Ross Franson stood on the road between two fields, where nothing grows under the Fresno County sun.
As a teen, Franson hauled a water tank to spray down the dust on roads like this — rolling past rows of almond and pistachio trees, the CD on his Discman skipping with every bump.
For more than a century, PG&E’s Potter Valley Project has funneled water from one Northern California river to another. Now, the century-old system has become the center of a political firestorm, cast by the Trump administration as a battle of “fish over people.”
Earlier this summer, PG&E submitted its final proposal to federal regulators: Dismantle the project’s two dams, drain its reservoir and retire the diversion tunnel that has long carried Eel River water into the Russian River watershed. The company would replace the infrastructure with a smaller facility that sharply curtails diversions in order to restore the Eel River’s struggling salmon populations. Supporters along the Eel see a long, overdue chance to undo generations of ecological damage. On the Russian River side, critics warn of heightened wildfire danger, worsening water shortages and severe economic strain for farms and communities that rely on the supply.
Gov. Gavin Newsom and some of California’s major water agencies hit a setback this week when a proposal to fast-track plans for a 45-mile water tunnel beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta died in the state Legislature.
Newsom has been trying to streamline legal and environmental review of the proposed water tunnel through budget measures that also would give the state authority to issue bonds to pay for the project.
Water is becoming a scarce resource as Texas continues to grow, and it’s prompting concerns among state officials and industry leaders over what happens when the next drought occurs.
The regional economy is expanding, but growth trends are beginning to collide with stark realities about natural resources that are already strained.
In the more than four decades since I started at the L.A. Times, we’ve never had a reporter cover water with the depth and persistence of Ian James. California’s story is often the story of water — who’s got it, who doesn’t and who will find our next acre-foot. Ian is a former foreign correspondent who has written about everything from novel water solutions like reclaiming sewage, to the intersection of H2O with wildlife and farms. Essential Cal talked to Ian about his work.
The Imperial Irrigation District Board of Directors voted unanimously at its regular meeting on Tuesday, Sept. 2 to endorse California’s Delta Conveyance Project, with managers and directors saying the plan could strengthen the State Water Project and reduce pressure on the drought-stricken Colorado River.
The move is notable because Imperial County does not receive State Water Project water, and IID relies entirely on the Colorado River. The district said the endorsement underscores how the state’s two major water systems are linked, and that improving reliability in one benefits the other. The IID described its action as a “significant and unusual endorsement” in a press release, noting that it is the largest irrigation district in the United States and the largest single user of Colorado River water.
For more than two decades, satellites have tracked the total amounts of water held in glaciers, ice sheets, lakes, rivers, soil and the world’s vast natural reservoirs underground — aquifers. An extensive global analysis of that data now reveals fresh water is rapidly disappearing beneath much of humanity’s feet, and large swaths of the Earth are drying out.
Scientists are seeing “mega-drying” regions that are immense and expanding — one stretching from the western United States through Mexico to Central America, and another from Morocco to France, across the entire Middle East to northern China.
California’s biggest irrigation district is throwing its support behind a controversial water diversion project that aims to help relieve the Golden State’s historic battle with drought but also faces widespread local opposition.
The Imperial Irrigation District — the biggest district not only in California, but also the nation — declared on Tuesday that it was issuing “a significant and unusual endorsement” for the state’s proposed Delta Conveyance Project.
For millennia, humans have sought to make seawater drinkable. Ancient mariners tried distillation by boiling the oceans in which they sailed, and in more recent times, engineers have experimented with filters and chemicals .
As the climate warms, populations surge and droughts intensify, there is a growing need to make the sea drinkable. Desalination technology is spreading fastest in the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Asia, where there is plenty of ocean but dwindling supplies of fresh water.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has published a sector-wide set of non-regulatory recommendations to strengthen U.S. drinking water and wastewater systems against cyber attacks, alongside new funding for resilience projects. Although the document itself is advisory, it lands amid stepped-up inspections and enforcement tied to Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) §1433 risk-and-resilience obligations. Utilities, vendors, investors, and acquirers should treat these recommendations as the new baseline for diligence, budgeting, and compliance planning.
