An effort to create commemorative Salton Sea license plates has been slow to take off.
Last year, the Greater Palm Springs Convention and Visitors Bureau began working with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to sell the specialty plates.
The plates cost $50 to $98, depending on whether the driver wants to keep his old license number. A portion of the money would go to the Salton Sea Authority to benefit environmental restoration of the sea.
Scott Slater, CEO of Cadiz Inc., has a controversial plan. He wants to pump 814 billion gallons of water from the Mojave Desert to Los Angeles, San Diego and other drought-stricken communities in Southern California—making more than $2 billion in the process.
Slater’s company owns the water rights to 45,000 acres of land in the Mojave Desert, and he’s already secured contracts to sell the water for $960 per acre-foot (the amount of water it takes to cover an acre of land in a foot of water), according to The Guardian. At that price, the company stands to make $2.4 billion over the 50-year period of its water extraction deal with San Bernardino County.
The ongoing drought has driven interest in using recycled water instead of drinking-quality water wherever possible, but making that happen depends largely on where the “purple pipes” run.
Wastewater treatment agencies in the East Bay have been selling (or giving away) the water that runs through those purple pipes — essentially wastewater that has been treated to a lesser degree than water purified for drinking and other domestic purposes — for uses ranging from watering home gardens to helping cool down a power plant.
The first of a series of El Niño-related storms hit Southern California on Monday, drenching highways and soaking potentially unstable hillsides, authorities said.
Though there were only a few crashes reported on the freeways and no reports of significant flooding, cities along the Angeles National Forest foothills warned residents to begin preparing for a weeklong deluge that could lead to mud flows.
Projections of future water supplies and demand reveal a shortage of billions of gallons by 2040, a shortage that Orange County water managers say must be filled in the coming years.
More water is needed – or at least more money needs to be spent curtailing increases in demand.
To help figure out how to fill that shortfall, the Municipal Water District of Orange County is preparing a study that predicts how much water Mother Nature will supply in the coming decades and offers methods for determining which water supply projects – desalination plants, recycling facilities, water storage and many others – the county can build to bank and even supplement nature’s gifts.
Ten years after the first seeds were planted for the proposed twin tunnels, the battle shifts to a new arena in 2016 — a critical year for the controversial project.
A small state agency will soon begin the daunting process of deciding whether to change the water rights for the state and federal water projects, allowing them to divert some of their water from the Sacramento River and bypass the Delta for the first time.
The water rights must be changed before a shovelful of earth can be turned.
But it won’t be simple. Months of hearings are expected, starting in April.
A series of El Niño-related rainstorms and snowfall is expected to begin late Sunday night and could last all the way into next weekend.
There’s a 30% chance of rain between 10 p.m. Sunday and 4 a.m. Monday, and a 70% chance Monday morning, said Robbie Munroe, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard, with the possibility of up to a half-inch of rain.
The strongest storm of the week is likely to hit Tuesday, Munroe said, bringing 1 to 2 inches of rain in foothill areas and up to 4 inches at higher elevations. Mountain areas above 6,000 feet could see up to 2 feet of snow.
We’ve talked a lot about desalination in recent years. We have examined the arguments for and against, and it can be compelling both ways.
Still, removing salt from sea water and using it to supplement California’s dwindling portfolio seems the only responsible thing to do.
Thanks to a billion-dollar experiment on the coast just north of San Diego, California and the rest of the nation will have evidence — one way or another — of the utility of desalination on a scale heretofore not seen in the Western Hemisphere.
The Sacramento Bee editorial promoting construction of Sites reservoir noted that it would cost $3 billion to $4 billion (“State needs to invest in Sites reservoir”; Editorials, Dec. 27).
Proposals to build Sites have been put forth since the 1940s, and none have gotten past a drawing board. No study has ever shown that the project makes economic sense. Even Don Hodel, President Ronald Reagan’s interior secretary, said the Sites project would never pencil out.
Sites reservoir would add a little more than 1 percent to the state’s storage capacity.
Old-school cooling systems on the roofs of larger Los Angeles buildings may be wasting billions of gallons of water each year.
The Los Angeles Times reported Saturday (http://tinyurl.com/zarkqn9) that some of these “swamp coolers” are so inefficient they can use as much water as all the bathrooms, drinking fountains and kitchens in the buildings below.
As California’s drought persists, officials are looking to supplement savings already won when property owners ripped out lawns or installed water-miserly appliances.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
