The Paso Robles City Council has approved millions in funding for an ambitious recycled water project.
The project involves building a 4.5-mile pipeline that will carry recycled water to vineyards and parks on the east side of the city.
“I think it’ll save water and it goes back into the ground,” said Doris Vermi, who lives near Paso Robles.
If passed, a bill in the Nevada Legislature would urge the United States Bureau of Reclamation to consider more measures to protect and manage the Colorado River.
SJR 3 reads that the Colorado River is the most vital water source in Nevada, and much of the western states, including 22 Native American tribes and Mexico.
Ninety percent of Southern Nevada’s water supply comes from the Colorado River via Lake Mead, which is still facing unprecedented drought and aridification.
Following three consecutive years of drought in California, the Sierra Nevada snowpack is one of the most bountiful in more than 40 years. While the record snowpack and snow water equivalent is great news for water supply, there are concerns the record snowpack could create flooding issues.
California and Colorado are both receiving impressive amounts of snow.
That’s good for us because snow in the Rocky Mountains ultimately ends up in the Colorado River, which leads to Lake Mead.
That snow is hitting places like the Copper Mountain Ski Resort, which sits 9,700 feet up in Frisco, Colorado. That’s about an hour and a half west of Denver.
California’s unusually stormy winter is promising good news for the state’s struggling hydropower industry.
After three years of extreme drought, winter weather has driven up the most populous U.S. state’s snow levels to 235% of normal, according to the latest figures from the California Department of Water Resources. That’s likely to fill up hydro reservoirs during the spring melt, which could lead to more of the cheap renewable energy source and less dependence on fossil fuels, public agencies and utilities said.
The healthy snowpack whitening Colorado’s mountain peaks has given water officials some breathing room to manage the Colorado River Basin’s ongoing drought. The challenge will be not to squander it.
As winter storms wind down, water managers and policymakers are mulling over decisions about how to release and retain water in shrunken reservoirs across the basin, which supports 40 million people across the West.
Marty Plaskett upgraded his farming equipment and spent $60,000 on new sprinklers to conserve water, even before the rural Nevada valley where he farms alfalfa began more strictly managing groundwater.
Now, Plaskett is weighing another adjustment: selling off part of his legal right to use water that lies under his land to the state.
Nevada gets less than a 2 percent cut from the Colorado River’s waters, but the state actually uses far more water than that each year, all while staying well within its century-old legal water rights.
It’s all thanks to an extensive water recycling program in the Las Vegas Valley and something called “return flow credits,” which allow the state to pull extra water out of Lake Mead for every gallon of wastewater treated and returned to the reservoir via the Las Vegas Wash.
If you wanted to measure California’s change of water fortunes, the boat ramp at Lake Sonoma would be one place to do it.
The lake is the scene of an incredible four-month turnaround, for the very water system where the drought officially started.
“As you recall, three years ago, the governor literally was up at Lake Mendocino,” recalled Grant Davis with Sonoma Water. “Declaring the start of the drought basically, basically April 2021.”
Weeks of off-and-on storms across California may have been a source of frustration for many of the state’s residents, but it’s been good news for the state’s snowpack.
Precipitation has been so dramatic and persistent in recent months that this year’s historic snowpack totals are now believed to be the largest on record.
