The city of Tucson has agreed to cut back the amount of water it takes from the Colorado River over the next year and possibly longer. The deal comes with compensation from the federal government.
Late last year the Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the Lake Mead reservoir, offered customers the chance to get paid for not taking their full share of Colorado River water.
Colorado and three other Upper Colorado River Basin states have, for the first time in history, embarked on a series of formal meetings to find a way to negotiate jointly with some of the largest owners of Colorado River water rights: tribal communities.
This week’s rain has been a welcome sight for those dealing with the impacts of the Mosquito Fire. The early season moisture has helped to significantly dampen fire activity over the last several days. Estimates and measurements show that anywhere from 1 to 2.5 inches of rain has fallen over the burn region since Sunday morning.
People in California are not noticeably dirtier than other Americans, and yet residents of the country’s most populous state use less water than many of their fellow citizens to bathe, wash their hands, and flush their toilets.
Showerheads in California use a maximum of 1.8 gallons of water every minute; Texas residents, on the other hand, are inundated with 2.5 gallons, the most the Environmental Protection Agency allows. California’s toilets use no more than 1.28 gallons per flush even though the federal cap is 1.6.
Microplastics, or the small fragments of plastics and polymers from clothing, packaging and cosmetics, are now found virtually everywhere on Earth — from the highest peaks to the depths of the ocean.
At five millimeters long or less, these tiny specks are also cropping up in the air we breathe, the food we eat and the water we drink. Microplastics have been detected in commercially farmed shellfish and, recently, in beef and pork, with little known about how much plastic we’re ingesting — or the impacts of this material on our health or the health of the planet.
The Marina Coast Water District (MCWD) announced at a meeting of the Monterey County Board of Supervisors that it is going to restart its long-dormant desalination plant.
Remley Scherzinger, general manager for MCWD, told the supervisors that to augment their current water supply they’ll need to return to their already-built desal plant.
The desal facility was built in 1997 and was operated until 2003.
It’s human nature to mark big-number anniversaries, but there’s a centennial looming just ahead that Californians — and other Westerners — might not want to celebrate.
It’s the 100th anniversary of the Colorado River Compact, a seven-state agreement that was signed Nov. 24, 1922.
Much-needed rainfall and thunderstorms are hitting central and northern parts of California, bringing relief to places that typically see little precipitation in September. An upper-level low-pressure system, an occurrence more likely in winter, is churning off the coast of Northern California. It follows unprecedented heat across much of California at the start of September, when a prolonged heat wave shattered thousands of records across the West.
A top Centennial State official warned Colorado River Basin states that the system’s federal reservoirs could effectively empty in a few short years barring aggressive reductions to water demands.
Colorado River Water Conservation District General Manager Andy Mueller painted a bleak future for the basin’s seven states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — on Friday, during his organization’s annual conference in Grand Junction, Colo., on the river’s future.
In August, Governor Gavin Newsom and officials from the Department of Water Resources released a new Water Supply Strategy, saying that because of California’s “hotter, drier climate,” the state needed to find at least 10 percent more water to supply its farms, cities, and industry by 2040.
“We are experiencing extreme, sustained drought conditions in California and across the American West caused by hotter, drier weather,” states the plan. “Our warming climate means that a greater share of the rain and snowfall we receive will be absorbed by dry soils, consumed by thirsty plants, and evaporated into the air.”
