In February, 1914, the rainfall in the Mojave Desert region exceeded by nearly fifty per cent in three days the average annual precipitation.
Where the steel siphon crosses Antelope valley at the point of greatest depression, an arroyo or run-off wash indicated that fifteen feet was the extreme width of the flood stream, and the pipe was carried over the wash on concrete piers set just outside the high water lines.
A judge has refused to block a Southern California water agency’s controversial purchase of five islands in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
Judge Barbara Kronlund in San Joaquin Superior Court declined to grant a temporary restraining order Friday to officials from San Joaquin and Contra Costa counties, who sued two weeks ago to keep the Metropolitan Water District from completing its $175 million purchase of the five islands.
Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, speaking at the state Republican Party Convention, dug into the state’s complex water policies Saturday, suggesting that it might be possible to replenish the Delta smelt population with a little romantic music and a disco ball.
More than a trillion gallons of fresh water have been dumped into the Pacific Ocean “because of a little three-inch bait fish,” Cruz said, saying the state’s environmental policies have overreached in protecting it.
California faces major changes in its water supply. The sooner everyone realizes these changes are coming, the better the state will be able to cope with what lies ahead.
Today’s changes are driven by efforts to end groundwater depletion, by sea level rise and loss of snowpack, salts and nitrate accumulating in groundwater, new invasive species, population growth and California’s globalized economy and agriculture.
Ready or not, California’s new Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (“SGMA”) is here and mine operators should be vigilant in monitoring and actively participating in developments under the law. Previously, the use of groundwater was largely unregulated. Now local agencies are in the driver’s seat when it comes to addressing a very complex problem: managing groundwater to ensure sustainability.
Earlier this week, environmental consultant Bob Anderson, of Geosyntec and Stoel Rives attorneys Wes Miliband and Tom Henry hosted a webinar about the implications of SGMA for mine operators.
A judge on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit seeking to force the city of San Francisco to drain Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, a key part of the water system for 2.6 million residents of Bay Area cities stretching from Hayward to San Jose to San Francisco.
Releasing its draft Urban Water Management Plan (UWMP), the San Diego County Water Authority said that San Diego County will continue to have a safe and reliable water supply for decades. Urban Water Management Plans must be updated every five years by law.
The draft plan — known as the 2015 UWMP based on when the updating process began — estimates that the region’s future water demands will be about 14 percent lower in 2020 and about 15 percent lower in 2035 compared to projections in the 2010 plan.
The increase came despite removals of about 45,000 acres of trees in 2015 — much of which occurred after harvest — and continues a trend in which acreage has doubled in the last 20 years, according to government and industry statistics.
As California enters its fifth year of official drought — and its ninth dry year in the past 10 — the elements of a modern, sustainable water system are finally taking shape. The state is improving water efficiency in agriculture and urban areas, expanding wastewater treatment and reuse, figuring out how to capture more storm water, and starting to monitor and manage badly over-drafted groundwater basins.
In Washington D.C., however, special interests are still pushing ineffective and inequitable water strategies. Nowhere is this tension between new water strategies and outmoded federal thinking more apparent than in the California drought legislation currently before Congress.
A Tuolumne County judge has thrown out a lawsuit seeking to drain San Francisco’s Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, the linchpin of a system that supplies drinking water to 2.5 million people in the Bay Area.
In a ruling delivered Thursday, Superior Court Judge Kevin Seibert sided with San Francisco officials who have objected to emptying the reservoir, situated in Yosemite National Park, and restoring the valley it now occupies. Restore Hetch Hetchy, the group that sued to shut down Hetch Hetchy, had argued that the dam and reservoir violate Article X, Section 2 of the California Constitution.
