The Truckee River Operating Agreement is a done deal.
Parties to the landmark water compact, which went into effect Dec. 1 after nearly three decades of negotiations and work, took time out Tuesday to celebrate.
“From a drought perspective, this is a game changer,” Leo Drozdoff, director of the Nevada Department of Conservation & Natural Resource, said Jan. 5. “It provides certainty in uncertain times.”
California’s historic drought has forced the state to rely on underground water reserves to an extent unseen in decades. One of the biggest water issues facing the state is how to maintain and rebuild its groundwater supply.
“After four years of drought, farmers are looking to gather up more water than ever,” said Jay R. Lund, director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis. “People are going to be trying to refill aquifers with increased motivation due to the fourth year of drought.”
Water-starved Folsom Lake is beginning to slowly fill up and recover from its lowest water levels ever.
The state’s ninth-largest reservoir, the main water source for the sprawling Sacramento suburbs, shrank to a mere 135,561 acre feet on Dec. 4, 2015. The previous lowest level at Folsom was 140,600 acre feet, recorded during the 1976–77 drought. An acre foot is enough water to flood an acre of land under a foot of water, and roughly the amount required by a family of four over a year.
Godzilla El Niño stormed ashore in Southern California today, offering up a good drenching that has caused flooding, closed roads, and transformed the usually trickling Los Angeles River into a raging torrent.
Today’s fast-moving tempest will be just the first in a parade of storms this week. An El-Niño-energized subtropical jet stream promises to help deliver at least two more rounds of copious rainfall to the drought-plagued region between now and Sunday.
Restore the Delta and its coalition partners on Tuesday filed either formal protests or notices of intent to make formal statements with the State Water Resources Control Board to oppose permitting to change the point of water diversion in the Sacramento River to allow for Gov. Edmund Brown Jr.’s water tunnels to be built.
The twin tunnels touted by Mr. Brown would each be 40 feet in diameter and extend 30-35 miles.
El Niño gave Sacramento its biggest rainstorm in more than a year Tuesday, overwhelming gutters and snarling traffic but putting another small dent in the drought.
The second straight day of El Niño storms meant snow chain controls for much of the Sierra Nevada and occasional traffic accidents throughout the Sacramento region. A pre-dawn big-rig crash on southbound Highway 99 near Dillard Road forced lane closures, while a car crash later in the morning on northbound Interstate 5 near Pocket Road caused headaches for commuters. Vehicles encountered significant flooding early in the day on the Capital City Freeway, near the E Street exit. Caltrans said a jackknifed big rig near the Nevada border brought eastbound traffic on Interstate 80 to a halt for about an hour.
Amid California’s worst drought in recent memory, the city of Shasta Lake is eyeing looking into studying whether to raise water utility rates.
“The loss of revenue due to decreased water sales coupled with the rapidly increasing cost of water supply cannot be sustained for a prolonged period of time,” said John Duckett, city manager.
He will ask the City Council to approve a $66,030 contract with the Los Angeles-based Raftelis Financial Consultants, Inc., for a water rate study at the council’s meeting Tuesday night.
Paul G. Peschel has been named the Kings River Conservation District’s new general manager, agency officials announced Monday.
Peschel, the planning and engineering manager for the Imperial Irrigation District Energy Department in El Centro, will begin his new job for the Fresno-based agency on Jan. 25. He replaces David Orth.
A registered civil engineer, Peschel has a background in water resources, engineering and management. He was employed by the Imperial Irrigation District for nearly 30 years, starting as an assistant engineer for the district located in southeast California.
Up to an inch of rain or more could fall on the central San Joaquin Valley on Tuesday, the National Weather Service said, as the first in a series of El Niño-fueled storms arrives in California.
Around the Valley, workers were preparing by making sandbags available to residents and pumping water through the basin systems, but the storms are expected to drop large amounts of rain over a long period instead of brief, strong showers that frequently cause flooding.
“It will pretty much be a steady rain,” said David Spector, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Hanford.
The kind of rainy weather pattern shaping up for Central California this week has not occurred since 2010, the National Weather Service said Saturday.
A series of storms is expected to roll into Central California and will make for the most days with rain since before the drought began.
Three separate storms are on track to hit the central San Joaquin Valley Valley, meteorologist Brian Ochs said. The total expected rainfall for the three systems in the Valley is around 1 to 1.5 inches.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
