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When the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation announced last month that the country’s largest reservoir, Lake Mead, had fallen to its lowest-ever level at 1,074ft (327m), the question many asked was: How will it affect one of California’s primary drinking sources?

After all, some 19 million Californians, nearly half the state’s population, receive some part of their water from the Colorado River, which flows into the 80-year-old reservoir created by Hoover Dam outside Las Vegas.

With triple-digit heat, a full moon and fires raging from Santa Barbara County to the Mexican border, another summer straight out of end times has arrived.

Monday’s summer solstice followed an unsettling 13 consecutive months of record-setting heat on this planet, in a year that is on track to be, yet again, the hottest ever. Across the American West, warnings of dangerous heat have been issued, spanning four states and some 40 million people. At least five deaths have been attributed to the heat wave so far in Arizona, which hit 120 degrees in Yuma.

 

California’s drought and a bark beetle epidemic have caused the largest die-off of Sierra Nevada forests in modern history, raising fears that trees could come crashing down on people or fuel deadly wildfires that could wipe out mountain communities.

Aerial images show vast forests that have turned a rust-color. The epidemic has killed an estimated 40 million trees since 2010 in the central and southern Sierra, and it’s spreading north. Officials who are cutting down and stacking the most dangerous trees in piles across six counties, however, say they are stumped by how to get rid of them all.

There’s only so many acre-feet of water jargon the public can absorb during a drought. Here’s a primer that avoids wading into cubic-feet-per-second, appropriative water rights, overdraft, conjunctive water use and the like.

As a Delta farmer managing my family’s farming operation so it can be here for the next generation I am infuriated by what I see about the Delta water issues.An editorial by Jerry Meral of the Natural Heritage Institute has started appearing in local papers. This name may sound familiar if you follow Delta water issues. Meral was the leading tunnel advocate (T.A.) for Gov. Brown, also known as Gov. Tunnel Vision (T.V.), when he went to work for him in Sacramento.