State residents have been struggling to keep up with their water bills during the COVID-19 pandemic, but government officials say help is on the way.
Survey results from the State Water Resources Control Board released in late January estimate about 1.6 million or 12% of households across the state have not paid their water bills resulting in an estimated $1 billion in statewide household water debt. The average household debt is $500.
A cold, late-winter Pacific storm brought rain and snow to California on Tuesday. Winter storm warnings were posted or scheduled to take effect during the day in mountains from the Oregon border south to the U.S-Mexico border. Mountain travel was discouraged due to the potential for major delays, chain controls and near-whiteout conditions, the National Weather Service said. The San Francisco Bay Area weather office warned of possible hail, thunderstorms and downpours that could make driving risky.
If 2020 was a difficult water year for the Klamath Basin, then 2021 is likely to be even more challenging. With record-low inflows coming into Upper Klamath Lake, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation anticipates it will not have anywhere near enough water this summer to meet minimum requirements for endangered fish — let alone enough water to meet irrigation demands for farmers and ranchers.
Proposed water wells in California don’t all require environmental review under state and local permit laws, but state standards governing well location will sometimes require local governments to make discretionary decisions, triggering such a look, a state appellate court said.
The California Environmental Quality Act requires discretionary decisions—those that require an agency to exercise judgment in deciding whether to approve a project—to undergo an environmental review. Ministerial decisions made to determine legal compliance, however, don’t require such weighing.
While much has been written this year about atmospheric rivers, avalanche warnings and even flash flooding, the western half of the United States is experiencing a crushing drought. The weather patterns have left parts of the Northwest soggy. Still, 80% of the land in the western states face some official category of drought. That is nearly half of the entire continental US, or put another way, the size of New York State times 25. The drought is affecting more than 70 million people.
Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot said the Delta flows issue has been decades in the making and “it’s going to take some time to figure this out.”
Get ready for a lot of chatter this week about Colorado’s weather, especially on social media. Computer forecast models show the potential for a high-impact winter storm moving into the state sometime after Wednesday. As we see it now this storm could drop a large amount of moisture and it could be mostly in the form of snow, so it is something you will want to pay close attention to this week.
A new Colorado River study predicts we may need to make even deeper cuts to keep our reservoirs from tanking over the long haul. But the dire conclusions within the study aren’t what make it so intriguing. It’s how the group arrived at them. The Future of the Colorado River project, an effort based out of Utah State University, has produced six white papers to evaluate new approaches to water management along the river.
There’s a classic scene in “The Graduate” where Dustin Hoffman’s character, fresh out of college, gets pulled aside at a graduation party by a well-meaning friend of his parents and told: “I just want to say one word to you. Just one word … plastics.”
The year 2020 is going to be remembered for a lot of things, many of them not so good. Included in the not-so-good list is the drought that has plagued the West, lasting into 2021. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, which has published weekly maps since 2000, the 2020 drought is the worst, in terms of its geographical scope, in more than 20 years.
