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Water is Disappearing in the West – and Not Just During the Summer

/in , , /by /CNN by Hannah Gard

Skiers and snowboarders pray for snow so they can shred the slopes. Climatologists and hydrologists have an entirely different and more critical reason to cross their fingers for the “white gold.”

The West’s historic drought has many impacts, including water shortages, more severe wildfire seasons and unprecedented heat waves, to name a few. Intense droughts are a result of many factors, one of which scientists have recently began to analyze with more scrutiny: snow drought.
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Drier Springs Bring Hotter Summers in the Withering Southwest

/in , , /by /Inside Climate Newsby Judy Fahys

A question has bothered climatologist Park Williams during the decade he’s been probing drought in the Southwest. Like other climate scientists, he knew from research papers and worldwide storm patterns that a warming atmosphere is thirstier and sops up more moisture from oceans and the land.

“But, in the Southwest, we’ve seen the exact opposite happening,” said Williams, an associate professor in the University of California, Los Angeles’ geography department.

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Bills Addressing California Water Crisis Advance in Sacramento

/in , , /by /Fox 26 Newsby Liz Gonzalez

A pair of bills addressing the state’s water crisis have now cleared another hurdle in Sacramento.

Senate bill 559 from Senator Melissa Hurtado (14th District- Sanger) would allocate $785 million dollars to repair three canals that move water across the state.

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Some 200 California Projects May Be Funded by Infrastructure Bill

/in , , /by /Los Angeles Timesby Jennifer Haberkorn

The House on Thursday approved an approximately $715-billion transportation infrastructure plan that would build and repair roads, bridges and rail systems around the country.

The bill forms the House’s framework for President Biden’s infrastructure plan. While the proposal is likely to change during negotiations with the Senate as it progresses toward Biden’s desk, the bill includes $920 million specifically targeted to projects throughout California.

The most expensive California project, at $25 million, will be pre-construction work on a transportation hub in San Diego. Major projects in Los Angeles include a Metro transit line through the Sepulveda Pass and improvements to existing transit in the Vermont Corridor.

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California’s Rain Year Just Ended – and the Data Shows We’re in Trouble

/in , , /by /San Francisco Chronicleby Kellie Hwang

California’s rain year officially ended Wednesday, and the data reflects what the dry landscape in much of the Bay Area already shows: It wasn’t pretty. Data shows that for many of the major regions of California, the July 2020-June 2021 rain year was one of the top 10 driest ever. Even more troubling is that the extreme dry spells are starting to stack up, especially in the Sierra Nevada watersheds that supply so much of the state’s water.

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The Colorado River is Shrinking. Hard Choices Lie Ahead, This Scientist Warns

/in , , /by /Science Magby Erik Stokstad

On a spring morning in 1996, then–Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt stood at Glen Canyon Dam, a concrete bulwark in Arizona that holds back the Colorado River to form Lake Powell. During a live broadcast on the Today show, a popular national TV program, Babbitt opened valves to unleash an unprecedented experimental flood into the Grand Canyon just downstream. As onlookers applauded, water gushed from gaping outlet pipes. Babbitt called the experiment, which was testing one way of restoring Grand Canyon ecosystems damaged by the dam, the start of “a new era” in environmental management.

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State Finds Deficiencies in Paso and Cuyama Basin Plans

/in , , /by /New Timesby Peter Johnson

The California Department of Water Resources published its first reviews of local groundwater sustainability plans as part of a 2014 state law regulating groundwater—and two Central Coast aquifers are included in the initial wave of feedback.

DWR reviewed and found “deficiencies” in the Paso Robles Groundwater Basin and Cuyama Valley Groundwater Basin sustainability plans—declining to give final approval to either.

In separate letters about the basins, DWR identified issues ranging from a lack of discussion about impacts to shallow and domestic wells, to a lack of planning for surface waters, like creeks and rivers. Six points of deficiencies were listed in all—two for Paso and four for Cuyama.

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California Tests Off-The-Grid Solutions to Power Outages

/in , , /by /AP Newsby Daisy Nguyen

When a wildfire tore through Briceburg nearly two years ago, the tiny community on the edge of Yosemite National Park lost the only power line connecting it to the electrical grid.

Rather than rebuilding poles and wires over increasingly dry hillsides, which could raise the risk of equipment igniting catastrophic fires, the nation’s largest utility decided to give Briceburg a self-reliant power system.

The stand-alone grid made of solar panels, batteries and a backup generator began operating this month. It’s the first of potentially hundreds of its kind as Pacific Gas & Electric works to prevent another deadly fire like the one that forced it to file for bankruptcy in 2019.

Opinion: How Budget ‘Trailer Bills’ Get Misused

/in , /by /CalMattersby Dan Walters

To understand a sharp-elbows squabble that’s developing behind the scenes in the state Capitol, one must first understand “pumped-storage hydro,” a way for electrical energy to be stored.

In its simplest form, water stored in a reservoir is released to generate power as it flows into a second reservoir at a lower elevation. Later, when the electrical grid’s need for power diminishes, the water is pumped back into the upper reservoir so the cycle can be repeated when demand increases.

It’s not a new technology; in fact it’s been around for more than a century although never more than a marginal factor in global power generation.

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State Launches Audit of Sexual Harassment Policies at Powerful Southern California Water Agency

/in , /by /Los Angeles Timesby Adam Elmahrek

State authorities approved an audit of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California over its handling of sexual harassment complaints, following allegations that leaders at the powerful water agency tolerated bullying and abuse of women in the workforce.

The audit was adopted during a hearing Wednesday afternoon of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee and comes after a Times investigation earlier this year found a pattern of complaints from women enrolled in the district’s trades apprenticeship program.

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