Seismologist Lucy Jones hikes through a dirt trail into a canyon, past a riverbed, and through some brush in Altadena. She kneels down and points at a thick layer of greenish-grey clay, snaking through the sloping terrain among rocks and dirt.
“This is the fault! Isn’t it amazing?”
The biggest freshwater rivers on Earth don’t flow along the planet’s surface. Instead, they surge and whip through the atmosphere thousands of feet above our heads, carrying 2½ times the amount of water that gushes through the Amazon River at any given time. They’re called atmospheric rivers, or, more aptly, rivers in the sky. These rivers are capable of burying Sacramento under 30 feet of water.
The Helix Water District says it remains committed to the East County Advanced Water Purification Project, a multimillion-dollar, multi-agency recycled water project facilitated by the Padre Dam Municipal Water District in Santee.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
