An undersea oil pipeline that for more than 50 years supplied Carlsbad’s Encina power plant with fuel and helped keep the lights on across San Diego County soon will be history.
NRG/Cabrillo Power has applied to the California Coastal Commission for permission to remove the 20-inch-diameter steel-and-concrete pipeline that extends out from beneath the power plant on Carlsbad Boulevard more than half a mile into the ocean at a depth of roughly 60 feet.
The blob is back. Since 2014, a mass of unusually warm water has hovered and swelled in the Pacific Ocean off the West Coast of North America, playing havoc with marine wildlife, water quality and the regional weather. Earlier this year, weather and oceanography experts thought it was waning. But no: The Blob came back, and it is again in position off the coast, threatening to smother normal coastal weather and ecosystem behavior. The Blob isn’t exactly to blame for California’s drought, though it certainly aggravated the problem.
As California enters the sixth year of its historic drought, something unusual is happening: It’s raining. And raining. Rainfall is expected across much of the Bay Area again Sunday, with another storm coming Halloween night. Marin, Sonoma and other North Bay counties should get the biggest soaking. Meteorologists stress that it’s only the very beginning of California’s rainy season, so there are no guarantees that a wet October will bring a wet November, December, January or February. So far, though, October has been surprisingly wet across the northern part of the state, raising the hopes of drought-weary Californians.
California water agencies that spent more than $350 million in the last two years of drought to pay property owners to rip out water-slurping lawns are now trying to answer whether the nation’s biggest lawn removal experiment was all worth the cost. Around the state, water experts and water-district employees are employing satellite images, infrared aerial photos, neighborhood drive-bys and complex algorithms to gauge just how much grassy turf was removed. They also want to know whether the fortune in rebates helped turn California tastes lastingly away from emerald-green turf.
The San Juan Water District showed the rest of California how to save water when the state needed the savings most. The supplier for eastern Sacramento and southern Placer counties cut consumption 41% from 2013 levels during the summer of 2015 — the height of a years-long drought. District residents let their acre-sized properties fade, livestock went thirsty, vineyards decayed. Then, the rain arrived. Regulators relaxed the rules and on went some spigots. This summer, the district used almost 600 million more gallons than it did last summer. Lacking a state mandate to conserve, residents’ daily consumption climbed to more than 500 gallons per person.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
