Much of the torrential rain that fell on Southern California this week flowed right into the ocean, just like it did before the state’s epic drought.
That seemed like a good idea for many years, as storm drains provided a crucial defense against flooding. But with California entering what may be a fifth year of drought, water agencies are slowly moving to capture and store more of this precious resource.
Folsom Lake, one of the water storage areas in northern California, rose almost 30 feet in just 30 days. The increase was thanks in big part to the recent series of storms, bringing multiple days of rain to the Central Valley.
According to the National Weather Service, Folsom Lake rose steadily at the end of December, then took a sharp increase starting December 22. Folsom Lake is now at 52 percent of average for this date.
A California lawmaker is dramatically raising the stakes in water management, proposing fines that could reach thousands of dollars a day and public shaming of people who use too much.
Legislation introduced this week would require the state’s 411 urban water districts to set local limits on household water consumption during drought emergencies.
Cold weather and heavy snowfall this winter may mean the end of drought in 2016 — maybe.
According to the first water supply outlook report for the year — released by USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service — all basins in Oregon are experiencing above-normal snowpack levels, an estimated 125 percent of average.
That’s for the basins. The news gets even better. Snowfall levels already have surpassed the peak levels of last year’s snow season in all locations statewide. All locations.
Water managers are cautiously optimistic that the state will see drought recovery.
The Vallecitos Water District is now receiving high-quality desalinated water directly from the Claude “Bud” Lewis Desalination Plant in Carlsbad, California. The direct connection pipe, located at the corner of Pawnee and Cherokee Streets in San Marcos, will deliver as much as 4,083 acre feet of desalinated water annually to Vallecitos’ distribution system. This equates to approximately 27 percent of the District’s annual supply and is enough water to meet the needs of more than 8,100 families for one year.
The San Diego River is overflowing from this week’s El Niño-driven downpours. Four days of relentless rain have transformed the river to a raging torrent at times, flooding roads and parking lots across Mission Valley.
The U.S. Geological Survey is closely monitoring conditions with a small, boat-like instrument called an acoustic Doppler profiler, which is floated back and forth across the river.
Scott Slater has a plan. It is not a popular plan, but he wants to pump 814 billion gallons of water from under the Mojave Desert to Los Angeles and other drought-stricken communities in southern California, and make more than $2 billion doing so.
“Yes, it’s quite a lot of money,” Slater, the 57-year-old chief executive of Cadiz Inc, says as he stands in front of a scale model of the project in the foyer of the company’s office on the 28th and top floor of a LA city centre office block. “It’s worth whatever the community who wants the water is willing to pay for it to meet their demands.”
The latest storm to hit the Sierra Nevada region dropped a foot of snow on ski resorts around Lake Tahoe on Wednesday, with a couple of inches in the valleys and freezing fog that caused dozens of crashes on slippery roads from Reno to Fallon about 60 miles east.
The only potentially serious injury reported involved a man who was hospitalized Wednesday after his truck slid off Interstate 80 near the Nevada-California line and plunged several feet below into the Truckee River. His name was not released, and his condition was not immediately known, the California Highway Patrol said.
In the last days of 2015, the Famine Early Warning System Network, a forecasting tool, reported that the deepest drought experienced by South Africa in over a decade could lead to grain shortages and spiking food prices. South Africa’s corn harvest, which normally yields a 3 million metric ton surplus that helps feed other African nations, is projected to finish in April with a 500,000 to 600,000 metric ton deficit.
The warning network, an interagency data gathering system established in 1985 by the U.S. Agency for International Development, reported that moisture conditions are even more perilous in mid-continent Africa, where record flooding is occurring in East Africa while the most dangerous drought since the 1960s scorches Ethiopia.
It’s estimated that nearly 18 percent of the water used in a person’s home is lost to leaks. Annually that can amount to a staggering 13,000 gallons of water. Whether all of that is coming from the toilet that won’t stop running or a catastrophic burst pipe, oftentimes you find out far too late that there’s a problem or an accident has occurred.
Calliope Waterworks, launching today from TechCrunch’s CES Hardware Battlefield, is aiming to make home plumbing a bit smarter and help save you money on your utilities and costs associated with water damage while also helping protect the planet.
