California’s Office of Administrative Law (OAL) approved OAL File No. 2024-0624-02S – the Direct Potable Reuse Regulations – and filed with the Secretary of State on August 6, 2024.
The regulations will take effect on October 1, 2024. This is a step in the evolution of using recycled water as a safe and reliable water supply for Californians.
The California state water board on Monday formally announced that the Sites Reservoir project failed to get federal approval, a situation they say isn’t permanent and can be rectified.
The rejection by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is the latest setback for the estimated $4 billion project in Northern California that would capture water during the rainy season. Officials have said the reservoir would hold up to 1.5 million acre-feet of water, or enough for 3 million homes a year.
In 2014, Gov. Jerry Brown signed historic legislation establishing a framework for California to begin managing groundwater in an effort to curb widespread overpumping, which had sent aquifer levels into rapid decline, left hundreds of wells dry, and caused the ground to sink in parts of the Central Valley.
The law was based on the idea that groundwater could best be managed at the local level, and it called for newly formed local agencies to gradually adopt measures to address chronic declines in groundwater levels. The legislation laid out an implementation timeline stretching more than a quarter-century, giving many areas until 2040 to address their depletion problems.
The Sierra Club filed a legal challenge Thursday seeking to halt a huge Colorado River conservation deal between the Biden administration and the powerful Imperial Irrigation District, saying that rare desert wildlife and low-income residents near the shores of the already-fast dwindling Salton Sea would be further harmed if concrete steps weren’t taken immediately.
The environmental group on Thursday filed a request for an injunction in California Superior Court in Imperial County, saying both the water agency and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation had violated a tough state environmental law, the California Environmental Quality Act, by rushing through cursory approvals to conserve as much as 900,000 acre feet of water through 2026 — more than the entire state of Nevada receives annually, and enough to potentially supply 2.7 million households.
Yorba Linda is a small, sunny city southeast of Los Angeles. It’s perhaps best known for being the birthplace of President Richard Nixon.
But in the past few years, Yorba Linda has picked up another distinction: It’s home to the nation’s largest per- and polyfluoroalkyl (PFAS) water treatment plant of its kind, according to the city.
Despite an unusual number of modest earthquakes this year in Southern California, the state overall remains in the midst of a “drought” of major earthquakes.
There have been no significant damaging earthquakes underneath California’s most populous cities in the last 30 years. That’s a stark contrast to the prior three decades, when earthquakes in suburban or mountainous areas caused catastrophic damage in the urban infrastructure, causing freeway and building collapses and resulting in the deaths of scores of people.
Former President Donald Trump on Friday threatened to withhold federal disaster response funding from California over Gov. Gavin Newsom’s position on water deliveries to farmers.
Speaking to reporters from a golf course in Rancho Palos Verdes on Friday, Trump said he would strong-arm California’s governor into agreeing to send more water from California’s lush north to farm fields in its drier south.
It is my hope to put to rest the mistaken belief that Great Lakes water, now, or at any point in the future, will be used to solve the water woes of the western United States. This is not going to happen. Westerners cannot have an honest discussion about their future until we dispel this myth once and for all.
Standing anywhere on Chicago’s famous lakefront, it is easy to imagine the freshwater resource in front of you is limitless. I have seen visitors to our city stare in awe at Lake Michigan and say, “You call this a lake? That’s an ocean!”
The California State Water Resources Control Board distributed approximately $880 million to water systems and communities during the past fiscal year for projects that will benefit around 12 million Californians.
395 projects across the state have received funding to capture and recycle more water, recharge and protect groundwater, improve stormwater management, expand access to safe drinking water and improve sanitation.
Western states and the federal government face a looming 2026 deadline to divvy up falling water levels in the Colorado River basin. As overuse and climate change stretch the river thin, research suggests relatively small shifts in global eating patterns could save enough water to fend off steeper cuts for cities and agriculture — and help reduce climate pollution.
Nearly half — 46% — of all the water drawn from the Colorado River goes to growing feed for beef and dairy cows, according to a recent study published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. It’s the most detailed analysis yet of how the river’s water is used.
