Water providers are feeling the squeeze.
The drought, rising populations, and environmental concerns are pushing agencies to move toward what, for most, was unthinkable decades before: pushing sewer water into the tap.
While health officials in California, and elsewhere, work out the details, water consortiums are moving on the process to make this new tap water source a reality.
California’s Orange County Water District took ‘reuse and reduce’ to a whole new level with its ground-breaking work in recycling used water. Its general manager Michael R. Markus shares his insights on the organisation’s decades-long journey in protecting the region’s water basin and ensuring water security for millions, efforts that helped it win the 2014 Lee Kuan Yew Water Prize.
In preparation for the initial 2016 water supply allocation announcement later this winter, the Bureau of Reclamation is providing an update on water supply conditions for the federal Central Valley Project (CVP). The water year (WY) runs from October 1 to September 30; the contract year for most CVP contractors runs from March 1 to February 28.
California’s current drought crisis isn’t going away any time soon, and state authorities have cast their nets far and wide looking for any way of conserving what little water they have left. Now California Governor Jerry Brown has unveiled new details of a plan for two huge pipes, powered by gravity, to improve the flow of water around the Sunshine State.
The major infrastructure project is called the California Water Fix, and it turns the current system on its head.
Forget about selfies. In California, residents are using smartphones and drones to document the coastline’s changing face.
Starting this month, The Nature Conservancy is asking tech junkies to capture the flooding and coastal erosion that come with El Nino, a weather pattern that’s bringing California its wettest winter in years — and all in the name of science.
Six Northern California Democrats are breaking from Gov. Jerry Brown to demand a vote on his proposed tunnels to send water to Southern California. Democratic Assemblywoman Susan Talamantes Eggman of Stockton said Friday that she’ll introduce a bill to ask voters about the $15.5 billion project.
The Democratic governor has proposed building two massive tunnels in the San Joaquin Delta to supply residents and farmland further south.
Farmers in California’s fertile San Joaquin Valley are bracing to receive no irrigation water from a federal system of reservoirs and canals for a third consecutive year and looking to El Nino to produce the very wet winter they need.
The year kicked off with heavy rains and an above-average snowpack in the Sierra Nevada. The El Nino — a global weather system associated with wet winters in California — may play out nationwide through late spring or beyond, officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say.
The recent onslaught of El Nino storms only slightly increased the levels of California reservoirs that now stand at half of historic depths for this time of year, federal officials said Friday while releasing an initial water outlook for 2016.
The federally operated reservoirs that supply farms and cities throughout the agriculture-rich Central Valley are now 49 percent full, compared with 47 percent on Oct. 1, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said.
I have stated this before and I will say it again. This has not been your typical strong El Nino West Coast winter, at least through what looks like now much of January.
The Pacific Northwest has been consistently wet. Most of western Washington and Oregon are 30 to 60 percent above normal in precipitation since Oct. 1. Northern and north-central California are about normal while the Sierra snow is anywhere from normal to 25 percent above normal. Meanwhile, from San Luis Obispo on south precipitation totals are averaging 30 to 40 percent below normal. For Southern California, three of the five usually wettest months have already gone by.
With January more than half over and the much-hyped dousing of southern California by El Nino-related storms nowhere to be seen, weather experts are urging patience.
The smattering of short-lived El Nino-driven storms that hit California in early January were actually ahead of schedule, experts told the Los Angeles Times this week. In previous El Nino years, the majority of the rainfall has occurred in February, March, and even April and May.
