The COVID-19 pandemic encouraged wildlife, looking for easy food, to visit quiet neighborhoods they normally didn’t. The drought may now be forcing them to do the same. Experts say, though you might like to, do not leave food and water out for wild animals showing up in neighborhoods. The bear that showed up in a tree near central San Anselmo this week is one of several recent North Bay sightings.
The Biden administration will defend controversial water delivery contracts to California farmers issued in the Trump era, according to a court filing yesterday, rejecting pleas from a tribe and environmentalists to rescind them.
We asked some colleagues for lessons that might be useful in managing the California’s new drought. Here is a first sampling of thoughts.
The water crisis along the California-Oregon border went from dire to catastrophic this week as federal regulators shut off irrigation water to farmers from a critical reservoir and said they would not send extra water to dying salmon downstream or to a half-dozen wildlife refuges that harbor millions of migrating birds each year.
In what is shaping up to be the worst water crisis in generations, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said it will not release water this season into the main canal that feeds the bulk of the massive Klamath Reclamation Project, marking a first for the 114-year-old irrigation system.
Rural, low-income Latino communities across California were hardest hit by the last drought and could see drinking water shortages again this year as extreme drought spreads across the state, according to a report released today by non-partisan advisors to California’s lawmakers.
The report from the Legislative Analyst’s Office warns state officials to prepare by ramping up monitoring of wells in vulnerable communities and lining up emergency drinking water supplies to send there.
After a 2020 fire season that shattered records and killed 33 people in California, federal wildfire experts predict another tough one for the state due to widespread and worsening drought conditions.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack told reporters Thursday that they had been briefed by government wildfire experts at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, to expect another extremely active fire season complicated, for the second year, by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. With nearly half of the United States gripped by a severe drought, officials said that Americans living throughout much of the West should plan for a year of “above average wildfire potential.”
As Californians can tell by the already beige hills, the early fire weather warnings and the dusty umbrellas sitting deep inside closets, it’s been drier than usual this winter.
And according to decades worth of precipitation data, that’s the new normal.
You can’t water your lawn more than twice a week in the city or Sacramento during summer, and never on Thursday or Friday. For thousands of Sacramento County residents, the limit is three days a week. In Roseville, there’s no watering between 10 a.m. and 8 p.m. Customers of the San Juan Water District have five days to fix leaks, and hosing down the driveway or sidewalk is off-limits in Elk Grove. Long before Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a drought emergency for the Sacramento region — and much of the rest of California — area residents were already dealing with an assortment of restrictions on water consumption, depending on their supplier.
Don’t be fooled. Governor Gavin Newsom’s decision Monday to declare drought in most of California, including here, is no reason for most farmers in Stanislaus County to break out the party hats.
They know full well that words on a declaration will not generate an extra drop of water for their orchards and row crops.
An entire run of endangered winter-run chinook salmon, as well as the fall-run salmon that make up the core of the California fishery, are in danger of being wiped out this year if the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation keeps diverting water to farmers at its current rate. With state water resources constrained by the extreme drought, that’s the alarm that environmental, fishing and tribal groups are sounding after reports show the Sacramento River will reach dangerous temperatures during spawning season, based on federal scientific scenarios that analyze the bureau’s planned water releases. They warn of a massive die-off as bad as during the last drought, when 95% of winter-run chinook salmon eggs and young fish were wiped out in 2014 and 2015.
