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Facing Historically Low Levels, Lake Mead Officials Are Fending Off a Water War. Here’s How

/in /by /The Los Angeles Timesby William Yardley

This may be what the start of a water war looks like.

Drought is draining the West’s largest reservoir, Lake Mead, to historic low levels. Forecasts say climate change will make things worse. Headlines warn of water shortages and cutbacks. Members of Congress are moving to protect their states’ supplies.

Yet if war is really imminent, why is one of the region’s most experienced water managers doing the same thing he has done for years: tinkering?

“I like to describe this as another incremental step,” said Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources.

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Long Beach to study health of trees, create maintenance plan for urban forest

/in /by /Press Telegram (Long Beach)by Courtney Tompkins,

City officials hope to better understand the health of Long Beach’s urban forest, which contains some 92,000 street trees throughout the city.

As cities across Southern California have grappled with a historic drought and worked to comply with state-mandated watering restrictions, trees and park systems have suffered, including those in Long Beach.

A handful of City Council members, led by 5th District Councilwoman Stacy Mungo, asked the council to support having the Public Works Department study the condition of the city’s street trees – and based on that assessment, develop a life-cycle management plan.

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Are California Redwood Trees the Answer to Global Warming?

/in /by /The Murcury News (San Jose)by Paul Rogers

California’s ancient redwood forests aren’t just majestic and among the oldest living things on Earth — a new study finds they are a particularly potent weapon against global warming.

The towering trees remove and store more carbon from the atmosphere per acre than any other forests on the planet, including tropical rain forests, researchers found in a discovery that could influence everything from logging rules to how parks are preserved as the state grapples with climate change.

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Downtown L.A.’s Five-Year Rain Total is Lowest Ever Recorded

/in /by /The Los Angeles Timesby Joseph Serna

Los Angeles has chalked up yet another dreary milestone in its growing almanac of drought.

On Wednesday, experts at the National Weather Service confirmed that the last five years have been the driest ever documented in downtown L.A. since official record keeping began almost 140 years ago. Having missed out on most of El Niño’s bountiful rains this winter, the Southland experienced yet another dreadfully below-average year of precipitation between July 1 and June 30. As a result, downtown Los Angeles recorded an average of just 7.75 inches of rain every year since July 2011, according to NWS meteorologist Scott Sukup.

 

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Del Mar Lowers Drought Response Level

/in /by /The Coast News Group (Encinitas)by Bianca Kaplanek

Council members opted to follow state and local recommendations and agreed to reduce the drought response to Level 1. Last month, when staff suggested the change based on increased water supplies due to winter storms and Carlsbad’s desalination plant going online, Councilman Don Mosier called the move “premature” and a “big mistake because…two-thirds of the state is still in a drought.” “You’re undoing a good program,” Mosier said at last month’s meeting in an effort to convince his colleagues to leave the response level unchanged. “This community’s adapted to using less water, and I think we should continue to do that.”

 

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Desalination Plants Get a Reboot to Fight Water Shortages

/in /by /Take Partby Erica Gies Mentioned: Carlsbad Desalination Plant

On an overcast day in May, construction is in full swing on the Charles E. Meyer Desalination Facility in this affluent enclave on the Central California coast. Several workers fine-tune rebar in foundations for processing units, while two others deploy a large spinning plate to melt the edges of an ocean intake pipe so it can be attached to another pipe. In response to California’s epic drought, the Santa Barbara City Council voted last year to reactivate a desalination plant built in 1992 to fight an earlier drought. It operated for only six weeks before being shuttered.

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San Diego Water Authority Is Pretending the Drought Is Over; It’s Not

/in /by /Voice of San Diegoby Tracie Barham Mentioned: San Diego County Water Authority

Without mandatory conservation, San Diego is positioning itself to fall back into the same short-sighted planning that built the state’s drought inadequacies in the first place. For decades, the San Diego region inched closer and closer to a drought crisis, pumping more water for more lawns from the ever-dwindling supplies in the Colorado River Basin and the Bay Delta. We were addicted, concerned with getting more water today, not the drought tomorrow. Then we hit rock bottom. In 2015, after we failed to respond to voluntary conservation calls to action, Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency.

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Shasta Lake water release plan draws mixed reviews

/in /by /Appeal-Democratby Jake Abbott

Mixed reviews are in for a plan to release water from Shasta Lake that does not involve any cutbacks to farm water deliveries.

Last week’s proposal from federal officials was hailed as a victory for Central Valley growers, but local organizations said the plan has brought about some concerns and that release levels were not high enough.

The plan also included a stipulation to manage the water release in an effort to protect winter-run Chinook salmon by monitoring water temperatures. Young salmon start to die when water temperatures exceed about 56 degrees.

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Sites seeks Phase 1 help

/in /by /Appeal-Democratby Jake Abbott

The Sites Project Authority announced recently it will begin seeking additional entities to participate in Phase 1 of the reservoir project.

Phase 1 of the project includes completing studies that are required for submitting an application under Proposition 1 by June 2017. The proposition is intended to supply up to half of the funding required for surface storage projects in California. The Sites Project Authority has already started on studies needed for the application but is seeking other entities to help with the process.

 

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BLOG: North Valley Regional Recycled Water Program Projected Completion

/in /by /California Ag Today by Brian German

In our continued coverage of the monumental North Valley Regional Recycled Water Program (NVRRWP), Anthea Hansen, general manager of the Del Puerto Water District, talked about the projected completion for the project. “We estimate the pipeline will be completed by December 2017—less than two years,” Hansen stated. “The first year’s combined quantities, if both cities (Turlock and Modesto) are online at the start date, will be somewhere between 25K and 30K acre-feet per year,” Hansen calculated.

 

 

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