In a neighborhood flanked by grapevines and orange groves on the east side of the San Joaquin Valley, people cannot drink the water from their faucets because it’s contaminated.
Residents in the area north of Porterville, many of them farmworkers, have been discussing a solution, which they expect will require running pipes to connect to the nearby city system.
After the West’s warm winter and fast spring thaw, reservoirs that many communities depend on are entering summer with little margin for error.
With reserves already thin, water managers in places such as Utah and Idaho are warning that summer could bring stricter conservation rules and heightened wildfire danger.
Summer is just around the corner, but our recent hot weather makes it feel like it’s already here. So, if you’re thinking about hitting the lake to go fishing, boating, or just relaxing… how full is that lake? And how about the water temperatures in the local rivers?
We’ve been talking about how the Sierra Nevada snowpack started it’s Spring melt-off early this year for a while now, so now it’s time to take a look at how our reservoirs are doing as we near Summer. And while the snowpack news has been bad, the reservoir news is pretty good. Most major reservoirs around the state are 75% to 95% full – great news! Because the Sierra snowpack is just about done, this will likely be their peak for the year – they likely won’t see any significant inflow until next November, at the earliest.
An elephant standing full weight on a smartphone. That’s the pressure 1,400 feet underwater that a startup hopes to use to push seawater through ultrafine filters and make drinking water off the coast of Malibu — without much of the controversy that surrounds desalination.
Desalination plants are notoriously large electricity users. Some have natural gas pipelines running to them to fuel dedicated power plants. The company OceanWell estimates its technology will cut that electricity use by up to 40%.
After a couple of years of sufficient water, much of California is showing “abnormally dry” conditions in spring 2026, according to the state drought monitor.
And as climate change adds more swings between wet and dry conditions, researchers are working on ways to better identify, predict and manage drought.
As the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence drives an unprecedented boom in data center construction across California, a bipartisan push for tighter industry oversight is gaining traction in the state capitol.
Assemblyman Jeff Gonzalez (R-Indio) cast his vote this week in favor of a sweeping package of legislation designed to pull back the curtain on the secretive, energy-hungry facilities. The move highlights growing anxiety in rural and suburban communities over how the massive computing hubs will affect local infrastructure.
The U.S. Supreme Court has approved a settlement package designed to rein in groundwater pumping along one of North America’s longest rivers and ensure enough water reliably makes it from New Mexico to Texas, ending a long-running dispute over management of the Rio Grande.
In a brief order Tuesday, the court accepted the recommendation of a special master to move forward with agreements first proposed last year by New Mexico, Texas and Colorado.
American data centers collectively consume unprecedented amounts of water, with AI driving exponential demand growth.
Data centers across the United States consume massive quantities of water for cooling their servers. These facilities require constant temperature regulation to prevent overheating, and that cooling comes at a steep environmental cost. The scale of consumption continues growing as AI workloads demand more computational power.
As a result, water levels at Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the river’s two largest reservoirs, are also depleting rapidly. In April, with Lake Powell on track to fall below 3,490 feet later this year—the minimum level at which it can generate power—the Bureau of Reclamation stepped in to announce emergency reductions to the amount of Colorado River water released from Lake Powell downstream to Lake Mead.
The Bureau of Reclamation plans to release about $35 million to Utah from the Inflation Reduction Act for drought mitigation projects in the Colorado River Basin, said Amy Haas, director of the Colorado River Authority of Utah.
That’s just a portion of the $90 million that the Biden administration awarded to Utah for 11 projects, ranging from wetland restoration near Moab to removal of invasive Russian olive trees along the Green River. Shortly after the funds were awarded in early January 2025, though, President Donald Trump froze spending from the IRA.
