Congress approved a government funding bill last week that threw $80 million at the Sites Reservoir in California in order to keep the project on track.
The project is meant to hold 1.5 million acre-feet of water for the state to be used during droughts for agriculture, community usage and environmental need, said a press release issued Tuesday by the organization behind the Sites Reservoir.
San Joaquin County communities are having their woes compounded as they struggle with the effects of one historic drought while still struggling with the effects of another.
With constituents concerned about the ongoing drought and resources available, Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Stockton, hosted a panel of state and federal experts to discuss the critical situation, its statewide effects and best water practices.
The federal Bureau of Reclamation has pledged another $5 million toward drought relief in the Klamath Basin as farmers and other stakeholders in the region continue to grapple with a major shortage of water.
Reclamation previously awarded $15 million toward the Klamath Project Drought Response Agency, and the additional $5 million will join those funds. KPDRA is tasked with distributing the fund to irrigators in Oregon and California who are without an external water supply due to the drought. Reclamation said that the initial funds will be distributed on a per-acre basis later this year.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is known for damming rivers and building levees to keep waterways at bay. But a new initiative seeks natural flood control solutions as climate change brings increasingly frequent and severe weather events that test the limits of concrete and steel.
It only makes sense to use Mother Nature’s flood defenses as one of the tools to combat destruction from intense rains in the middle of the country and storms and sea level rise on the coasts, says Todd Bridges, who heads the Corps Engineering with Nature initiative.
As drought conditions persist statewide, officials with the East Bay Municipal Utility District said on Monday the agency has begun tapping into water from the Sacramento River to boost local supplies.
EBMUD, which delivers water to some 1.4 million people across Alameda and Contra Costa counties, typically draws from the Mokelumne River for its water supply.
The agency said the latest move is part of its drought response.
How dry? The region received a little more than a third of normal precipitation from Oct. 1, 2020, to Sept. 30, 2021, according to data from the National Weather Service — a common occurrence for the past several years, which bodes ill for a region already at the worst “exceptional” level on the U.S. Drought Monitor map.
As the deepening drought threatens to dry up some West Marin wells in the coming months, the county government wants to tap into dwindling reservoirs to avoid a potential public health emergency.
The county proposes to truck reservoir water for the next four months to an estimated 10 to 20 residences in areas such as Nicasio, San Geronimo Valley and Lucas Valley. The actual number of residents is not certain, county officials said, as qualification criteria are still being drafted.
What if farmers could use half the water than they are now without sacrificing crop yield?
Arizona would be a different place.
There are roughly 946,000 acres of farmland in the state, according to the most recent federal farm census in 2018, using an estimated 4.4 million acre-feet of water.
The term La Niña may be one that casual weather observers as well as aficionados hear meteorologists using from time to time, especially when breaking down long-term weather trends or providing a sneak peek at conditions expected during an upcoming winter or hurricane season. But, what exactly is La Niña? Let’s take an in-depth look.
The key to how winter in the United States may unfold often lies thousands of miles away in the open waters of the equatorial Pacific Ocean. It’s there where the roots of a climatological phenomenon known as La Niña originate and eventually help shape weather patterns worldwide.
With snowpack and storage at historic lows, California and 95% of the West are suffering the worst drought in modern history. Marin and Santa Clara counties have imposed mandatory cutbacks, and other counties are considering the same. However painful, it is time for California to move quickly. Here are the steps — starting with the least intrusive and least expensive — that state and local government need to take now to avoid the dystopia that Cape Town, South Africa, endured in 2018 when the faucets ran dry.
