The massive climate and healthcare package that passed Sunday in the Senate includes $4 billion to help shore up the rapidly dwindling Colorado River and its massive reservoirs.
California officials who are pushing to meet an August deadline for huge water savings in Lake Mead and Lake Powell praised the bill’s passage.
Charlie Hamilton hasn’t irrigated his vineyards with water from the Sacramento River since early May, even though it flows just yards from his crop.
Nearby to the south, the industrial Bay Area city of Antioch has supplied its people with water from the San Joaquin River for just 32 days this year, compared to roughly 128 days by this time in a wet year.
They may be close by, but these two rivers, central arms of California’s water system, have become too salty to use in some places as the state’s punishing drought drags on.
Thousands of acres of crops, from corn to nectarines, surround Melynda Metheney’s community in West Goshen, California — one of the key battlegrounds where residents say irrigation and overpumping have depleted drinkable water.
“You know what you’re up against when you live in these communities. You have to decide, are there enough of us?” said Metheney, standing in her parched yard.
Two powerful Southern California water districts are actively negotiating an agreement for hefty voluntary cuts of Colorado River supply to farmers and reduced delivery of water to greater Los Angeles, as part of urgent efforts across seven states and Mexico to stave off the collapse of the drought-stricken river system that provides drinking water and irrigation for nearly 40 million people.
Responding to a June mandate from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation for all those who rely on the river to cut 2 million to 4 million acre-feet of water usage within 60 days, Imperial Irrigation District and Metropolitan Water District officials are negotiating “around half a million, between 400,000 and 500,000 acre-feet” in combined reductions, IID general manager Enrique Martinez said on Monday.
The Western US is an empire built on snow. And that snow is vanishing.
Since most of the region gets little rain in the summer, even in good years, its bustling cities and bountiful farms all hinge on fall and winter snow settling in the mountains before slowly melting into rivers and reservoirs.
The United Nations warned on Tuesday that the two biggest water reservoirs in the United States have dwindled to “dangerously low levels” due to the impacts of climate change.
The situation has become so severe that these reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, are on the verge of reaching “dead pool status” — the point at which water levels drop so low that downstream flow ceases, according to the U.N. Environment Program.
KTVU is continuing its week-long series of stories about the drought with a look at the dire situation at California’s largest reservoir.
Lake Shasta provides water not only to agriculture in the Central Valley, but also to several regional Bay Area water systems. Lake Shasta is located 10 miles from Redding, in Shasta County, and about 200 miles north of the Bay Area.
As of Spring 2022, National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) data show nearly 70 percent of the lower 48 U.S. states in drought, affecting more than 100 million residents.
California in particular is facing a deepening water crisis, with over 93 percent of the state experiencing extreme drought. 2022 is the state’s driest year on record for the past 128 years, while 58 counties in the state are currently under a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) disaster designation.
It was the end of a fight that lasted for almost a decade. On 12 May 2022, the California Coastal Commission, which has a legal mandate to protect the coastline of the US state, voted to deny the building permit for a large seawater-desalination plant that was proposed to be erected near Huntington Beach. Ever since the application to build the plant was made in 2013, this mega-project has been dividing experts, politicians and activists.
On a recent, scorching afternoon in Albuquerque, off-road vehicles cruised up and down a stretch of dry riverbed where normally the Rio Grande flows. The drivers weren’t thrill-seekers, but biologists hoping to save as many endangered fish as they could before the sun turned shrinking pools of water into dust.
For the first time in four decades, America’s fifth-longest river went dry in Albuquerque last week.
