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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.

 

 

Scott Slater, CEO of Cadiz Inc., has a controversial plan. He wants to pump 814 billion gallons of water from the Mojave Desert to Los Angeles, San Diego and other drought-stricken communities in Southern California—making more than $2 billion in the process.

 

Slater’s company owns the water rights to 45,000 acres of land in the Mojave Desert, and he’s already secured contracts to sell the water for $960 per acre-foot (the amount of water it takes to cover an acre of land in a foot of water), according to The Guardian. At that price, the company stands to make $2.4 billion over the 50-year period of its water extraction deal with San Bernardino County.

Ten years after the first seeds were planted for the proposed twin tunnels, the battle shifts to a new arena in 2016 — a critical year for the controversial project.

 

A small state agency will soon begin the daunting process of deciding whether to change the water rights for the state and federal water projects, allowing them to divert some of their water from the Sacramento River and bypass the Delta for the first time.

 

The water rights must be changed before a shovelful of earth can be turned.

 

But it won’t be simple. Months of hearings are expected, starting in April.

Old-school cooling systems on the roofs of larger Los Angeles buildings may be wasting billions of gallons of water each year.

The Los Angeles Times reported Saturday (http://tinyurl.com/zarkqn9) that some of these “swamp coolers” are so inefficient they can use as much water as all the bathrooms, drinking fountains and kitchens in the buildings below.

As California’s drought persists, officials are looking to supplement savings already won when property owners ripped out lawns or installed water-miserly appliances.

On California’s central coast, a region that usually receives drenching rainfall or fog for most of the year, some forests are now as arid as a desert. Streams that once ran at least at a trickle through summer have vanished in the ongoing drought, and environmentalists and fishermen fear that local salmon will disappear if climate conditions don’t improve.

The landscape desperately needs rain. It could also use beavers, according to ecologists who say the near eradication of Castor canadensis from parts of the West in the 19th century has magnified the effects of California’s worst dry spell in history.