OROVILLE, Calif. — The American Society of Civil Engineers has recognized the Oroville Dam rebuild as one of 10 outstanding civil engineering projects.
Two runners-up and a winner will be chosen at the 2020 Outstanding Civil Engineering Achievement gala in Washington D.C. on March 13.
Emergency Crews rescued two people from a wash flowing with runoff from record rain in Las Vegas, and up a to half-foot of Sierra snow (15 centimeters) triggered chain controls around Lake Tahoe as a cold front moved across Nevada on Wednesday.
The National Weather Service also issued a winter weather advisory through 4 p.m. Thursday for much of central Nevada, where as much as 6 inches (15 cm) is possible in mountain areas.
The service said 0.35 inch of rain (9 millimeters) fell in Las Vegas through 8 a.m. Wednesday, breaking the old record for the date set in 1963.
The San Francisco Bay-Delta, the largest estuary on the West Coast, was once the home to fisheries that produced five million pounds of canned salmon a year.
The Delta’s largest city, Stockton, is where children swam, rowed boats, and canoed after school in places made navigable through their parents and grandparents’ labor. Today, our children in Stockton will not enter a river or slough to swim, or fish, or row. Our urban waterways are stagnant, thick with algal scum and toxins.
For the past two centuries, California has relied heavily on the natural resources of the North Coast region, exploiting its pristine watersheds for agriculture and its forests for timber. But today, the environmental costs of timber extraction and damming have reached a tipping point.
Now the Yurok are working with local and state organizations to revitalize the forests, rivers and wildlife, a comprehensive feat requiring collaboration among community leaders up and down the Klamath and Trinity Rivers.
The 2018 Irrigation and Water Management Survey results were published Nov. 13 by the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service.
“The 2018 Irrigation and Water Management Survey, formerly titled the Farm and Ranch Irrigation Survey, expands on the data collected in the 2017 Census of Agriculture,” said NASS Administrator Hubert Hamer. “This report offers detailed, comprehensive, up-to-date information specific to the agriculture industry’s use and management of water supplies.”
By design, the San Francisco Public Utilities Building is exceedingly green. It opened in 2012 and for years the building has been recycling its wastewater for things like flushing the toilets. Now, that water can be consumed.
“Everything that’s connected in this room to the transparent pipe is part of our research project,” explains Manisha Kothari, Project Manager for the SFPUC.
Down in the bowels of this building that houses some 900 employees, you will find the equipment that treats all of their wastewater.
As California deals with the aftermath of several devastating wildfires, heavy rainfall hitting the charred remains of the terrain could cause floods in the southern part of the state.
Rainfall in Southern California began on Tuesday, flooding some roads, and was forecast to continue through Thursday morning. Some areas of California were expected to see rainfall rates of up to half an inch per hour, prompting the National Weather Service to issue a Flash Flood Watch.
A private company and the town of Queen Creek are proposing a water deal that would leave 485 acres of farmland permanently dry near the Colorado River and send the water used on that land to the fast-growing Phoenix suburb.
The company GSC Farm LLC is seeking to sell its annual entitlement of 2,083 acre-feet of Colorado River water — about 678 million gallons — to Queen Creek for a one-time payment of $21 million. The town and the company asked regulators at the Arizona Department of Water Resources to endorse the water transfer, and the agency is holding a series of four meetings this week to hear comments on the proposal.
In a victory for critics of California’s oil drilling industry, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday stopped the approval of new hydraulic fracturing in the state until the permits for those projects can be reviewed by an independent panel of scientists.
Newsom also imposed a moratorium on new permits for steam-injected oil drilling, another extraction method opposed by environmentalists that was linked to a massive petroleum spill in Kern County over the summer.
Contamination of drinking water from per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) may be the nation’s most pressing drinking water quality issue. With many calling for the expedited banning and removal of PFAS in water sources, a new U.S. EPA procedure to better assess them may be a concrete step in that direction.
“The US EPA has published a systemic review protocol for the toxicity assessment of five per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) and is now seeking the public’s input on its approach during a 45-day comment period,” according to Chemical Watch.
