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About 9,200 households in Granada Hills and Porter Ranch were dealing with a water service outage on Wednesday after the Los Angeles Department of Water Power announced that emergency repairs were underway at a pump station.

The problem arose on Tuesday afternoon. The DWP said that as crews were making repairs of a leak at a pump station that connects to a 10-million-gallon tank, a valve controlling the flow of water failed to open.

One of the largest solar and battery power plants in the United States is now supplying Los Angeles and Glendale from Kern County.

Local leaders and clean energy experts gathered Tuesday beneath a blazing desert sun to mark the initiation of full production from 1.36 million solar panels and 172 lithium iron phosphate batteries that make up the Eland solar-plus-storage electricity project. It’s as large as 13 Dodger stadiums, parking lots included, and will generate 7% of the electricity for all of the city of Los Angeles, much of it at a record-low price.

While Southern California has managed to escape the worst of the summer heat (so far), mild June and July temperatures have probably helped obscure the region’s single biggest issue: water, or the lack thereof. Despite the easy weather, this part of the world has been hurtling deeper into drought conditions since early spring, and new data shows just how bad things have gotten from Santa Barbara to San Diego.

Recent statewide precipitation data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows just how little rainfall Southern California has received since Oct. 1, the start of the state’s formal water year. Monitors in Santa Barbara have only collected 7.09 inches of rain in that time, compared to last year’s giant tally of 25.16 inches during that period. Historically, Santa Barbara would have received 17.17 inches by now, meaning the Central Coast city’s rainfall totals are down by nearly 60%. Things aren’t much better elsewhere, either.

The picturesque tufa towers on the shores of Mono Lake, formed over centuries by underwater springs and left high and dry as Los Angeles diverted water from nearby creeks, have long been a symbol of the saline lake. Visitors who stroll beside the lapping water take photos of the craggy calcium carbonate formations as flocks of migratory birds soar overhead.

But residents, local officials and environmentalists say the lake’s level should be much higher than it is today, and that the fully exposed tufa spires show L.A. remains far from meeting its obligation to restore the lake’s health.

There are obvious benefits to logging, grazing, prescribed burns, and mechanical thinning of California’s forests. When you suppress wildfires for what is now over a century, then overregulate and suppress any other means to thin the forest, you get overcrowded and unhealthy forests.

California’s trees now have 5 to 10 times more than a historically normal density. They’re competing for an insufficient share of light, water and nutrients, leading to disease, infestations, dehydration and death. Up through the 1980s, California harvested 6 billion board feet per year of timber; the annual harvest is now 25 percent of that. We have turned our forests into tinderboxes, and that is the reason fires turn into superfires.