California regulators approved new rules last month to enable water suppliers to treat wastewater and redistribute it as drinking water. The state says that the new standards, which took years to craft, are the most advanced in the nation for treating wastewater and will add millions of gallons of additional drinking water to state supplies.
A heating planet and expanding commercial agriculture are putting increasing pressure on America’s vital aquifers — underground reservoirs that supply water to an estimated 145 million Americans, as well as supporting much of the nation’s food supply.
The push towards a green, battery-powered future comes with a major tradeoff. Student reporters from the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at Arizona State University discovered that increased mining for lithium inside the United States will stress freshwater aquifers. Caitlin Thompson has their investigation.
For the second time in a month, torrential flooding returned to Southern California this week with El Niño-fueled rains rolling in off the Pacific Ocean. This time San Diego felt the punch. The city, known for weather “the closest thing to perfect in America,” experienced one of its wettest days on record.
Hydrologists measure large amounts of water in acre-feet – an acre of water one-foot deep, or 326,000 gallons. In an average year, 200 million acre-feet of water falls on California as rain or snow. The vast majority of it sinks into the ground or evaporates, but about a third of it finds its way into rivers. Half of that will eventually flow into the Pacific Ocean.
Weather officials had been warning Californians about the wrath of El Niño for months — even as some residents had begun to think the typically soaking climate pattern had gone AWOL.
It’s hard to think of a California company that carries more toxic baggage than Cadiz Inc. The Los Angeles firm has been trying for more than 20 years to advance a plan to siphon water from under the Mojave Desert and pump it to users throughout Southern California.
Metropolitan Water District representative Cynthia Kurtz reported that the agency has 3.4 million acre-feet of water in storage, enough to meet the future demand of its customers regardless of the weather.
In a sign of the ongoing threats to its precious groundwater stores, half a dozen regions in California rank among the world’s most rapidly declining aquifers, according to research published today.
The pump is primed for another stretch of very stormy weather next week and into early February. What forecasters have yet to fully determine is where the next fire hose of moisture will be aimed: at San Diego again, at points to the north or even at the entire state of California.
