Farmers in California’s Central Valley are in for another brutal summer of drought.
The federal government announced initial 2022 water allocations Wednesday for customers of the Central Valley Project, and the figures were dismal: Most irrigation districts in the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys can expect to receive no deliveries from the project’s vast network of reservoirs and canals.
Packed onto the slopes of the Sierra Nevada is a precious source of water for California — a frozen reservoir that climate change is already transforming.
As the planet warms, the spring snowpack is dwindling. The snow is creeping up mountainsides to higher elevations, melting earlier in the year and seeping into dry soils rather than washing into rivers and streams that feed reservoirs.
The water level in Lake Powell was at a record low when rain and snow began to fall across the Colorado River Basin in October, soaking dry soils ahead of the winter season.
Water managers, who hoped the trend would build into an above-average snow year that might delay a looming water crisis in the Southwest, watched the snowpack drop to near zero in November. Then, after a massive storm cycle brought six feet of snow to parts of the Rockies around the New Year, they again breathed a sigh of relief.
The Modesto Irrigation District will deliver about 60% of its usual water this year because of the persistent drought.
The district board voted 5-0 Tuesday morning for this allotment from the Tuolumne River. It affects about 58,000 acres of farmland, as well as a treatment plant that eases reliance on groundwater in Modesto and a few other towns.
MID is in relatively good shape as California’s drought enters its third year. The Turlock Irrigation District, which also diverts from the Tuolumne, has not yet set a 2022 allotment for its nearly 150,000 acres.
In the coal fields of eastern Montana, climate change is forcing a stark choice: halt mining that helped build everything from schools to senior centers or risk astronomical future damage as fossil fuel emissions warm the planet and increase disasters, crop losses and premature deaths.
One of the largest mines in this arid region straddling the Wyoming border is Spring Creek — a gaping hole among sagebrush hills where house-sized mechanical shovels dig up millions of tons of coal annually, much of it shipped overseas and burned in Asian power plants.
For most of the year, the Los Angeles River is sustained by a flow of wastewater.
Now, a battle is brewing between environmentalists and wastewater recycling advocates about where that wastewater should go. In an interview for “LA Times Today,” staff writer Louis Sahagun told host Lisa McRee about the water fight and the future of the LA River.
Much of the water in the LA River is treated sewer water. Most of it comes from toilet and sinks and is discharged by Glendale, Burbank and city of LA.
Already diminished by drought and extreme heat, California’s water supply will face yet another peril as wildfires continue to incinerate ever larger areas of forested land, according to new research.
In a UCLA-led study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers determined that increasing forest fire activity is “unhinging” western U.S. stream flow from its historical predictability. In areas where more than a fifth of the forest had burned, stream flow increased by an average of 30% for six years after the fire.
Gripped by drought, communities along California’s coast are exploring innovations and investments to ensure residents have access to drinking water. But desalinating seawater, one proposed solution, has provoked heated debate, as some environmentalists say the process is inefficient, expensive and unneeded.
The California Coastal Commission next month will decide whether to approve a private company’s application to build a $1.4 billion seawater desalination facility in Huntington Beach, southeast of Los Angeles. An approval would cap a 15-year permitting process to bring Southern California its second, large-scale seawater desalination facility—joining another in Carlsbad that fully opened in 2015.
A fairly decent start to this year’s rainy season quickly dried up.
The Central Coast of California is a story of ebbs and flows, wet years and drought.
From man-made reservoirs to underground aquifers, we need to store rain that falls in wet years to help supply the never-ending demand for water during the dry years. But it’s a constant battle to make sure there’s enough set aside to go around.
If this were the summer, it would hardly be worth mentioning. But the winter months are when the region expects to pick up a majority of its annual rainfall.
The good news is that despite this near-record long winter rainless streak, the season’s total rainfall (since Oct. 1) is still above average for Sacramento.
