The fast-moving Dove Fire near a Yosemite gateway town jolted California out of a relatively quiet fire summer, forcing road closures and the evacuations of hundreds of homes.
Former U.S. Forest Service firefighter John Buckley wasn’t surprised to see the fire taking off last Sunday. Driving through the area in the Central Sierra foothills earlier that day, he remembers telling his wife those fuels looked ready to burn.
Farmers and ranchers in a rural Mendocino County valley have long opposed the planned removal of two local dams because it would reduce their summer irrigation supply.
Over the past year, the pear and grape growers, cattle ranchers and their allies successfully turned their local fight into a national conservative cause, folded into President Donald Trump’s broader war with California over dams, fish and who gets to control the state’s water.
The climate-driven water crisis is becoming a housing crisis as builders increasingly struggle to secure sufficient water supplies for new residential developments.
Now Japanese water infrastructure company Kubota Corp. aims to provide developers of suburban subdivisions with an unlimited source of water through a technology that extracts H2O from the air. In a deal announced Tuesday, Kubota is buying atmospheric water harvesters made by Delaware-based AirJoule LLC to be initially deployed in California and Texas.
A U.S. plan for sharing the waters of the drought-stricken Colorado River would require Arizona, California and Nevada to cut their water use by a fifth in the next two years and to make even deeper reductions later, a senior water official from one of those states said on Monday.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said the plan should also include reductions for Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, the four other states deadlocked over the future of a river that provides drinking water to one in 10 Americans, irrigates land producing around 15% of U.S. food output and fills reservoirs that provide power to over 6 million people in the region.
Max Wilson, like water managers around the Colorado River Basin, spent Monday waiting for a new federal report outlining the river’s future — and future water cuts.
He watched the federal website where the report would be published, which appeared to be temporarily down. He sat in the city’s ninth-floor water office, talking about how Phoenix has prepared for this moment, while looking out on the Arizona Capitol and the sprawling metropolis below.
Mountain meadows cover a sliver of the Sierra Nevada, but they do outsized work for the rest of California. Crews are proving that this summer at Pickel Meadow, just north of Yosemite, where a restoration project is reshaping 3 miles of the West Walker River and its floodplains.
The trouble traces back 20 years, when Caltrans built a berm after a nearby landslide. The structure squeezed the river into a narrow channel that carved deep banks, cut water off from the floodplain and left much of the meadow dry. Removing it is the centerpiece of the work.
As the heat wave continues, people are flocking to beaches and pools to cool off. As for wildlife, it’s a different story.
“They are feeling the heat just as much as we are,” said Ben Martin, wildlife supervisor for Project Wildlife at the San Diego Humane Society. “They are looking for sources of water to drink.”
Declining Colorado River supplies could force water cuts for Western farmers, potentially driving up food prices nationwide.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is expected to make a final decision about the future of the Colorado River and how the Western States will divide the water.
Officials are expected to issue a final plan of action on Friday, after the seven Western states that use the river (Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, California and Utah) were unable to come to a new agreement amongst themselves.
California lawmakers are returning to Sacramento with several major issues expected to dominate the legislative session.
