Stormwater runoff has emerged as a primary water quality issue.
In urban areas, after long dry periods rainwater runoff can
contain accumulations of pollutants. Stormwater does not go into
the sewer. Instead, pollutants can be flushed into waterways with
detrimental effects on the environment and water quality.
In response, water quality regulators use a range of programs to
reduce stormwater pollution including limiting the amount of
excess runoff and in some cases recapturing freshwater as well.
By any objective standard, the southern coast of San Diego
County is enduring a long-running environmental nightmare.
Decades of billions of gallons of untreated human waste flowing
north from broken sewage infrastructure in Tijuana have
sickened a vast number of surfers and swimmers and many Navy
SEALs training at Coronado. Especially because of ailments
reported by border agents, some doctors worry that the health
threat goes far beyond active ocean users to include those who
spend extended time in coastal areas and breathe air that often
smells like a filthy portable toilet. Now there is fresh
confirmation of how uniquely awful this problem is. The
Surfrider Foundation has released a report on 567 sites in
which it tested water for unsafe bacteria levels and found
Imperial Beach — which has been closed for more than two years
— had far and away the dirtiest water in the United
States.
The wet weather of the past two years has been a stark contrast
to the drought conditions that California has become accustomed
to. Floods, landslides, and overflowing streets were a winter
staple as storms from atmospheric rivers–so named for their
shape and the amount of moisture they carry–dumped buckets of
rain on the Golden State. Now that we’ve moved out of the
rainy season into the drier, warmer summer months, we can begin
to take stock of the effects of the wet years. These include
filled groundwater supplies and lush hills, along with worse
allergies and more fuel for wildfires, to say nothing of the
considerable toll taken on road infrastructure. Here’s a look
at some of the ways that the statewide effects of the rain
might show up for Oakland residents.
California is home to three of the most bacteria-ridden beaches
in the country, according to the Surfrider Foundation. The
nonprofit organization recently released its 2023 Clean Water
Report to “build awareness of issues that affect water quality
at the beach.” The report … highlights 10 beaches across the
United States and Puerto Rico where high bacteria levels
consistently exceed state health standards, putting public
health at risk. … [The nonprofit said in the report],
“Surfrider Foundation volunteers test beaches that are not
covered by agencies, and also monitor potential sources of
pollution, such as stormwater outlets, rivers and creeks that
discharge onto the beach.”
Yesterday, Senator Steve Padilla (D-San Diego) introduced
Senate Joint Resolution 18, which urges the Center for Disease
Control to conduct an investigation into the health impacts
surrounding the ongoing pollution crisis in the Tijuana River.
For decades, the Tijuana River has been contaminated with
billions of gallons of trash, sediment, and wastewater as a
result of sewage infrastructure inadequacies has created
recurring and worsening pollution problems for the County of
San Diego and the southern California coastline. Just this past
January, a storm surge caused 14.5 billion gallons of raw
sewage and pollution to wash up on the banks of the River as
well as overflow into the nearby coastal wetlands, one of the
few remaining such ecosystems left in Southern California.
Stormwater in L.A. and Orange Counties is captured via
spreading grounds, or large open areas of gravel and sand that
allow pools of water to form and percolate deep into
underground reservoirs. Since we’ve largely run out of room for
spreading grounds, other solutions are being explored. Slow it
down: Before we paved over our cities, water used to percolate
through soil across the region. Water agencies use dams to
capture and slowly release water over time to utilize spreading
grounds even during hot months. Use our yards: The majority of
L.A. is private property, meaning there’s a big opportunity for
owners to implement water features like swales, which can
capture water and allow it to sink into the soil, rather than
run out into the street.
County public health officials say that a two-week
investigation showed “no conclusive evidence” of increased
gastrointestinal illness at a South Bay health clinic that
claimed its patients suffered such symptoms since Tropical
Storm Hilary inundated the heavily polluted Tijuana River in
August 2023. Public statements about a rising trend in
the incidence of gastrointestinal symptoms such as abdominal
pain, diarrhea, nausea and vomiting spurred the county to
dispatch experts to South Bay Urgent Care from Feb. 5 to Feb.
18 during a period when several inches of rain fell across the
region. A close review of patient charts during that
fortnight, said Dr. Mark Beatty, an assistant medical director
in the county’s epidemiology and immunization department, did
find incidences of gastrointestinal illness, but at rates no
greater than were observed at other medical providers in the
area.
Marin County’s major water providers have raised rebates for
rainwater catchment systems because of county funding. The
Marin Municipal Water District and the North Marin Water
District are offering customers with the systems rebates of 75
cents per gallon of water — 25 cents more than before. The
offer is supported by $20,000 in funding from the Marin County
Stormwater Pollution Prevention Program. The grant marks a
collaboration between Marin County and the water utilities to
encourage residents to save water. Collecting rainwater to use
for irrigation also helps protect the area from potential
flooding during storms, and prevents pollutants collected
through water runoff from entering bodies of water.
The nation’s high court has agreed to hear a water quality case
next year that will examine U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency authority to impose new wastewater discharge
requirements on utilities that are based on conditions without
specific numeric limits. San Francisco wants the U.S.
Supreme Court to review a July 2023 opinion by judges from the
federal appeals court in San Francisco that affirmed agency
authority to include broad language prohibiting the pollution
and placing conditions on the city’s National Pollutant
Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit. Those conditions
included requiring the San Francisco Public Utilities
Commission to update its long-term control plan for managing
combined-sewer overflows.
Los Angeles County public health authorities are warning
residents to avoid the waters of some beaches this Memorial Day
weekend after testing turned up bacterial levels that exceed
state standards. People should avoid swimming, surfing and
playing in these waters until further notice, the county public
health department said in a warning issued Thursday. The
beaches are: Santa Monica Canyon Creek at Will Rogers State
Beach, 100 yards up and down the coast from the creek; Malibu
Lagoon at Surfrider Beach, 100 yards up and down the coast from
the public restrooms; Santa Monica Pier, 100 yards up and down
the coast from the pier; and the entire swim areas at Mothers
Beach in Marina Del Rey and Inner Cabrillo Beach in San Pedro.
A Sacramento State professor will work with community
volunteers and student interns to monitor trash and clean up
San Francisco Bay, thanks to a $742,240 federal grant. The
grant – one of eight Bipartisan Infrastructure Law awards
from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency – is part of a
$43 million investment in protecting and restoring San
Francisco Bay as well as local watersheds and wetlands. The
funding will help reduce trash going into urban stormwater
systems by utilizing the community-based monitoring system
Associate Professor of Environmental Studies Julian Fulton
developed with Sac State faculty and students as well as the
nonprofit Keep California Beautiful. The grant will allow
Fulton to expand the Trash Rapid Assessment Data Exchange
(TRADE) to Contra Costa County.
Cassandra Sutcliffe has been using her inhaler more often to
treat her chronic bronchitis. She lives on an oceanfront
property in Imperial Beach, one of the southernmost
communities impacted by sewage and toxic chemicals that spill
over the U.S.-Mexico border. “The smell makes your eyes
water and your throat close up,” said Sutcliffe, one of many
residents who have reported having similar symptoms and who say
they find relief when they leave town. “I was told by (my
doctor) that the environment could be the contributing factor
(to) my failing health.” … A newly formed task force,
spearheaded by Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre and
comprised of San Diego researchers and physicians, aims to
change that. The group has yet to decide on its formal name,
but it does have an end game.
It was exactly the sort of deluge
California groundwater agencies have been counting on to
replenish their overworked aquifers.
The start of 2023 brought a parade of torrential Pacific storms
to bone dry California. Snow piled up across the Sierra Nevada at
a near-record pace while runoff from the foothills gushed into
the Central Valley, swelling rivers over their banks and filling
seasonal creeks for the first time in half a decade.
Suddenly, water managers and farmers toiling in one of the
state’s most groundwater-depleted regions had an opportunity to
capture stormwater and bank it underground. Enterprising agencies
diverted water from rushing rivers and creeks into manmade
recharge basins or intentionally flooded orchards and farmland.
Others snagged temporary permits from the state to pull from
streams they ordinarily couldn’t touch.
On average, more than 60 percent of
California’s developed water supply originates in the Sierra
Nevada and the southern spur of the Cascade Range. Our water
supply is largely dependent on the health of our Sierra forests,
which are suffering from ecosystem degradation, drought,
wildfires and widespread tree mortality.
This tour ventured into the Sierra to examine water issues
that happen upstream but have dramatic impacts downstream and
throughout the state.
Blasted by sun and beaten by waves,
plastic bottles and bags shed fibers and tiny flecks of
microplastic debris that litter the San Francisco Bay where they
can choke the marine life that inadvertently consumes it.
One of California Gov. Gavin
Newsom’s first actions after taking office was to appoint Wade
Crowfoot as Natural Resources Agency secretary. Then, within
weeks, the governor laid out an ambitious water agenda that
Crowfoot, 45, is now charged with executing.
That agenda includes the governor’s desire for a “fresh approach”
on water, scaling back the conveyance plan in the Sacramento-San
Joaquin Delta and calling for more water recycling, expanded
floodplains in the Central Valley and more groundwater recharge.
Although Santa Monica may be the most aggressive Southern California water provider to wean itself from imported supplies, it is hardly the only one looking to remake its water portfolio.
In Los Angeles, a city of about 4 million people, efforts are underway to dramatically slash purchases of imported water while boosting the amount from recycling, stormwater capture, groundwater cleanup and conservation. Mayor Eric Garcetti in 2014 announced a plan to reduce the city’s purchase of imported water from Metropolitan Water District by one-half by 2025 and to provide one-half of the city’s supply from local sources by 2035. (The city considers its Eastern Sierra supplies as imported water.)
Imported water from the Sierra
Nevada and the Colorado River built Southern California. Yet as
drought, climate change and environmental concerns render those
supplies increasingly at risk, the Southland’s cities have ramped
up their efforts to rely more on local sources and less on
imported water.
Far and away the most ambitious goal has been set by the city of
Santa Monica, which in 2014 embarked on a course to be virtually
water independent through local sources by 2023. In the 1990s,
Santa Monica was completely dependent on imported water. Now, it
derives more than 70 percent of its water locally.
Farmers in the Central Valley are broiling about California’s plan to increase flows in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river systems to help struggling salmon runs avoid extinction. But in one corner of the fertile breadbasket, River Garden Farms is taking part in some extraordinary efforts to provide the embattled fish with refuge from predators and enough food to eat.
And while there is no direct benefit to one farm’s voluntary actions, the belief is what’s good for the fish is good for the farmers.
Sixty percent of California’s developed water supply
originates high in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Our water
supply is largely dependent on the health of our Sierra forests,
which are suffering from ecosystem degradation, drought,
wildfires and widespread tree mortality.
We headed into the foothills and the mountains to examine
water issues that happen upstream but have dramatic impacts
downstream and throughout the state.
GEI (Tour Starting Point)
2868 Prospect Park Dr.
Rancho Cordova, CA 95670.
As we continue forging ahead in 2018
with our online version of Western Water after 40 years
as a print magazine, we turned our attention to a topic that also
got its start this year: recreational marijuana as a legal use.
State regulators, in the last few years, already had been beefing
up their workforce to tackle the glut in marijuana crops and
combat their impacts to water quality and supply for people, fish
and farming downstream. Thus, even if these impacts were perhaps
unbeknownst to the majority of Californians who approved
Proposition 64 in 2016, we thought it important to see if
anything new had evolved from a water perspective now that
marijuana was legal.
California voters may experience a sense of déjà vu this year when they are asked twice in the same year to consider water bonds — one in June, the other headed to the November ballot.
Both tackle a variety of water issues, from helping disadvantaged communities get clean drinking water to making flood management improvements. But they avoid more controversial proposals, such as new surface storage, and they propose to do some very different things to appeal to different constituencies.
Sixty percent of California’s developed water supply
originates high in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Our water
supply is largely dependent on the health of our Sierra forests,
which are suffering from ecosystem degradation, drought,
wildfires and widespread tree mortality.
Microplastics – plastic debris
measuring less than 5 millimeters – are an
increasing water quality concern. They enter waterways and
oceans as industrial microbeads from various consumer
products or larger plastic litter that degrades into small bits.
Microbeads have been used in exfoliating agents, cosmetic washes
and large-scale cleaning processes. Microplastics are used
pharmaceutically for efficient drug delivery to affected sites in
patients’ bodies and by textile companies to create artificial
fibers.
Microplastics disperse easily and widely throughout surface waters and sediments. UV
light, microbes and erosion degrade the tiny fragments, making
them even smaller and more difficult for wastewater treatment
plants to remove.
The particles, usually made of polyethylene or polypropylene
plastic, take thousands of years to biodegrade
naturally. It takes prohibitively high temperatures to
break microplastics down fully. Consequently, most water treatment plants cannot remove
them.
The health effects of consumption are currently under
investigation.
Responses
Many advocacy groups have published lists of products containing
microbeads to curb their purchase and pollution.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulates microbeads in
industrial, but not domestic, wastewater.
Federal
law required microbeads to be phased out of rinse-off
cosmetics beginning in July 2017. Dozens of states also
regulate microbeads in products. California has the strictest
limitation, prohibiting even the use of biodegradable microbeads.
Microplastics in California Water
In 2019, the San Francisco Estuary Institute published a
study estimating that 7 trillion pieces of microplastic
enter San Francisco
Bay annually from stormwater runoff, about 300
times the amount in all wastewater treatment effluent entering
the bay.
California lawmakers in 2018 passed a package of bills to raise
awareness of the risks of microplastics and microfibers in the
marine environment and drinking water. As
directed by the legislation, the State Water Resources Control
Board in 2020 adopted an official
definition of microplastics in drinking water and in 2022
developed the world’s standardized methods for testing drinking
water for microplastics.
The water board was expected by late 2023 to begin testing
for microplastics in untreated drinking water sources tapped by
30 of the state’s largest water utilities. After two years, the
testing was expected to extend to treated tap water served
to consumers. A progress report and recommendations for
policy changes or additional research are required by the end of
2025.
Point sources release pollutants from discrete conveyances, such
as a discharge pipe, and are regulated by federal and state
agencies. The main point source dischargers are factories and
sewage treatment plants, which release treated
wastewater.
Problems with polluted stormwater and steps that can be taken to
prevent such pollution and turn what is often viewed as
“nuisance” runoff into a water resource is the focus of this
publication, Stormwater Management: Turning Runoff into a
Resource. The 16-page booklet, funded by a grant from the State
Water Resources Control Board, includes color photos and
graphics, text explaining common stormwater pollutants and
efforts to prevent stormwater runoff through land use/
planning/development – as well as tips for homeowners to reduce
their impacts on stormwater pollution.
This card includes information about the Colorado River, who uses
the river, how the river’s water is divided and other pertinent
facts about this vital resource for the Southwest. Beautifully
illustrated with color photographs.
This 30-minute documentary, produced in 2011, explores the past,
present and future of flood management in California’s Central
Valley. It features stories from residents who have experienced
the devastating effects of a California flood firsthand.
Interviews with long-time Central Valley water experts from
California Department of Water Resources (FloodSAFE), U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Reclamation, Central Valley Flood
Management Program and environmental groups are featured as they
discuss current efforts to improve the state’s 150-year old flood
protection system and develop a sustainable, integrated, holistic
flood management plan for the Central Valley.
This 30-minute documentary-style DVD on the history and current
state of the San Joaquin River Restoration Program includes an
overview of the geography and history of the river, historical
and current water delivery and uses, the genesis and timeline of
the 1988 lawsuit, how the settlement was reached and what was
agreed to.
This 25-minute documentary-style DVD, developed in partnership
with the California Department of Water Resources, provides an
excellent overview of climate change and how it is already
affecting California. The DVD also explains what scientists
anticipate in the future related to sea level rise and
precipitation/runoff changes and explores the efforts that are
underway to plan and adapt to climate.
20-minute DVD that explains the problem with polluted stormwater,
and steps that can be taken to help prevent such pollution and
turn what is often viewed as a “nuisance” into a water resource
through various activities.
Many Californians don’t realize that when they turn on the
faucet, the water that flows out could come from a source close
to home or one hundreds of miles away. Most people take their
water for granted; not thinking about the elaborate systems and
testing that go into delivering clean, plentiful water to
households throughout the state. Where drinking water comes from,
how it’s treated, and what people can do to protect its quality
are highlighted in this 2007 PBS documentary narrated by actress
Wendie Malick.
A 30-minute version of the 2007 PBS documentary Drinking Water:
Quenching the Public Thirst. This DVD is ideal for showing at
community forums and speaking engagements to help the public
understand the complex issues surrounding the elaborate systems
and testing that go into delivering clean, plentiful water to
households throughout the state.
This 7-minute DVD is designed to teach children in grades 5-12
about where storm water goes – and why it is so important to
clean up trash, use pesticides and fertilizers wisely, and
prevent other chemicals from going down the storm drain. The
video’s teenage actors explain the water cycle and the difference
between sewer drains and storm drains, how storm drain water is
not treated prior to running into a river or other waterway. The
teens also offer a list of BMPs – best management practices that
homeowners can do to prevent storm water pollution.
The 28-page Layperson’s Guide to Water Rights Law, recognized as
the most thorough explanation of California water rights law
available to non-lawyers, traces the authority for water flowing
in a stream or reservoir, from a faucet or into an irrigation
ditch through the complex web of California water rights.
The 24-page Layperson’s Guide to Integrated Regional Water
Management (IRWM) is an in-depth, easy-to-understand publication
that provides background information on the principles of IRWM,
its funding history and how it differs from the traditional water
management approach.
For all the benefits of precipitation, stormwater also brings
with it many challenges.
In urban areas, after long dry periods rainwater runoff can
contain heavy accumulations of pollutants that have built up over
time. For example, a rainbow like shine on a roadway puddle can
indicate the presence of oil or gasoline. Stormwater does not go
into the sewer. Instead, pollutants can be flushed into waterways
with detrimental effects on the environment and water quality.
Lake Tahoe is one of the world’s most beautiful yet vulnerable
lakes. Renowned for its remarkable clarity, Tahoe straddles the
Nevada-California border, stretching 22 miles long and 12 miles
wide in a granitic bowl high in the Sierra Nevada.
Tahoe sits 6,225 feet above sea level. Its deepest point is 1,645
feet, making it the second-deepest lake in the nation, after
Oregon’s Crater Lake, and the tenth deepest in the world.
This printed issue of Western Water discusses several
flood-related issues, including the proposed Central Valley Flood
Protection Plan, the FEMA remapping process and the dispute
between the state and the Corps regarding the levee vegetation
policy.
This printed issue of Western Water discusses low
impact development and stormwater capture – two areas of emerging
interest that are viewed as important components of California’s
future water supply and management scenario.
Growth may have slowed in California, but advocates of low impact
development (LID) say the pause is no reason to lose sight of the
importance of innovative, low-tech management of stormwater via
incorporating LID aspects into new projects and redevelopment.
This printed issue of Western Water, based on presentations
at the November 3-4, 2010 Water Quality Conference in Ontario,
Calif., looks at constituents of emerging concerns (CECs) – what
is known, what is yet to be determined and the potential
regulatory impacts on drinking water quality.
This issue of Western Water examines the continuing practice of
smart water use in the urban sector and its many facets, from
improved consumer appliances to improved agency planning to the
improvements in water recycling and desalination. Many in the
water community say conserving water is not merely a response to
drought conditions, but a permanent ethic in an era in which
every drop of water is a valuable commodity not to be wasted.
