It could also mean limited use of toilets and taps, an inconvenience that water and sewer districts across the state are scrambling to address before a blackout comes and nature calls.
November 8, 2018 was a dry day in Butte County, California. The state was in its sixth consecutive year of drought, and the county had not had a rainfall event producing more than a half inch of rain for seven months. The dry summer had parched the spring vegetation, and the strong northeasterly winds of autumn were gusting at 35 miles per hour and rising, creating red flag conditions: Any planned or unplanned fires could quickly get out of control.
A study led by Scripps Institution of Oceanography suggests that a new pattern of wet and dry extremes is emerging in California with extreme precipitation caused by streams of moisture in the sky known as atmospheric rivers.
Bob Wieckowski stands alone. He was the only state senator to vote against Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to clean up dirty drinking water in the California’s poorest communities, which passed the Senate in a 38-1 vote on Monday.
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.
For the better part of a day this April, San Diego’s main drinking water treatment plant wasn’t doing everything it was supposed to do to kill viruses and a nasty parasite known as Giardia before reaching taps across parts of the city, North County, East County and South Bay.
San Diego faces a hidden earthquake threat — to its water supply. A quake, even one so far away that nobody in San Diego feels it, could cause an emergency and force mandatory water-use restrictions. That’s because most of San Diego’s water comes from hundreds of miles away through threads of metal and concrete that connect us to distant rivers and reservoirs.
People in North Park say they’re fed up with rushing water and flood damage from recent water main breaks. There have been at least four major water main breaks, since 2017, in the same area.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
