February 27, 2020 – After securing more than $350 million in “Water Stewardship Rate” benefits for the San Diego region, the San Diego County Water Authority’s Board of Directors today voted to dismiss certain related claims against the Los Angeles-based Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.
The California Natural Resources Agency this week released its Salton Sea Management Program annual report, which trumpeted the first completed dust suppression project and set ambitious goals for upcoming mitigation efforts.
The report lays out an aggressive target of 3,800 acres on which the agency hopes to complete efforts to tamp down dust by the end of 2020 to catch up with its long-term benchmarks.
“We’re well-positioned and have identified a suite of projects that will help us accomplish that goal by the end of this year,” said Arturo Delgado, the agency’s assistant secretary for Salton Sea policy.
Water plays a lead role in the state’s political theater, with Democrats and Republicans polarized, farmers often fighting environmentalists and cities pitted against rural communities. Rivers are overallocated through sloppy water accounting. Groundwater has dwindled as farmers overdraw aquifers. Many communities lack safe drinking water. Native Americans want almost-extinct salmon runs revived. There is talk, too, of new water projects, including a massive new tunnel costing billions of dollars.
A winter with little precipitation has left most of California abnormally dry and officials are bracing for the possibility of an early and more intense wildfire season amid record-breaking temperatures.
Drought has expanded to nearly a quarter of the state, mainly in central California, the heart of the state’s agricultural sector, according to a U.S. Drought Monitor map mad public Thursday. The map shows 70 percent of the state is abnormally dry.
California began regulating surface water in rivers and streams in 1914, but it took the state another 100 years to look underground.
In 2014, for the first time in its history, California passed a law regulating the use of groundwater – the resource on which 85% of its population and much of its $50bn agriculture industry rely.
The March through May wonderment that we know as The Flower Fields at Carlsbad Ranch will once again explode with tissue-like petals of Tecolote ranunculus, Mother Nature’s sign that spring is on the way.
Seven million flowers — in hues of red, purple, orange, gold, rose, pink and white — will fill row upon row of the more than 50 acres of hillside that overlooks the Pacific Ocean.
California, as everyone knows, receives virtually all of its precipitation during a few fall and winter months and in 2019, some early rain and snow storms promised a bountiful water year.
This year, Mother Nature kept that promise in Southern California, where precipitation is running at or above the normal, but Northern California — far more important from a water supply standpoint — has been a different story.
The north has seen almost no precipitation since Christmas, the all-important Sierra snowpack is less than half of its average depth, and the region’s balmy, springlike weather shows no signs of ending.
With unusually dry, hot weather continuing for weeks on end and the driest February in the Bay Area in 156 years, nearly a quarter of California’s land area now is under drought conditions, federal officials announced Thursday.
Altogether, 23.3% of the state is in “moderate drought” — up from 9.5% last week, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, a weekly report issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
It shouldn’t have come to this.
California has seen wars over water waged across time eternal it seems. Grand deals negotiated by the likes of former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger have been hailed as long-dreamed-for solutions to the complicated battles waged by the competing interests of agriculture, environmentalists and thirsty urban areas, only to fail to live up to their hype.
In recent months, however, it seemed that Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration was breaking the logjam, working on a compromise that would help realign the state’s water paradigm to something all sides could accept.
“I’m trying to put together a peace plan in the delta,” Wade Crowfoot, Newsom’s secretary of the Natural Resources Agency, is quoted in a column this week by the Los Angeles Times’ George Skelton. “I don’t want to be a Pollyanna, but there’s beginning to be a sea change in many of these water users. They’re just tired of fighting.”
After a week that saw President Donald Trump visit Bakersfield to pledge more water for Central Valley farmers and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration respond with a lawsuit, farmers and water agencies looked for ways to continue work on voluntary agreements intended to ease California’s water disputes.
Trump announced his administration had finalized new federal rules to guide operations in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta for the federal Central Valley Project and the State Water Project. The lawsuit filed by the state the next day asserts that new biological opinions prepared by federal agencies lack safeguards for protected species and their habitat.
