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The El Nino rains have brought some relief to drought-stricken California. The U.S. Drought Monitor is reporting that the percentage of the state in exceptional drought is half of what it was at the beginning of the year – 21 percent versus 44.8 percent in January. At least one water district has decided to loosen its water usage restrictions.

But Jay Famiglietti, senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, says water scarcity is a chronic condition in California and the drought is far from over.http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2016/05/05/california-drought-eases

Water supplies in many California public schools have repeatedly exceeded safe drinking standards. The report from the Community Water Center looked at nearly 7,000 public schools around California. It found between 2003 and 2014, up to 24 percent of the schools had water that violated safe standards.

“Bacterial and arsenic violations were the most common types of violations impacting schools, but they were also followed by the pesticide DBCP, disinfectant byproducts, and nitrates,”says lead author Jenny Rempel with the Community Water Center.

Thunder and lightning hit the north valley this week and flashing, booming skies could continue through Saturday evening.

“There’s an unsettled pattern, we do have a large trough of low pressure over the West Coast right now,” said Karl Swanberg, a forecaster with the National Weather Service’s Sacramento office. “These enhanced features, they just rotate around the low pressure, so you get little waves of energy bringing a chance of showers and in your area, thunderstorms.”

Louie Campos stopped drinking the water from his faucets in Visalia, California, so long ago that it takes him a minute to recall just how many years it has been since he held a glass to the tap and took a swill. By his closest approximation, the plainspoken 43-year-old has ripped through a 24-pack of bottled water a week for the last eight years. Bottled water, he says, is a hidden tax Visalia’s residents must pay to live there.

 

Flowing over 250 miles to from the high desert of southern Oregon through the Cascades Mountains before emptying out into the Pacific Ocean in northern California, the Klamath River and its Coho and Chinook salmon and steelhead runs were vital to Native American tribes for thousands of years before settlers arrived.

But within decades of their arrival there would be half a dozen dams constructed on the river, effectively blocking salmon and steelhead migrations on what was once the third-highest salmon producing river on the West Coast.