The Consulate of Mexico in Calexico hosted a presentation Thursday, February 2 announcing a collaborative effort with the Imperial Irrigation District to raise awareness about the risk of the All-American Canal involving undocumented and illegal border crossings.
IID General Manager Henry Martinez opened by welcoming all in attendance and introducing dignitaries.
The powerful storms that clobbered California for weeks in December and January dropped trillions of gallons of water, flooding many communities and farms. But throughout the state, the rains have done little to nourish the underground supplies that are critical sources of California’s drinking water.
Thousands of people in the San Joaquin Valley have seen their wells go dry after years of prolonged drought and overpumping of aquifers. And a two-week deluge — or even a wet winter — will not bring them relief.
As rain clouds swelled over Fort Stockton, Texas, last summer, a little yellow plane zipped through the sky. It was on a mission.
Equipped with tanks of water and special nozzles on its wings, the craft soared beneath the gray-white billows. Then, at just the right moment, it released a spray of electrically charged water particles into the cloud.
Figuring out where the Colorado River’s water goes after Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam can be challenging to understand and is often incorrectly stated. So when the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation published forecasted use of Colorado River water it is essential to analyze the numbers.
According to the USBR, the forecasted use for 2023 in the lower Colorado River basin is divided four ways: Nevada, Arizona, California and Mexico.
The decades-old agreements that outline water rights to the Colorado River Basin are leading to an impasse on an issue affecting millions of people in the American Southwest.
On Jan. 31, the seven states that draw water from the basin had to come up with a plan to voluntarily cut back on using water from the basin. Six states — Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — agreed on one proposal. But California, which is the state the uses the most water, rejected that plan and submitted its own.
The snowpack in the Sierra Nevada is the deepest it’s been in decades, but those storms that were a boon for Northern California won’t make much of a dent in the long-term water shortage for the Colorado River Basin — an essential source of supplies for Southern California.
In fact, the recent storms haven’t changed a view shared by many Southern California water managers: Don’t expect lakes Mead and Powell, the nation’s largest reservoirs, to fill up again anytime soon.
The lower Colorado River has been out of balance for about 40 years, using more water than has been available. As their reservoirs empty, the three lower basin states, federal government, and water users are getting around to addressing this problem.
January storms propelled California from a state of water scarcity to one of water optimism.
The drought outlook in much of the state has improved thanks to continued and steady precipitation, and with more than two months left in the wet season, snowfall in the Central Sierra mountains of California has already reached 100% of the average for an entire year.
When devastating floods swept California last month, the community of Grayson – a town of 1,300 people tucked between almond orchards and dairy farms where the San Joaquin and Tuolumne rivers converge – survived without major damage.
In the minds of some townspeople and experts, that was thanks partly to the 2,100 acres (850 hectares) of former farmland just across the San Joaquin that have been largely restored to a natural floodplain.
Snowpack has been running well above average this winter across the Colorado River watershed. It’s a rare bright spot after 23 years of grinding megadrought brought the driest conditions in 1,200 years to the basin that supplies 40 million people in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, and Mexico.
Should the generous rains and mountain snows continue into spring, they could help head off a deeper water crisis, including perhaps an unprecedented loss of hydropower generation from severely depleted Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
