The California Department of Water Resources is cutting its water allocation for the State Water Project to 5%—down from its earlier promised allotment of 15%.
The agency cited dropping reservoir levels and reduced snowpack amid California’s continuing drought.
The March 18 announcement marked another setback for farmers and others who rely on state surface-water supplies.
The California Department of Water Resources (DWR) has announced its second phase of funding through the Urban and Multibenefit Drought Relief Grant program.
The program will provide financial assistance to 62 projects throughout the state to tackle drought impacts on human health and safety, protect fish and wildlife resources, and support other public benefits, such as ecosystem improvements.
Of the $180 million in funding, half will support various types of water supply projects including groundwater, surface water, recycled water, and supply reliability.
Monterey city officials are again lobbying state water overseers to open taps that have been blocked for years because of illegal diversions from the Carmel River, arguing that those diversions are no longer occurring. State water officials disagree.
In a March 17 letter to the chairman and other members of the state Water Resources Control Board, Monterey Mayor Clyde Roberson and other City Council members argued that California American Water Co. is, more or less, no longer making illegal diversions since the amount of acre-feet that is being consumed is now down to the limit set by the water board.
Water managers from across the Colorado River Basin are preparing to negotiate new rules for allocating the river’s dwindling flow and sharing the pain of a deepening shortage.
They’re adapting the 100-year-old Colorado River Compact to a river that little resembles the bountiful gusher that negotiators from seven states and the federal government in 1922 thought — or hoped — would bless the Southwest forever. The stakes rise with every foot that Lake Mead and Lake Powell fall, as the states and the water users within them recognize they’re due for a tighter squeeze.
From the Murray-Darling system to Great Artesian Basin, “invisible” underground groundwater is often the only water supply available across the vast majority of Australia—and its annual contribution to GDP is estimated at more than $6.8 billion a year.
However, overuse of groundwater during droughts and aquifer depletion has led to water crises, including in Australia’s “food bowl” the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB), California and Cape Town in South Africa, with more likely to follow as groundwater management is largely reactive and unlikely to avert more crises as climate change and population pressures grow.
California today proposed a long-awaited standard for a cancer-causing contaminant in drinking water that would require costly treatment in many cities throughout the state.
Traces of hexavalent chromium are widely found in the drinking water of millions of Californians, with some of the contamination naturally occurring and some from industries that work with the heavy metal.
The proposed standard is a major step in a decades-long effort to curtail the water contaminant made infamous by the movie Erin Brockovich, based on residents of rural Hinkley, California who won more than $300 million from Pacific Gas & Electric for contamination of their drinking water.
Parts of the Bay Area are expected to heat up on Tuesday. Warm temperatures could be near record-breaking in some areas. The heatwave comes only days after Saturday’s storm, which wasn’t significant enough to impact drought conditions.
There is looming concern, as the state struggles to conserve water.
The warm weather and sunny skies forecast for Tuesday will bring a typical springtime event, according to Meteorology and Climate Science expert Alison Bridger.
The school is disappearing.
Westside Elementary opened its doors nearly a century ago here in the San Joaquin Valley, among the most productive agricultural regions on earth. As recently as 1995, nearly 500 students filled its classrooms. Now 160 students attend and enrollment is falling fast.
This was where the children of farmworkers learned to read and write, often next to the children of the farm owners who employed their parents.
Serious drought conditions across California and the West are expected to worsen this spring into early summer, with hotter-than-normal temperatures, reduced chances of rain and increased fire risk likely, federal forecasters said Thursday.
The next three months through the end of June show little to no drought relief, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the parent agency of the National Weather Service.
2022 is another drought year, although we won’t know exactly how dry for about another month. Precipitation and snowpack this year in California are below average. In addition, the prolonged dry and warm months of January through March of this year’s “wet” season will have evaporated more water from watersheds and reduced snowpack, reducing runoff and groundwater recharge from this year’s modest precipitation and likely lengthening this year’s wildfire season.
Some reservoirs did refill during the wetter-than usual December, but many of the largest reservoirs remain significantly lower than at this time last year, in the 2nd year of this drought.
