Reservoirs continue to dry up in Marin County and everyone agrees that conservation efforts are ‘not’ where they need to be. Now, the Marin Municipal Water District is looking at some expensive options to tackle the severe drought. “We’re facing historic drought conditions,” Emma Detwiler said.
Could wastewater be the solution to our drought problems? Valley Water thinks so and they are doubling down on it by expanding their North San Jose advanced water purification center and planning on building a new plant in Los Atos to produce millions of gallons of purified drinking water. In the heart of Silicon Valley, Valley Water is technology to lead the county out of the drought.
As the drought intensifies, local water utility California Water Service is helping customers save water every day through expanded water conservation programs and educational resources.
These programs and resources include newly launched lawn-to-garden and spray-to-drip rebates, which offer incentives for Cal Water customers to make their landscaping and irrigation systems as efficient as possible.
Key staff from three water organizations along the Monterey Peninsula have apparently reached an agreement on a deal that will send hundreds of acre-feet of new water to California American Water Co. for distribution up and down the Peninsula.
Monterey One Water, the Monterey Peninsula Water Management District and Cal Am reached an agreement at a joint meeting Wednesday whereby Cal Am agreed to purchase water from Monterey One’s Pure Water Monterey expansion project.
The U.S. government released projections Wednesday that indicate an even more troubling outlook for a river that serves 40 million people in the American West.
The Bureau of Reclamation recently declared the first-ever shortage on the Colorado River, which means Arizona, Nevada and Mexico will get less water than normal next year. By 2025, there’s a 66% chance Lake Mead, a barometer for how much river water some states get, will reach a level where California would be in its second phase of cuts. The nation’s most populated state has the most senior rights to river water.
Today local lawmakers toured the Kern Water Bank to see drought impact firsthand.
$50 million from the state budget is going to fund Assembly Bill 252, which calls for land repurposing all to focus on the drought and getting water flow back to where it matters.
So Southern Californians didn’t decrease their water usage in July, despite Gov. Gavin Newsom’s request for a voluntary 15% cutback?
Well, of course not. The dusty lake beds, the dry spigots, the serious water-use cutback orders and the most frightening wildfires (so far, anyway) have been in Northern California, and that’s where Newsom focused his most dire warnings. He declared a drought emergency in Mendocino and Sonoma counties in April, expanded it to 41 counties in May, and then to 50 counties in July — but not Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, San Diego, Riverside or San Bernardino counties. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California warned of unprecedented shortages in Lake Mead and has launched an advertising campaign calling for increased conservation. But the MWD is the victim of its own success, in that it has done a superb job over the decades supplying enough water so that residents generally don’t think about shortages.
On the bone-dry western flank of Arizona, where the Colorado River Basin meets the Mojave Desert, sit 11,000 acres of alfalfa, sorghum, wheat, and Sudan grass belonging to the Colorado River Indian Tribes (CRIT), all destined to be harvested and sold for animal feed. For anything to grow here, irrigation is a must. Less than a quarter inch of rain has fallen so far this year, according to Josh Moore, who manages the farm on behalf of his tribe.
New buildings will need to collect and reuse much more water than what is required for existing buildings, after the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved new regulations Tuesday.
The ordinance more than doubles the amount of water that new large buildings will be required to collect and reuse on site, said Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, its author. He said it also directs the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to come up with a plan for expanding The City’s supply and use of recycled water.
Francisco Diaz remembers when the water piped to his home in the Central Valley community of Monterey Park Tract made everything smell rotten, including himself.
“We had to take our clothes and go to the city and wash it over there because if you had washed it here and put it on, you’d stink,” said Diaz, who heads the Monterey Park Tract Community Service District, a form of specialized local government. “We couldn’t even take showers.”
Unsurprisingly, the water was undrinkable. Agricultural run-off, heavy in potentially toxic nitrates, had contaminated both wells that supplied water to Monterey Park Tract, nestled amid the crop fields and dairy farms of Stanislaus County.
