California is no longer facing an acute drought. But we’re waking this morning to a vivid reminder of another environmental threat.
Major wildfires, from the Mexican border to Oregon, burned through the weekend. And it’s only the start of summer. The largest fire, in Kern County near Bakersfield, spread quickly, destroying at least 250 structures and killing at least two people.
Lawn watering restrictions mandated after years of devastating drought will soon be eased in Poway.
Instead of being allowed to water only twice a week, for 10 minute intervals per sprinkler station, customers will be allowed to water three times a week starting almost immediately, the Poway City Council decided last week. Assistant City Manager Tina White said within days papers will be signed allowing city water customers to water on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays between the hours of 8 p.m. and 8 a.m.
Part of the solution to California’s demand for water in the face of the state’s crippling drought may lie 10,000 feet beneath the surface of the state’s Central Valley. New research published in the journal PNAS suggests that the region’s aquifers, areas deep underground where water can collect, have three times the usable groundwater as previously estimated.
“It’s not often that you find a ‘water windfall,’ but we just did,” said study author Robert Jackson, a professor at Stanford University, in a press release. “There’s far more fresh water and usable water than we expected.”
In a surprising new study, Stanford researchers have found that drought-ravaged California is sitting on top of a vast and previously unrecognized water resource, in the form of deep groundwater, residing at depths between 1,000 and nearly 10,000 feet below the surface of the state’s always thirsty Central Valley.
The resource amounts to 2,700 billion tons of freshwater, mostly less than about 3,250 feet deep, according to the paper published Monday in the influential Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Drought-stricken California might have a hidden water bonanza. A Stanford University study released Monday said the state has three times more groundwater located in deep aquifers than earlier estimated.
The research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said this water source is much deeper than traditional aquifers and that tapping it would likely require a lot of money and engineering expertise.
California may have lifted its emergency water-use restrictions in May, but that doesn’t mean the region’s dry spell has ended. It’s just no longer what Felicia Marcus of the state water board described to Time as “the-worst-snowpack-in-500-years drought.”
Now that the past year’s El Nino rainstorms have brought some life back into the west coast lands, California cities and residents are working to implement water conservation practices as a part of everyday life. A new program from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) is one such case in point.
Drought, extreme heat and high winds have fueled wildfires across the western U.S. this month. But another enemy is driving California’s most destructive blaze of the fire season so far: tens of millions of dead trees.
A year after California attacked the drought with an unprecedented water rationing program that drove cities and towns to cut back 24 percent collectively, state officials have changed course and given local agencies the leeway to come up with their own water-saving goals.
The Bureau of Reclamation announces the selection of three California water districts to receive $3 million total in Agricultural Water Conservation and Efficiency grants for Fiscal Year 2016. The grants, combined with local cost share contributions, total more than $6 million slated for water management improvement projects to be implemented during the next two years.
The AWCE program is a joint effort with the Natural Resources Conservation Service to promote district level water conservation improvements that facilitate on-farm water use efficiency and conservation projects. With NRCS support, Reclamation selected three projects for funding.
The City of San Diego recommended moving from a Level Two Drought Alert to a Level One Drought Watch, which would reduce water restrictions.
The suggestion came Thursday after the San Diego County Water Authority’s (CWA) determination that the region has an adequate water supply for the next three and a half years thanks to conservation efforts and new water supply sources.
