The board for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power passed an ordinance Wednesday setting up a mechanism to fine major water users who don’t cut back their consumption. The mechanism would provide for monthly fines of $1,000 to $40,000 for “unreasonable usage.”
The board also added additional penalties for minor water violators that increase on a sliding scale depending on the severity of drought conditions.
Although Southern California has experienced several recent storms, including one just last week, such is simply a drop in the bucket when it comes to the state’s ongoing drought, experts say.
In Northern California, the snowpack is 110 percent of what it usually is this time of year. Everywhere else, it is 75 percent.
With those numbers, though, some are wondering whether it’s time to start easing up on the state’s water conservation measures.
Not so fast, says CBS2 Chief Meteorologist Josh Rubenstein.
Reduziert is the German word for “reduced.” You could use to it to refer to any kind of reduction: of light, mass, calories. But if you’ve ever walked through a German mall after Christmas, you’ll also have seen the word splashed across signs and windows of stores desperately offloading their merchandise. It’s the German equivalent of “sale.”
That dualism is what the German-born, California-based photographer Thomas Heinser is playing at with the title of his current show at San Francisco’s Gallery 16. “Reduziert” is a collection of aerial photographs taken in 2015. They capture California at its most diminished—from drought, from wildfire, and from human profit.
A contract for a pilot program that would leave some of Pueblo’s water on the Western Slope was approved Tuesday by the Pueblo Board of Water Works.
Pueblo Water will leave 200 acre-feet (65 million gallons) of water from the Ewing Ditch for a fee of about $134,000 as part of an $11 million pilot project to test tools to manage drought in the Colorado River basin.
The drought isn’t over, but the recent storms that many hope are part of a “March miracle” have put California a lot further down the road to recovery.
By Monday, seasonal rainfall jumped above the historic average across much of the state — uncommon territory over the past four years — with San Francisco notching 21 inches of rain since July 1, more than the city has seen in an entire year going back to 2011. California’s reservoirs, meanwhile, got a much-needed boost.
Rick Williams stood on his dead front lawn near Sacramento, California, wondering why he still pays a drought surcharge on his water bill and cannot run his sprinklers as often as he needs when a nearby reservoir is so full it could overflow come spring.
After four years of catastrophic drought and nearly a year of mandatory water conservation measures, Williams is joining a growing chorus of consumers in the wetter parts of the state to call for an end to restrictions they see as overbearing.
The snowpack is back and the water is rising. Between last weekend’s storms and this weekend’s forecast, drought-weary California appears to have gotten the March miracle we were all hoping for. That’s the good news. The bad news is that, between this state’s natural climate and global warming, drought is now perpetually around the corner, and, as usual, people are already beginning to forget that.
So as much as we hate to sound like a broken record – or a dripping faucet – it bears repeating: No, California, you can’t stop conserving water just because we have wet weather.
Federal water managers warned Tuesday that northern California could be headed for an “interesting” runoff season following a series of late-season storms. Officials with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation made the statements during a meeting of the State Water Resources Board in Sacramento.
“This is an area where we tend to want to be very cautious with people’s lives and livelihoods,” said Ron Milligan, operations manager for the Bureau of Reclamation’s Central Valley Project. The Bureau of Reclamation manages several reservoirs, including Folsom Lake and Lake Shasta. Both are more than three-quarters full and still rising following recent storms.
One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. Put into action, that looks like the federal water policy that sends millions of gallons of water to the ocean for the purpose of protecting Delta fish that continue to die.
Since 1992, federal water regulators have increased Delta outflow requirements repeatedly; they now total millions of acre-feet per year. Despite these releases, regulators have never been able to prove, through peer-reviewed science, that any Delta fish have benefited – not even during wet years
As I write this opinion from my home in the Sacramento Valley, our rivers are at or near flood stage and the reservoirs are continuing to fill. The bad news is that the water not being captured in our reservoir system is mostly blowing out under the Golden Gate Bridge with little diverted south of the Delta.
Most of us who farm up here have state or federal contracts that are the basis of our water rights, which are an integral part of our land and its value.
