A “dangerous and deadly heat wave” is on the way for the Southwest through the weekend, the Phoenix National Weather Service warns.
More than 30 million people are under heat alerts, and more than 50 daily high-temperature records could be broken through the weekend – including in Death Valley, California, one of the hottest places on earth.
Coastal Southern California increased water usage by more than 25% for the month of April, lagging behind most other parts of the state in conservation and appearing to dismiss dire warnings of supply shortages.
According to data released Tuesday by the State Water Resources Control Board, cities and towns in the South Coast hydrologic region — an area that includes Los Angeles and more than half the state’s population — used 25.6% more water in April than in April 2020, the first year of the current drought.
In response to prolonged drought across the West and ahead of the scorching summer months, California is asking its urban water suppliers to voluntarily report water consumption data sooner — so the state can better assess whether its water conservation goals are being met.
Years of low rainfall and snowpack coupled with more intense heat waves have fueled the state’s historic, multiyear drought conditions, rapidly draining its reservoirs.
Dangerous and potentially deadly heat will settle over the Southwestern United States for the next several days, with temperatures in some locations expected to break records and exceed 110 degrees.
More than 22 million people in California, Nevada and Arizona are under some sort of heat-related alert through at least part of the weekend, the National Weather Service said. A heat wave is defined as a period of abnormally and uncomfortably hot and unusually humid weather that lasts for two or more days.
As California continues to implement policies that are negatively impacting the agriculture and energy sectors, we must ask ourselves…who is looking out for California’s minority and disadvantaged communities?
The latest example is California’s Central Valley, particularly Kern County. Kern is a dynamic county that has a long history of welcoming people from other parts of the United States and immigrants from other countries.
In late April 1996, Lake Powell sat at an elevation of 3,673 feet — just 27 feet below its maximum capacity. At that time of plenty, Arizona lawmakers worried that the state wasn’t using its full share of Colorado River water.
Instead of potentially ceding those flows to California, the state opened a kind of liquid piggy bank, storing away a share of its water for an uncertain future.
The State Water Resources Control Board on Tuesday approved a groundbreaking agreement that allows “senior” water rights holders in the upper Russian River watershed to share their supply with junior rights holders whose claims might otherwise be suspended due to drought.
The collaborative, community-first approach, negotiated over many months by agricultural, municipal, tribal and other stakeholders in the region, is the first of its kind to try to bring balance to the allocation of scarce water supplies in a state governed by what one board member called an “inherently inequitable” water rights system.
A proposal to use up to $1.5 billion to purchase farmer’s senior water rights has made its way into the budget negotiations between lawmakers and Governor Gavin Newsom, the Associated Press reports.
It comes at a time when 98 percent of the state is experiencing a severe drought and is part of the larger $7.5 billion Water and Drought Package “to build a climate resilient water system.”
In sweeping water curtailments stretching from Fresno to the Oregon state line, cities and growers in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta watershed have been ordered to stop pumping from rivers and streams.
The cutbacks, announced today by the State Water Resources Control Board, will affect 4,252 water rights in the Delta watershed, including 400 or more held by 212 public water systems, beginning Wednesday. But they’re concentrated around the San Joaquin River and its tributaries, where state officials expect “significant, very deep cuts.”
Desalination projects have always been a contentious issue in Monterey County and a proposal that will be mulled by elected officials Tuesday afternoon is sure to raise the eyebrows of advocates for publicly owned desal projects.
The idea that will be presented to the Board of Supervisors during its afternoon session beginning at 1:30 p.m. is an amendment to an existing ordinance allowing only public ownership of desal plants rather than private ownership.
