After two years of drought, Gov. Gavin Newsom remains reluctant to put limits on statewide water use. His administration, however, is looking to take a first step.
Next month, the State Water Resources Control Board is expected to adopt temporary prohibitions on outdoor water practices, including hosing down driveways, filling up decorative fountains and watering lawns within 48 hours of rain.
A one-two punch of storm systems is expected to drape the Bay Area in rainy weather for much of the upcoming week while potentially making holiday travel in the Sierra Nevada mountains “very challenging to impossible,” meteorologists say.
A proposed ballot measure that would dedicate $100 billion to bolster California’s water supply is drawing a sharp rebuke, not only for the amount of spending but also for the dramatic sidesteps it would allow in the environmental review process.
For example, the proposal would make the controversial plan for a Huntington Beach desalination plant eligible for a huge taxpayer subsidy — even though the private, for-profit Poseidon Water company currently intends to pay for the $1.4 billion in construction costs.
Residents across the western United States who have drought relief on their holiday wish lists this season will be in luck over the next week. A series of storms will take aim at the West Coast and deliver needed rain and mountain snow from Southern California to the Pacific Northwest through Christmas Day.
The drought is far from over in California, but this week’s atmospheric river may have begun to put a small dent in the state’s worrisome water deficit. While a prior October atmospheric event earlier in the year brought historic rainfall totals to Northern California, this most recent storm delivered drenching rains to both the north and the south and blasted the Sierra Nevada with snow.
Trying to stave off dangerously low levels of water in Lake Mead, officials in California, Arizona and Nevada have reached an agreement to significantly reduce the amount they take from the Colorado River.
The problem took on new urgency this summer when the federal government declared a first-ever water shortage in the 86-year-old reservoir near Las Vegas.
A plan to build a new $2.3 billion reservoir in southern Santa Clara Couty passed a significant milestone on Wednesday when a key state agency ruled that it continues to qualify for nearly half a billion dollars in state funding.
Vicki McDowell woke up on a Saturday morning in May, thinking about what she would make her son for breakfast. He was visiting from Hayward, and she wanted to whip up something special. Biscuits and gravy. Fried potatoes. Eggs.
She walked to the kitchen sink to wash her hands. Turned on the faucet. Nothing happened. Worried, she tried the bathroom sink. Still nothing. She flushed the toilet. It gurgled.
In the verdant San Joaquin Valley, one of the nation’s most productive farming regions, domestic wells like McDowell’s are drying up at an alarming pace as a frenzy of new well construction and heavy agricultural pumping sends the underground water supply to new lows during one of the most severe droughts on record.
A recent new round of heavy rain and snow following a dry November soaked a thirsty California landscape – but it wasn’t enough to significantly improve the state’s water levels, according to data from the California Department of Water Resources.
