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State Orders Sweeping Water Restrictions for Towns, Vineyards Along Russian River

/in , , /by /San Francisco Chronicleby Kurtis Alexander

Several communities and hundreds of vineyards in California’s Wine Country are being cut off from their water supply because there’s not enough water to go around. State regulators on Wednesday ordered nearly 1,000 water rights holders in the Russian River watershed to stop drawing supplies from the basin’s many rivers and creeks, the latest turn in California’s deepening drought. The order means many small water agencies and scores of growers in Sonoma and Mendocino counties will have to fall back on stored water or other sources, if they have it, or go without water entirely. State officials say the restrictions will not apply when human health and safety are at risk, though the exceptions are made on a case-by-case basis and are yet to be issued.

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As Drought Worsens, Tensions Erupt Over Control of SoCal’s Largest Water Supplier

/in , , /by /Los Angeles Timesby Sammy Roth

Southern California’s biggest water supplier has chosen a new general manager — but the selection isn’t yet final, and the fiercely contested vote is exposing deep disagreements within the powerful agency as a severe drought grips the region.

The Metropolitan Water District’s board of directors voted this month to select Adel Hagekhalil to lead the agency, The Times has learned, replacing longtime head honcho Jeff Kightlinger, who is retiring. Hagekhalil runs L.A.’s Bureau of Street Services and was previously second-in-command at the city’s sanitation department.

Metropolitan finds itself at a crossroads after 15 years under Kightlinger’s leadership. The agency delivers huge amounts of water from the Colorado River and Northern California, and has prided itself on hammering out complex deals to protect the region’s water rights and investments. But those far-flung resources are becoming less dependable as the planet heats up.

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Opinion: How Infrastructure Plan Can Accelerate Resilience

/in , , /by /The Mercury Newsby Amanda Brown-Stevens

Passing President Biden’s infrastructure bill would be the most significant step we’ve taken as a nation to start to address climate change head on.

Greenbelt Alliance believes this infrastructure bill is a great start. Yet, so far there is no path to guide how we can equitably shift away from rebuilding in the most climate-vulnerable areas and instead build for a more resilient future.

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Arizona’s Current Historic Drought May Be ‘Baseline for the Future’

/in , , /by /Cronkite Newsby Alyssa Marksz

Arizona and other Western states just lived through the driest year in more than a century, with no drought relief in sight in the near future, experts told a House panel Tuesday.

The period from last April to this March was the driest in the last 126 years for Arizona and other Western states, witnesses said. It caps a two-decade stretch that was the driest in more than 100 years that records have been kept – and one of the driest in the past 1,200 years based on paleohydrology evidence, one official said.

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Surfrider’s Annual Clean Water Report Highlights Infrastructure Needs and Toxin-Removing Landscapes

/in , , /by /The Beach Reporter by Laylan Connelly

Too often, ocean water is laced with sewage and pollutants, affecting how safe beaches are for swimming and surfing –  that’s the message of this year’s Clean Water Report released Tuesday, May 25, by the Surfrider Foundation.

“We believe the water should be clean, always. We should be able to do that in all but the most unusual circumstances,” San Clemente-based Surfrider Foundation CEO Chad Nelsen said. But instead, the report highlights inefficiencies in sewer infrastructure and a need to stop urban runoff before it reaches the coast, both main contributors to dirty water that plagues the country’s coastlines.

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As Sea Level Rise Threat Grows, SF Officials Don’t Have Public Plan to Save Sewers

/in , , /by /NBC Bay Areaby Stephen Stock, Robert Campos, Mark Villarreal, Michael Horn and Jeremy Carroll

Because Bay Area low-lying sewage treatment plants remain vulnerable to rising sea levels, government regulators told sewage facility managers to “provide a written plan for coping with SLR by the fall of 2021 – or they will be given a plan.”  The NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit reached out to 10 “at risk” sewage treatment plants to see those plans. All except one provided extensive documents of their proposals, the cost to address them, and even provided tours of completed work. San Francisco’s Public Utilities Commission replied to the Investigative Unit’s public records request that after a “diligent search for records…no records were found.” Other sanitary district officials were much more forthcoming about what they’ve already spent, what they’ve built and what they’re planning in the future to combat the rise in bay levels. All agreed seas are rising faster than expected.

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Valley Communities Lost Water in Last Drought. Are Small Water Systems Ready This Time?

/in , , /by /The Fresno Beeby Danielle Bergstrom

Arturo Rodriguez and his colleagues on the Poplar Community Services District board are responsible for keeping clean water flowing to 2,500 residents in the middle of a global pandemic and drought.

Of the community’s three wells, two are in production right now, although Rodriguez doesn’t know how long they’ll last through another drought. The other well is inactive because it is contaminated with nitrates. As the aquifer lowers this summer, even if the wells don’t run dry, they run a greater risk of becoming contaminated. Water suppliers are often forced to choose between a contaminated well or no running water.

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The Sinking Central Valley Town

/in , /by /SJV Waterby Lois Henry

In California’s San Joaquin Valley, the farming town of Corcoran has a multimillion-dollar problem. It is almost impossible to see, yet so vast it takes NASA scientists using satellite technology to fully grasp. Corcoran is sinking. Over the past 14 years, the town has sunk as much as 11.5 feet in some places — enough to swallow the entire first floor of a two-story house and to at times make Corcoran one of the fastest-sinking areas in the country, according to experts with the United States Geological Survey.

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As Drought Intensifies, California Seeing More Wildfires

/in , , /by /AP Newsby Don Thompson

As California sinks deeper into drought it already has had more than 900 additional wildfires than at this point in 2020, which was a record-breaking year that saw more than 4% of the state’s land scorched by flames.

The danger prompted Gov. Gavin Newsom to propose spending a record $2 billion on wildfire mitigation. That’s double what he had proposed in January.

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San Francisco Water Use Has Declined Since Last Drought — What Else Can You Do to Conserve?

/in , , /by /SF Newsby Jay Barmann

We’re once again going to be having conversations this summer about water use, and hearing about ever more strict mandates coming down from counties and the state about what we use water for. But is San Francisco’s household water use really the problem?

The drought is bad, and it’s getting worse. A big swath of the Bay Area was just put in the “exceptional” drought tier last week by the U.S. Drought Monitor, and the rest of the Bay Area is in the second-worst or “extreme” drought category, along with about three-quarters of California.

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