More rain is on the way. A lot more rain. “That’s really the theme now,” said National Weather Service Eureka meteorologist William Iwasko on Sunday. “… Nice sunny skies probably are not going to happen this week.” So much rain is expected, a flood watch was issued by the weather service for parts of Humboldt, Trinity and Del Norte counties on Sunday.
Angelenos can expect a hot Thanksgiving this year, with record-breaking temperatures forecast across the region. The mercury is expected to steadily rise throughout the week, with Wednesday and Thursday forecasted to be the hottest days. Forecasters predict a high of 89 degrees in downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday, which would tie a record set in 1950, and 87 degrees on Thursday, said Kathy Hoxsie, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. At Los Angeles International Airport, temperatures will reach 86 and 84 on Wednesday and Thursday, respectively.
The update of the Rainbow Water District capacity charges included allowing for smaller meters. The Rainbow board voted 4-0, with Hayden Hamilton absent, July 27, to approve the revisions in the district’s capacity fee ordinance which also changes the wastewater capacity fee variable for single-family homes from number of bedrooms to square footage of the house. Capacity fees are one-time charges to developers who purchase system capacity for water and sewer services. “It’s primarily a buy-in charge,” Rainbow general manager Tom Kennedy said.
San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer is moving ahead with the city’s plans to buy power from someone other than San Diego Gas & Electric, but he’s given the power company a chance to make its case to preserve its monopoly. The city has an ambitious plan to fight climate change. It says 100 percent of electricity sold within city limits must come from renewable sources by 2035. Right now, SDG&E is the greenest major power company in the state but still gets most of its power by burning natural gas.
When the California drought began to take hold in 2011, a mysterious thing happened: People began cutting back drastically on their water consumption – even before mandatory conservation was ordered by their local water agencies and state government. Newsha Ajami, director of Urban Water Policy with Stanford University’s Water in the West program, started hearing about this from water utilities during the drought. After the drought ended, she and a team of graduate students started to investigate why it happened.
The storms that blew through Northern California this week raised the water level of Lake Oroville about 4 feet, but it’s a long way from where the spillways might need to be used. The lake started rising about noon on Wednesday, according to the Department of Water Resources website, and in the next 48 hours climbed to about 695.5 feet above sea level by noon Friday. That’s 118 feet below the gates that would allow the repaired main spillway to be used, and 206 feet below the lip of the emergency spillway, where repair work is continuing.
Ten years after learning of the need to replace or repair the dam at Lake Wohlford, officials at the city of Escondido are still trying to raise the money. It’s a substantial sum — $45 million to $50 million — and they’re about halfway to it. Completion of the project would enable the city to store about twice as much water as it now can in the man-made reservoir and still prevent flooding from the structure in the event of a big earthquake.
It’s been more than half a century since Californians started talking seriously about building a new conveyance system – canals or tunnels – to divert water around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta to south Delta pumps for export to farms and cities in the south. California’s Department of Water Resources’ California Water Plan suggested a “Trans-Delta System” in 1957 to convey water around the Delta. And in the 1960s the idea of a “peripheral canal” emerged.
A storm system tapping an atmospheric river of moisture is bringing heavy rain to portions of California, including some burn areas through Thursday as heavy snow potentially snarls travel in the Sierra Nevada. The stream of moisture piping its way toward the West Coast from the Pacific Ocean can be seen in the yellow and orange shadings in this satellite image. An atmospheric river is a thin and long plume of moisture that stretches from the tropics or subtropics into higher latitudes.
Competing in a bass fishing tournament two years ago, Todd Steele cast his rod from his 21-foot motorboat — unaware that he was being poisoned. A thick, green scum coated western Lake Erie. And Steele, a semipro angler, was sickened by it. Driving home to Port Huron, Michigan, he felt lightheaded, nauseous. By the next morning he was too dizzy to stand, his overheated body covered with painful hives. Hospital tests blamed toxic algae, a rising threat to U.S. waters.
