The latest Spring snowstorms helped increase California’s water supply and lake levels, but the Golden State continues to face drought conditions.
April’s wet weather in northern California have increased water levels at lakes like Folsom Lake.
“The particular storm of this week increased the rain and snow over northern California by about 5-10 percent,” said Meteorologist and forecaster Jim Mathews with the National Weather Service.
Heavy snow in Northern California has given a recent boost of moisture to a region grappling with drought.
The Central Sierra Snow Lab at the University of California, Berkeley said Friday that more than 16 inches (43 centimeters) of snow fell in the past day.
“We are now at 61% of our normal #snow #water equivalent for this date,” said a tweet from the lab specializing in snow hydrology and climatology.
The spring storm had triggered warnings from the Oregon border down through the southern Cascades and the northern Sierra Nevada. But the late-season precipitation was welcome after a dry winter.
Spirits live here. That’s what Paiute and Shoshone tribal members say about the Owens Lake playa, an arid, eerily flat expanse along the eastern Sierra Nevada range that is prone to choking dust storms.
It is best known as the focal point of a historic feud that began in the early 1900s, when Los Angeles city agents quietly bought up ranch lands and water rights for an aqueduct to quench the thirst of the growing metropolis 200 miles to the south.
L.A. diverted so much water via the aqueduct system that the 110-square-mile lake dried up and it was nearly impossible for local farmers and ranchers to make a living — a scandal dramatized in the classic 1974 film “Chinatown.”
Bounded by the Bitterroot Mountains to the west and the Sapphire Mountains to the east, Montana’s Bitterroot Valley is home to renowned fly fishing streams and soaring vistas. Its forests, however, are facing the greatest wildfire risk in the entire state, with towns like Florence, Victor and Darby all in the nation’s 98th-plus percentile for risk. Yet houses continue to be built at a rapid clip, many of them in hazardous areas.
Theoretically, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a $1.2 trillion bill that funds improvements in transportation, water, energy, broadband and climate resilience projects, should be able to help.
The Olivenhain Municipal Water District recently completed the Manchester Avenue Potable Water Pipeline Project. In total, 3,700 linear feet of aged potable water pipeline was replaced along Manchester Avenue, Rancho Santa Fe Road and Encinitas Boulevard.
The pipelines previously serving water in this area were installed in 1961 and were approaching the end of their lifespan. OMWD takes a proactive approach in repairing and replacing aging water infrastructure to avoid leaks and ensure the continuation of uninterrupted water service to its customers. In the third year of drought in California, projects like this pipeline replacement, help save potable water and reduces costs to ratepayers.
“Emergency leaks are very costly, can waste millions of gallons of water, and can be disruptive to surrounding communities,” said Bob Topolovac, OMWD board director. “The investments we made to prevent these emergencies will benefit our ratepayers well into the future.”
Crews complete the final backfilling and repaving of the excavation area on Manchester Avenue required to facilitate the new pipeline installation. Photo: Olivenhain Municipal Water District
The project completion map shows streets now fully opened to traffic and restored. Graphic: Olivenhain Municipal Water District
To minimize the impact on the surrounding community, construction took place mainly at night. The project was completed on time and with no major disruptions or water outages to the impacted community. OMWD coordinated with the City of Encinitas on a traffic management plan to mitigate construction traffic, and there were no significant traffic impacts.
(Editor’s note: The Olivenhain Municipal Water District is one of the San Diego County Water Authority’s 24 member agencies that deliver water across the metropolitan San Diego region.)
Chula Vista, Calif. – Earlier this month, Sweetwater Authority (Authority) received calls from customers in the City of National City regarding discoloration of their drinking water. Upon receiving these calls, staff from the Authority’s Water Quality department deployed staff into the field to perform site investigations at several homes and businesses. An in-depth investigation led staff to find a significant change in system pressure, which was the result of a new water main that was being installed and a zone valve being inadvertently opened. Once this valve was closed, the water discoloration ceased. The Authority is working on continued enhancements to its best management practices to mitigate these types of events from occurring in the future.
After weeks of work, I’m pleased to report that thanks to the improved relationship between the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) and the San Diego County Water Authority, along with increased collaboration with other water agencies across Southern California, we helped reduce proposed rate increases to our wholesale water supplies by 7 percentage points over the next two years. This is good news for water ratepayers!
The bottom line is this: Instead of raising wholesale water costs by 17% over the next two years, MWD unanimously adopted consecutive 5% increases. This will allow MWD to cover increasing costs facing every sector of our economy, including our water industry, while limiting the impact on residents and businesses.
Mired in an extreme drought, California lawmakers on Thursday took the first step toward lowering the standard for how much water people use in their homes — a move that won’t be enforced on individual customers but could lead to higher rates even as consumption declines.
California’s current standard for residential indoor water use is 55 gallons (208 liters) per person per day. The rule doesn’t apply to customers, meaning regulators don’t write tickets to people for using more water than they are allowed.
Emily Tianshi has loved coming to Torrey Pines State Preserve since she was young.
The beach and preserve is one of the very few places where its namesake grows. As a curious middle schooler with an interest in biology, she became fascinated with the rarely studied tree.
“Because the pine is so rare, nobody had studied its mechanisms before,” she says. “I would observe that the Torrey Pine needles are able to condense water from the marine layer that comes through the State Park and use that to water itself in the midst of drought.”
As warm spring winds whip the Eastern Plains, sapping soils of moisture, and the state’s reservoirs sit at below-average levels, water managers got more bad news Tuesday: this two-year drought cycle could continue through the summer and into the fall leading the state into its third year of below-average snowpack and streamflows and high wildfire danger.
Looking ahead the weather pattern known as La Niña, which has created the intense drought of the past two years, is likely to continue, according to Peter Goble, a climate specialist with Colorado State University’s Colorado Climate Center.
Sweetwater Authority Logo 2019