Remember that boat that was sticking up out of the dried-up bed of Lake Mead last summer? Recent photos have shown the water has risen to almost cover the boat again.
So hallelujah, right? Not really.
Damien Lopez, age 4, has symptoms that many people who live near Southern California’s Salton Sea also have.
“His cough gets very wheezy. I try to control him,” his mother Michelle Lopez said.
“Control” often means visiting pediatric nurse Christina Galindo at Pioneers Memorial Hospital.
The United States Section of the International Boundary and Water Commission held a citizens forum in Yuma about restoration efforts for the Colorado River Delta. Local leaders say it’s going to take a binational effort from Mexico and the U.S. to restore higher water levels in the Colorado River.
The Colorado River is the lifeblood of the Southwestern U.S., providing billions of gallons of water to cities and farms in states including Arizona and eventually down to Mexico. Estuaries along the river in Mexico dried up, losing vital habitats along the way. “Along the course of the Colorado River, most of the water isn’t there anymore,” said Karl Flessa, geosciences professor at the University of Arizona.
Water customers in the city of Napa will likely pay higher rates starting in 2024.
The city’s utilities department laid out the proposed increases – the first in three years – in a Tuesday presentation to the Napa City Council. Joy Eldredge, the city utilities director, made the case for rate hikes, stating that Napa’s water division will face an annual $6.8 million budget deficit if rates aren’t adjusted.
Even though California enacted sweeping legislation nearly a decade ago to curb excessive agricultural pumping of groundwater, new research predicts that thousands of drinking water wells could run dry in the Central Valley by the time the law’s restrictions take full effect in 2040.
Residents living along Colorado’s northern Front Range and Northeastern Plains experienced a pretty wet year — the wettest, in fact, in 128 years.
And water experts expect this winter isn’t likely to be much different.
Becky Bolinger, assistant state climatologist at the Colorado Climate Center, said those areas had the wettest year since the state started keeping those records 128 years ago.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has before him about a thousand bills approved by the California Legislature that now await his fate but some are far more explosive and politically consequential than others. These bills in Newsom’s pile could reveal how the governor is evolving as a leader, and now he has less than a month to review them.
When the operator of the nation’s tallest dam applied for a new federal permit in 2005, few expected the process to drag on for more than a decade.
It’s still not done.
At midnight Thursday, California lawmakers put their pencils down.
The legislative session had come to a close in Sacramento, and elected officials had approved a whole bunch of climate change, energy and environment bills — and rejected others. Here’s a brief roundup of some of the highest-profile legislation.
About this time last year, I published an article on Hydro Review where I asked: “Who will build the first new pumped storage hydro in the U.S.?”
In that article, I didn’t really provide an answer to the question. I did list the three projects I saw as the front runners, based on them having operating licenses from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission: 1,300 Eagle Mountain in California, 400 MW Gordon Butte in Montana and 393 MW Swan Lake in Oregon. And I included the 1,200 MW Goldendale project in Washington in the honorable mention position.
