The City of Oceanside has started replacing old water and sewage lines in its downtown area. Some of the pipes are close to 100 years old, well past their life expectancy. This week crews are trenching Horne Street dropping in new lines made of polyvinyl chloride pipes. As part of $6.8 million project, the city will also replace hydrants, water meters and manhole covers. The work on Phase One of the project will last about a year.
The Olivenhain Municipal Water District celebrated the opening of the Village Park Recycled Water Pump Station Monday — a facility that will mean saving millions of gallons of water for the Encinitas area. The pump station itself is buried underground and is capable of pumping three million gallons of recycled water into the community every day, which is roughly 114 million gallons every year.
It seems simple enough: The State Water Resources Control Board, arbiter of equitable water use in California, wants to leave 40 percent of the water in three streams feeding the San Joaquin River south of Stockton. To the surprise of no one who follows this stuff, it’s more complicated than it sounds. Let’s ignore, for the moment, that the board has actually proposed a range of river flows from 30 percent to 50 percent, starting at 40 percent. I can only handle so much complexity, so we’ll just examine that 40 percent number.
The Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA) reports that the State Water Resources Control Board is expected to notify public water systems in the coming days regarding a new initiative to provide lead sampling to schools. Specifically, the State Water Board is expected to contact water systems this week with information about a statewide program that will require water systems to provide lead sampling services to K-12 schools upon request. The State Water Board also is expected to announce details about a webinar that will provide water systems with details about the initiative.
Asking the public to listen carefully to their controversial plan, state water officials began a series of hearings Tuesday on permanently shifting a share of water away from farms and cities and reallocating it to wildlife on streams feeding the San Joaquin River. Tuesday’s meeting was in Sacramento, but the board will next head to Stockton on Dec. 16 for a session at the Stockton Memorial Civic Auditorium. San Joaquin, Stanislaus and Merced counties have expressed strong opposition.
California’s rain and snow season is getting off to a fast start as Thanksgiving week brought more storms, launched the ski season early and raised cautious hope for a wet year after five years of drought. Two damp months in a row have boosted seasonal rainfall totals in Woodland to 3.25 inches. That compares with 2.57 for the same time in 2015. The 10-year seasonal average for Woodland, according to the UC Cooperative Extension Service, is 2.90 inches.
New satellite data released by the European Space Agency confirms that San Francisco’s 58-story Millennium Tower is sinking. “The Sentinel-1 satellites have shown that the Millennium Tower skyscraper in the center of San Francisco is sinking by a few centimeters a year,” a study by ESA says. “Studying the city is helping scientists to improve the monitoring of urban ground movements, particularly for subsidence hot spots in Europe.”
It started with a 2011 study that indicated by the turn of the century there would be no more Joshua trees in the national park named after the iconic desert plant. And likely none in California. “I was shocked when the study came out. I wanted to look at the details and change the scale,” said Cameron Barrows, a research ecologist for the UC Riverside Center for Conservation Biology in Palm Desert.
The first couple months of the new water year has yielded better-than-average rain and snow for parts of California. Water years begin Oct. 1 and run through the end of the following September. For California, the new water year got off to a rather wet start. While it’s being called the wettest start in 30 years, some almost seem to be egging on the drought by reminding us that we could end up in our fifth year of it on short notice.
Some 102 million trees have died in California since 2010, and that number will likely grow. Dead trees in a forest are natural, but the extraordinary numbers we see in parts of the Sierra Nevada threaten many benefits of our forests. Some places that had 20 trees per acre a century ago now have 260 trees. Too many trees, dead or alive, produce too much fuel. Once a fire gets started, a continuous expanse of fuel makes it more likely the fire will become extreme. California’s wildfires affect the whole nation.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
