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U.S. EPA plans to repeal and replace the Clean Water Rule with two separate rulemaking processes, an EPA official told the Association of State Wetland Managers yesterday. In a talk to the association’s annual winter meeting, Mindy Eisenberg, acting director of the EPA wetlands division, said that the agency plans to first rescind the Obama administration’s contentious regulation and then work on a new definition for “waters of the United States,” according to multiple people who attended the meeting.

 

California’s climate has long been dominated by cycles of intense dry conditions followed by heavy rain and snow. But never before in recorded history has the state seen such an extreme drought-to-deluge swing. Experts and state water officials say California is seeing more of these intense weather swings as temperatures warm, which has profound implications for the droughts and floods the state may face in the generations to come.

At the height of the California drought, images of empty reservoirs became the poster children of a state that desperately needed water. Their low water levels revealed massive swaths of dry, cracked lake beds. Now that the state has finally moved out of the drought with a rainy season marked by ceaseless moisture-packed storms, these same reservoirs are filled with water and 100 to 170 percent of their historical averages. Brimming and replenished, they’re a symbol of the state’s recovery.

In this remarkable water year, which ended more than five years of severe drought in most areas of California, there are still plenty of noteworthy water questions to contemplate and act upon. Here’s the central one: Three years after California passed what’s often called a landmark groundwater regulation law, no one knows how much under-surface water remains accessible to wells and no one has a clue about how much replenishment the state’s supplies actually got from the winter’s massive storms.

President Donald Trump’s top land and dam manager will meet Thursday with Gov. Jerry Brown in Sacramento. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke plans on discussing water, fire, infrastructure and conservation with Brown before heading to Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks on Thursday and Friday, said Interior spokesman Heather Swift in an email. It’s not clear whether Brown’s office extended the invite or the other way around.