Southern California’s Salton Sea, the largest lake in California, has seen its share of ups and downs since it was accidentally created in 1905 by Colorado River floodwaters. Now, already badly polluted by chemicals from agricultural irrigation runoff, which provides the lake’s inflow, the surrounding shoreline is in danger of becoming a toxic blight.
Below the streets of La Mesa, a big project is taking place. San Diego’s Water Authority is in the process of relining four miles of pipes that have been around for nearly 60 years. News 8’s Shawn Styles goes underground to give you a closer look at the work.
A winter storm is forecast to strike next week in Southern California that could bring up to 4 inches of rain and result in mudslides or flooding in some wildfire-scarred areas. Crews were scrambling this week to clean out debris in catch basins and prepare for heavy rains forecast to fall in burn areas Tuesday into Wednesday. The absence of vegetation and roots in burned-out hillsides and canyons makes them more susceptible to mudslides and even landslides, officials said.
Businesses and restaurants in Little Italy are asking the city of San Diego for money after a water main break last year. On July 30, 2017, a 16-inch concrete main broke at Kettner Boulevard and Juniper Street in Little Italy. “This was a pretty horrendous water break,” said Marco Li Mandri with the Little Italy Association of San Diego. Water flooded streets for hours. Normally busy restaurants and businesses were forced to close. “Kettner was shut down the entire day and you obviously can’t do any food service without water.”
Water customers across the city of San Diego have contacted NBC 7 Responds with complaints they are being charged by the city for more water than they actually used. These customers are not talking about their water rates, rather homeowners say their water use suddenly skyrocketed in one or more billing periods, leading to hundreds of dollars in higher charges.
San Diego’s weather, year after year, is more apt to be abnormal than “normal.” It’ll be wet one year, dry the next, dry the next, dry the next and then super wet the next. What San Diego really has is an average (10.34 inches of rain annually) that is a blend of the majority dry years and the occasional wet ones. No one would apply the word “normal” – or “average” – to 2017. It was both super wet and super dry at times, although consistently warm.
The water is back on now for the more than 60 businesses that were without water after a water main break in National City. It all started around 6 a.m. Thursday, when residents saw water running down West 16th Street and Coolidge Avenue. Water could be seen flooding several yards, but there was no damage to any property, just an inconvenience with no water for morning commuters. The Sweetwater Authority closed the affected area and forced drivers to find a way around the mess, while crews continued to fix the pipe and figure out what caused it to break.
The Trump administration, teeing up a fight with California regulators, is trying to pump more water through the fragile Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to the southern half of the state despite fresh evidence of the estuary’s shrinking fish population. A proposal by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to “maximize water deliveries” represents the administration’s first concrete effort to make good on a promise Donald Trump made while campaigning for the presidency in Fresno, where he vowed to deliver more water to San Joaquin Valley farmers and derided protections for endangered fish species.
States throughout the West have rushed to legalize marijuana over the last four years. The biggest by far is California, where recreational use of the drug became legal on January 1. The states are clamoring for the tax revenue in these new markets, but they seem less concerned with how they may affect water resources. Even now, no state regulators can answer a basic question about marijuana cultivation: How much water will this new industry consume? Yet state and local governments are permitting tens of thousands of indoor and outdoor marijuana farms without such answers.
Californians thirsting for relief from a parched, nearly rainless start to the state’s wet season are finally getting some relief this week. The single meteorological factor contributing to one of the driest final three months of the year on record in California has been a stubborn area of high pressure aloft. Nicknamed the “ridiculously resilient ridge” during the heart of the state’s exceptional drought earlier in the decade, this atmospheric roadblock has steered the Pacific storm track well north of California much of the fall and early winter so far.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
