, water conservation has
become part of everyday life. In Glendale, city officials
reported a 19% reduction in municipal water use during
a Stage 1 Drought Watch, far surpassing the city’s
initial 5% conservation goal.
Other drought and water conservation news around the West:
The Park County commissioners are taking a hard line with data
centers, in large part after hearing overwhelming public
sentiment in opposition and due to simply not knowing enough
about potential issues. … While Gov. Mark Gordon recently
came out opposed to a moratorium at the state level, a number
of primary election candidates have expressed opposition to any
more data centers being built. … “At this time, based on
public input and just the unknown, the recommendation [from the
consultant] is to more widely prohibit them as opposed
to allow,” Planning Director Joy Hill told
commissioners during a work session last week. … “I don’t
know how much water they need and how often. I
could not tell you. I do not have enough factual information
about data centers generally to feel comfortable even advising
you.”
The climate-driven water crisis is becoming a housing crisis as
builders increasingly struggle to secure sufficient water
supplies for new residential developments. Now Japanese water
infrastructure company Kubota Corp. aims to provide developers
of suburban subdivisions with an unlimited source of water
through a technology that extracts H2O from the air. In a deal
announced Tuesday, Kubota is buying atmospheric water
harvesters made by Delaware-based AirJoule LLC to be
initially deployed in California and Texas. Both
states require developers to demonstrate that they have secured
long-term access to water supplies to receive approval to
build. In water-stressed areas, clusters of AirJoule
harvesters could be integrated into Kubota’s water recycling
systems to serve as decentralized neighborhood water plants for
new subdivisions.
A proposal to raise sewer rates for several hundred Kern County
residents tied into the Bakersfield sewer system failed to pass
Tuesday. Supervisors Philip Peters and Leticia Perez voted
against the rate increase while a lawsuit between the county
and the city of Bakersfield plays out. … Residents of
County Service Area 71 are not inside Bakersfield city limits,
but the county does not have its own wastewater treatment plant
for those residents and ties into the city of Bakersfield’s
sewer system. Residents pay the county an annual wastewater
fee, and the county then pays the city for the service. With
the city increasing its rates, the county will now have to pay
more to supply the service to residents.
Golden mussels have been declared an emergency in Yolo County,
but boat inspections for the invasive mollusks are no longer
required at Lake Oroville in Butte County. … On April
29, the California Department of Water Resources announced that
boat inspections are no longer part of DWR’s mussel prevention
program at Lake Oroville. Earlier this month, Yolo County Board
of Supervisors declared a state of emergency when the invasive
species was found at the Port of West Sacramento. The emergency
applies to waterways connected to the Sacramento-San Joaquin
Delta. That doesn’t include Lake Oroville, which is formed by
the Oroville Dam and impounds the Feather River. DWR
decided that Lake Oroville’s deeper waters are too cold for
golden mussel larvae.
Welcome to Townsville, a community located in California’s
Central Valley. You have been tasked with working with a few of
your fellow residents to implement cropland transition projects
around Townsville. … This is the world of ‘Common Ground,’ a
video game developed by a team of students at Harvey Mudd
College in partnership with UCS, to explore just land
transition, climate change, and the decisions involved in
transitioning cropland in California’s Central Valley.
… Townsville is fictional, but the problems players must
grapple with are based on real challenges Californians are
facing today. … To accomplish California’s groundwater
sustainability goal, more than 500,000 acres of irrigated
cropland may be repurposed in the San Joaquin Valley alone.
Where and how this transition takes place will shape the future
of California’s agricultural industry and Central Valley
communities.
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.
