Division 2 and Division 4 on the Imperial Irrigation Board are two of the toughest races candidates are facing in the county’s primary.
In public forum moderated by Imperial Valley College students, residents wanted to hear how candidates plan to protect the valley’s land and water rights.
Division 2 incumbent, Bruce Kuhn talked about how he has been fighting to protect the valley’s resources from stakeholders in the Coachella district.
As we enter a new decade, California faces increasing environmental challenges caused by climate change, creating an uncertain future for our water resources. We need bold leadership to address these impacts. It is time for California’s Department of Water Resources to implement water policy for the state that shores up our precious waterways and diversifies water supplies in the face of these imminent threats.
The fast-melting ice in the Arctic may be the primary cause of extreme weather across the globe, including some of the most violent, damaging storms to hit the Bay Area and California, a Scripps Institution of Oceanography study has found.
The Scripps paper, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first definitive study of the links between melting polar ice and changing climatic conditions reaching to the tropics, a cause-and-effect relationship that scientists had plenty of evidence for but had never precisely documented to this extent.
What do you do about lab-made chemicals that are in 99% of people in the U.S. and have been linked to immune system problems and cancer? Whose bonds are so stable that they’re often called “forever chemicals“? Meet PFAS, a class of chemicals that some scientists call the next PCB or DDT. For consumers, they are best known in products like Scotchgard and Teflon.
A company’s proposal to take water from farmland along the Colorado River and sell it to a growing Phoenix suburb has provoked a heated debate, and some Arizona legislators are trying to block the deal with a bill that would prohibit the transfer.
The legislation introduced by Rep. Regina Cobb would bar landowners who hold “fourth-priority” water entitlements from transferring Colorado River water away from communities near the river.
The Food and Drug Administration is expanding its own capacity to test foods for certain “forever chemicals,” a senior agency official said Monday.
Expanded federal laboratory capability should help as the Department of Defense, states, and scientific researchers increase their testing of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) near military, industrial, and other sites with a history of having used the man-made chemicals.
The additional federal resources should also help state agencies dealing with suspected PFAS contamination in food.
The Department of Water Resources announced it would be increasing its allocations to 15 percent for State Water Project participants this year, which reflects a 5 percent increase to the state’s initial estimation in December.
Yuba City is one of 29 agencies that are part of the State Water Project. The project’s largest reservoir in Lake Oroville.
The point of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed underground aqueduct is to divert water from the Sacramento River beneath the fragile wetlands, waterways and islands that make up the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to an artificial body of water about 25 miles southwest of Stockton known as Clifton Court Forebay. From there, water would continue to flow through state aqueducts to coastal and Southern California and through federal channels mostly to farm fields in the San Joaquin Valley.
Currently, the water flows not under the delta but right through it. The problem is that when the powerful pumps are running near Clifton Court to drive more water to Southern California and the Central Valley, they reverse the natural flow of delta water and interfere with migrations of endangered fish
As the world warms and precipitation that would have generated snowpack instead creates rain, the western U.S. could see larger floods, according to new Stanford research. An analysis of over 400 watersheds from 1980 to 2016 shows that winter floods driven by rainfall can be more than 2.5 times as large as those driven by snowmelt. The researchers also found that flood sizes increase exponentially as a higher fraction of precipitation falls as rain, meaning the size of floods increased at a faster rate than the increase in rain.
A “normal winter” is forecast into spring, predicted the Bay Area’s weather wizard, Michael Pechner of Golden West Meteorology. On the heels of last year’s milestone rain and snow totals for much of Northern California and with residual high lake levels going into fall, a normal winter would fill most recreation lakes for summer camping, boating and fishing and provide good winter conditions for snow sports in April.
