Californians fought the urge to take long showers and generally slosh water around after all the rainfall this year, cutting water use instead by 26.1 percent in April, state officials said Monday.
Californians continued to save water in April despite the easing of the drought, reducing use by about 26 percent compared to 2013, the State Water Resources Control Board said Monday.
The reductions came before the recent roll back of harsh mandatory conservation targets. They also came during a relatively dry April. Sacramento received about 1.5 inches of rain during that month. Los Angeles saw about 0.3 inches. Water savings ranged from 23 percent along the south coast to about 33 percent in the San Joaquin valley, state data show. Water districts in the Sacramento River watershed cut use by 31 percent.
Touching down in Fresno one week ago, Donald Trump offered a standard Republican critique of California’s water shortage – that it is, as legions of roadside banners here proclaim, the “man-made” result of environmental policies restricting water flows.
Then he barreled further, declaring “there is no drought.”
But if exaggeration is Trump’s style, Hillary Clinton’s would appear to be avoidance.
The Democratic presidential frontrunner, campaigning in Fresno on Saturday, localized her longstanding criticism of Trump’s plan to deport undocumented immigrants living in the United States, pledging to make sure “that 1.2 million farmworkers in California will not be rounded up and deported.”
The California Senate approved two water measures by Sen. Lois Wolk, D-Davis, last week, including legislation to protect California’s aquifers and groundwater resources from permanent damage due to overdraft. Both bills will head to the Assembly next.
The Senate voted 21-17 to support Senate Bill 1317, which addresses a sharp increase in groundwater extraction through new and deeper drilling across the state during the drought, including water basins currently in critical overdraft.
It is easy to assume seawater desalination is the answer to California’s long-term water woes. All you have to do is look west, and the vast Pacific Ocean simply glimmers with opportunity.
But as with so many things involving water, desalination is not that simple. Converting seawater into drinking water is very expensive, it consumes a lot of electricity and it comes with a host of potentially unsavory environmental impacts.
With a Southern California water district’s purchase of 20,000 acres in the Delta expected to become official as soon as next week, San Joaquin County and central Delta farmers have erected one more legal hurdle in an effort to stop the deal. They filed suit in Contra Costa County Superior Court, alleging that the terms of the sale are in violation of an earlier legal agreement that contains rules about how the land can be used.
California’s drought is perhaps more of a political ping pong ball than it is anything else, but makes no mistake: drought in California is real; it happens; it’s cyclical; and, politicians have done nothing to mitigate its impacts to the state’s 40 million residents.
While El Niño arguably did not materialize as predicted it did fill northern California reservoirs. Shasta Lake is full, as are Lake Oroville and Folsom Lake. Those facts arguably moved state officials to allocate more than half the requested water allotments to State Water Project users, which include farmers and urban residents.
June 2, 2016 – The past week’s weather brought about a mixed bag of changes to the U.S. Drought Monitor map, with expansion of dryness and/or drought noted in the Northeast, Southeast, upper Great Lakes, northern Plains and Pacific Northwest. The most notable expansions this week are the advancement of D0 across the northern Cascades in Washington up to the Canadian border and the expansion of D0-D1 and a new area of D2 in the Southeast centered over northern Georgia, northern Alabama and southern Tennessee.
A water briefing in the Central Valley gave attendees an outline of how the water situation looks in California and clarified that the winter wasn’t as wet as some reports. The California Department of Water Resources and Water Education Foundation, in cooperation with the Center for Irrigation Technology, held a water briefing seminar at California State University of Fresno. The morning session had a statewide focus and speakers showed detailed information on where California stands with water and the implementation of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act.
Donald Trump has made surprising and even shocking statements a veritable staple of his campaign for president.
But possibly no statement surprised California farmers more than when he told thousands in Fresno’s Selland Arena last week that there is no drought.
Specifically, the businessman and former reality show host accused state lawmakers of directing water from the San Joaquin Delta away from farms and communities to improve habitats for delta smelt – though he didn’t mention the delta by name and he referred to the smelt as a “three-inch fish.”
