Good morning. I’m Ian James, water reporter for The Times, filling in for Sammy Roth, who will be back next week.
It’s crunch time for the Colorado River. The river’s badly depleted reservoirs keep dropping, and the federal government has announced that major water cutbacks need to happen soon to prevent supplies from reaching perilously low levels.
Pittsburg water customers will soon see a 5% increase in their water rates for each of the next five years as a result of council action this week.
Paul Rodrigues, city finance director, cited increases in the cost of energy and raw water, and the need to make capital improvements – at a $76.5 million price tag – in the water treatment plant as reasons for the increases. Both commercial and residential customers will be affected, but seniors will pay less, seeing only a 2% increase each year.
The seven Colorado River basin states have until mid-August to come up with a plan to drastically cut their water use. Federal officials say the cuts are necessary to keep the river’s giant reservoirs from declining to levels where water cannot be released through their dams and hydropower production ceases. If state leaders fail to devise a plan, they could face a federal crackdown.
But while federal intervention is a key feature of Colorado River governance and management, to cajole stubborn water users into negotiating — it’s rarely tested.
California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot says the Sites Reservoir Project is “on a pretty good pathway” for advancing through the environmental permitting process.
Speaking at the Agri-Pulse Food & Ag Issues Summit in Sacramento last week, Crowfoot explained that the Department of Fish and Wildlife within his agency has been evaluating potential impacts that the reservoir proposal could have on endangered and threatened species and its adherence to the California Environmental Quality Act.
After a high profile, decades-long battle to build a desalination plant in Huntington Beach ended in denial, all eyes will be on the California Coastal Commission as it considers whether or not to approve two smaller desalination projects this fall.
Groundwater levels are dropping and domestic wells throughout the San Joaquin Valley are going dry as California’s third year of drought grinds on.
That includes entire towns, such as East Orosi and Tooleville in Tulare County, which both went dry last week.
It’s bad. But it may get worse.
As models predict another La Niña for the coming winter, which could lead to another dry year, leaders of water agencies and other groups from across California and the western United States met Tuesday to discuss how best to get commerce and industry to use less water.
While residential water use has declined, commercial and industrial users need retrofits, new equipment and new ways of doing business when it comes how much liquid “gold” they consume.
Blazes have burned thousands of acres, cued mandatory evacuations and threatened some of the state’s oldest and most impressive trees, but far fewer acres have burned in California wildfires through the first few weeks of summer than at the same point last year.
The tides may turn in the coming weeks as conditions stay hot and grow drier, but the numbers to date suggest the state may have averted a particularly nasty start to this wildfire season.
Environmental agencies on the local, state and federal levels are commending the efforts of two tidal habitat restoration projects in Solano County.
The California Department of Water Resources is aiming to preserve smelt and other fish populations in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta by improving food sources and habitat conditions in the Suisun Marsh, specifically by restoring Bradmoor Island and Arnold Slough.
An explosion at the Hoover Dam has prompted an emergency response from a Nevada fire crew, authorities said Tuesday morning.
“We have a crew on the way where we have a report of a fire,” said Lisa LaPlant, a spokesperson for Boulder City.
Boulder City officials said on Twitter that the city fire department was heading toward the incident about 10:30 a.m. after video circulated on social media showing an explosion near the dam.
