After a wild winter, California is celebrating the start of spring with near-normal water levels. That’s caused some people to wonder whether a weather miracle is possible. Will California see a so-called “Miracle March” after a flurry of late winter storms? The Sacramento Bee reached out to weather experts to find out the answers.
As California continues to grapple with ongoing drought conditions, state lawmakers have introduced new regulations to curb unnecessary water use. Assembly Bill 1572 now prohibits the use of potable water—water safe for drinking and bathing—to irrigate non-functional turf.
Over $500 million is on the table for water storage projects across California. Options on how to allocate this money were discussed at the February meeting, and a final decision on funding was expected to be made at the March 19 meeting. However, the commissioners ultimately decided to withhold the majority of the money, at least for now.
The United States has refused a request by Mexico for water, alleging shortfalls in sharing by its southern neighbor, as Donald Trump ramps up a battle on another front. The state department said on Thursday it was the first time that the United States had rejected a request by Mexico for special delivery of water, which would have gone to the border city of Tijuana.
Californians could be drinking water tapped from the Pacific Ocean off Malibu several years from now — that is, if a company’s new desalination technology proves viable. OceanWell Co. plans to anchor about two dozen 40-foot-long devices, called pods, to the seafloor several miles offshore and use them to take in saltwater and pump purified fresh water to shore in a pipeline.
California has long struggled with chronic drought and water scarcity—Newsweek spoke to two experts about whether capturing water from fog may be able to help. They were both optimistic about using fog harvesting for California, which is being explored there with several research initiatives and pilot projects, but warned that it probably “can’t produce water for all of the needs and demands of humans and society.”
A new report released on March 13, 2025, shows that changes to reservoir operations at Lake Oroville and New Bullards Bar Reservoir in California can further reduce flood risk for communities along the Tuba and Feather rivers during extreme atmospheric river storm events and potentially benefit water supply during drier river periods.
The recent rain and snow are much needed for Central California’s water supply.
The latest set of storms is already sparking talk of a “Miracle March.”
Malynndra Tome was helping to map livestock ponds in the Navajo Nation when she saw something that inspired her to act. An elderly woman was filling milk jugs with water at the back of a gas station in the Native American reservation, where about 30% of people live without running water.
Eyewitness News was given a rare look inside the engineering marvel, which was the largest public works project in Southern California during the Great Depression, while it’s shut down for its annual maintenance. It’s the final leg of the massive Colorado River Aqueduct: the 13-mile-long San Jacinto tunnel, bringing up to 1,700 cubic feet of water per second underneath one of Southern California’s tallest mountains.
