VACAVILLE (CBS13) — Some Northern California residents who will experience power outages Wednesday are also being asked to conserve water. The city of Vacaville and El Dorado County announced Tuesday that the PG&E Public Safety Power Outage may also affect water service to neighborhoods.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — California’s biggest utility shut off electricity to more than a million people Wednesday for what could be days on end, in the most sweeping effort in state history to prevent wildfires caused by windblown power lines. The move came after two years of catastrophic fires sent Pacific Gas & Electric into bankruptcy and forced it to take more aggressive steps to prevent blazes.
Cities, counties and regional water districts throughout the Sacramento Valley and Bay Area are urging users to cut down on water use during Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s public safety power shutoff, which has blacked out hundreds of thousands of customers since the early morning hours of Wednesday.
Fairfield authorities are urging residents to conserve water use after the city experienced a treatment plant issue that it is attributing to the PG&E shutoff.
Next month, the Northern California community of Paradise and will commemorate a somber anniversary: On Nov. 8, 2018, the town burned to the ground. Nearly 11,000 properties were erased in the deadliest, most destructive wildfire in state history, which took 85 lives.
Now, as California braces for peak fire season, the most extensive post-fire cleanup it has ever taken on is nearly complete. Crews have hauled off more than 3.6 million tons of debris — twice what was removed from the World Trade Center site after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, in New York City.
California’s Central Valley is one of the most productive agricultural regions in the United States—it yields a third of the produce grown in the country and is the world’s largest supplier of canned tomatoes. But a seven-year drought has threatened the viability of the valley’s farmland, and many rural communities have suffered greatly as a result.
Joris Debeij’s short documentary When a Town Runs Dry offers a window into the front lines of the water crisis. In the film, which is based on Diana Marcum’s Pulitzer Prize–winning reporting, we hear from several residents of Stratford, a farming community in which much of the land was decimated by the drought.
For E. Joaquin Esquivel, California has made great strides in fighting climate change and transitioning to a cleaner energy sector.
Now, he said, it’s water’s turn.
“Water, I think, is ready for that moment,” said Esquivel, the chairman of the California State Water Resources Control Board who took over from longtime chair Felicia Marcus in February.
The board has a broad mandate to oversee water resources and drinking water for the protection of the environment, public health, and other uses. That includes managing water rights and dealing with rural water issues, the latter of which is the topic of an Oct. 8 webinar on which Esquivel is speaking.
The wildfires that raged last year from Paradise to Malibu made for California’s deadliest, most destructive fire season on record.
But the eruption of blazes marked another distinction for California, as one of the worst for the climate. In 2018, fires released more than 45 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — the most in a decade and trailing only slightly behind 2008, when the state was also stricken by two of the largest wildfires in modern history.
October kicks off a new water year for California and the state has a considerably more water storage than last year.
Statewide reservoir water storage is 128% of average. That amounts to about 29.7 million acre-feet of water for California, according to the Department of Water Resources.
It’s due to that marathon wet winter in 2017 that pounded the state with rain and snow. The 2018 water year was about average, which actually built up the surplus.
Of course that’s good news for California agriculture producers.
Paul Johnson farms 450 acres of wine grapes in Monterey County for his family’s Johnson Vineyard Co. Normally, a range of local wineries, under multiyear contracts, buy his Pinot Noir and Chardonnay grapes. But after last year’s harvest, Johnson began to worry when no winery clients renewed their contracts.
The Trump administration’s latest effort to dramatically boost oil and gas production is landing in California, with the Interior Department on Friday opening up 720,000 acres between the Bay Area and Fresno to potential drilling.
The move gives an immediate go-ahead to 14 drilling leases in San Benito, Monterey and Fresno counties, mostly projects near existing drill sites, projects that have been pursued for years by fossil fuel companies looking to expand.
