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California’s biggest lake, about 350 square miles, is dying. It’s not the first time. The Salton Sea, straddling the Imperial and Coachella Valleys, is the latest incarnation of a body of water that has been drying and refilling over eons with water from the Colorado River. Native Americans once fished and camped on Lake Cahuilla, a prehistoric and larger version. The Salton Sea was born in the early 1900s after a canal burst sent water from the Colorado flooding into the valley over a period of two years.

Pure Water Monterey now has permission to inject highly treated recycled wastewater into the Seaside basin for later use as drinking water. With staff offering its full-throated support, the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board on Thursday unanimously approved a permit blessing the recycled water project’s advanced treatment plan for purifying a variety of wastewater sources prior to pumping the water into the basin. The hearing was held at Watsonville City Hall. Monterey Regional Water Pollution Control Agency official Mike McCullough celebrated the latest step forward for the project.

 

Here’s a cold, wet reality: the more water in California’s reservoirs, the less urgency there is to build new ocean-water desalination plants that became a major talking point during the state’s long, parched years of drought, an ultra-dry period some folks insist has still not ended despite months of heavy rains. Those record or near-record rains have replenished everything reservoirs lost over the last few years of drought, and sometimes more.

When a market for trading water rights opened in central Nebraska last year, one of the initial bidders wasn’t a corn farmer, or even a water user at all in the traditional sense. It was the Platte River Recovery Implementation Program, a conservation group investing to replenish the region’s major river, the Platte. By buying some water and then not using it, the group is allowing more to stay in the river. The move bucked tradition, for sure. Typically, water rights aren’t traded at all or they are swapped among farmers.