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New Water Recycling Projects Will Help Battle Central Coast’s Seawater Invasion

/in , /by /Santa Cruz Sentinelby Lara Streiff

For decades, California’s coastal aquifers have been plagued by invading seawater, turning pristine wells into salty ruins. But the state’s coastal water agencies now plan to get more aggressive in holding back the invasion by injecting millions of gallons of treated sewage and other purified wastewater deep underground. The additional groundwater will both enhance potable water supplies and help prevent saltwater from seeping further into coastal California’s massive subterranean reservoirs. A decade ago, Orange County was the first in California to successfully employ this tactic — mocked by critics as a “toilet to tap” solution.

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Russian Riverkeeper Works to Protect, Restore Russian River

/in , /by /The Press Democratby Stephen Nett

Rivers are vital. Like life-giving arteries, they deliver water for drinking and irrigation and fertile soil for vineyards and farms. They support watersheds teeming with life. But humans are hard on rivers. We crowd their banks, dump waste in them and take out water, fish and other resources. In the process, waterways often end up reduced to narrow, dirty channels, shadows of their former selves. When that happens, who speaks for the river? For our longest local river, that voice has often been the nonprofit Russian Riverkeeper.

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New EPA-Corps Rule Narrows Federal Clean-Water Jurisdiction

/in , /by /Engineering News-Recordby Tom Ichniowski

The Trump administration has carried out a major rewrite of a key environmental rule, significantly tightening the definition of which bodies of water are subject to federal regulation under the Clean Water Act, and which are not. The rule, governing what the statute calls “waters of the United States,” (WOTUS) is important to the construction industry because it determines where contractors must get a federal permit before they build near wetlands or streams. Construction  groups hailed the new rule, which top officials of the Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers signed on Jan. 23.

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Trump Administration Unveils New Clean Water Act Rules. California Could See Big Impact

/in , , /by /Desert Sun (Palm Springs, Calif.)by Mark Olalde

The Trump administration on Thursday revealed an overhaul of the Clean Water Act that could remove federal protections for waterways around the country, including as many as two-thirds of those in California.

The arid West, where intermittent rainfall often flows through arroyos and washes, could be especially impacted by the rollback of federal jurisdiction, as the new “Navigable Waters Protection Rule” will remove federal oversight from ephemeral waterways created by rain or snow.

About 66% of California’s waterways are ephemeral or intermittent, according to the government’s own reports that were used in formulating earlier Clean Water Act rules. That number rises to 81%  around the entire Southwest, including 94% of Arizona’s watercourses.

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UC Merced Researchers Working on Innovative Way to Desalinate Ag Water

/in , /by /ABC 30 News/KFSN (Fresno, Calif.)by Sara Sandrik

MERCED, Calif. (KFSN) — A new project at UC Merced is focusing on irrigation water.
The work could have a significant impact on the crops that are grown throughout the Central Valley.

“We’re trying to take two problems and come up with one solution out of the two of them. We have an excess of drainage water which has excess salt in it, and we need cooling of agricultural greenhouses,” says assistant professor James Palko.

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Desalination Emerges as a Possible Solution for Another Monterey County Water Challenge

/in , , /by /Monterey County Weeklyby Asaf Shalev

On par with mission architecture or cattle ranching is another consequential relic of Spanish colonialism in California: the idea that water pumped from underground belongs to whoever owns the land above.

In the Central Valley, a major danger of unregulated pumping has been a drooping of the surface at a rate of one foot a year. Here, in the Salinas Valley, so much freshwater has been extracted that, in some aquifers, the natural flow from continent to ocean has reversed – seawater is pushing through gravel and sand into groundwater sources, threatening to spoil a critical household and agricultural supply.

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Don’t Fall for This Old Hoax About Showering and Doing Laundry in California

/in , , /by /PolitiFact (Washington)by Bill McCarthy

The police won’t come knocking for Californians who shower and do laundry on the same day, despite what some social media users would have you believe.

An old hoax about California’s water conservation laws recently resurfaced after a guest on a Los Angeles TV station shared misinformation on air.

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California Will be Hit Hard as Trump Administration Weakens Clean Water Protections

/in , , /by /Los Angeles Timesby Anna M. Phillips

Defying environmentalists and public health advocates, the Trump administration on Thursday will announce the replacement of Obama-era water protections with a significantly weaker set of regulations that lifts limits on how much pollution can be dumped into small streams and wetlands.

The changes to the Clean Water Act’s protections are expected to hit California and other Western states especially hard.

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Bonds on the Ballot: Will Billions of Dollars Help California Cope With Climate Change?

/in , , /by /CalMatters (Sacramento, Calif.)by Julie Cart

Given California’s international leadership in addressing climate change, it isn’t surprising that voters will be asked this November to approve billions of dollars in bonds to help the state become more resilient.

But why settle for one ballot proposal when you can have three?

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Trump Team Proposes Rollback of Desert Protections to Boost Geothermal Energy

/in , /by /Los Angeles Timesby Louis Sahagun

In step with President Trump’s push for more energy development in California’s deserts, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management announced Thursday it wants to transform 22,000 acres of public land in the southern Owens Valley into one of the largest geothermal leasing sites in the state.

The agency has determined that the aquifer deep beneath the surface of the vintage Old West landscape of Rose Valley, about 120 miles north of Los Angeles, is a storehouse of enough volcanically heated water to spur $1 billion in investments and provide 117,000 homes with electricity.

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