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Silicon Valley’s Largest City Is Sounding The Alarm About A Drinking Water Crisis That No One Knows How To Fix

/in , /by /Business Insiderby Aria Bendix

San Jose, California is plagued by both an absence and surplus of water. Until recently, the city suffered from a prolonged period of drought that forced nearly one million residents to cut back their water usage. Like many coastal cities, San Jose is also vulnerable to the growing threat of sea level rise, which has exposed the city to chronic flooding. In 2017, San Jose saw the worst floods to hit the Silicon Valley in a century — the product of an overflowing reservoir that spilled into the local Coyote Creek, trapping hundreds of residents in their homes and forcing more than 14,000 others to evacuate.

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Western States Sign Historic Agreement To Deal With Drought

/in , /by /Nevada Public Radioby Rachel Christiansen

Representatives from seven states along with federal water managers met at the Hoover Dam Monday to sign a historic agreement on how to deal with the ongoing drought in the West. The Drought Contingency Plan has been years in the making – and it’s not been an easy road. Negotiations were difficult, especially for the states who will have to cut back their use of this most precious resource. Brenda Burman is the commissioner for the Bureau of Reclamation. She admitted there were times where it seemed an agreement wasn’t going to happen, but water managers eventually came together.

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Snow In May: Yosemite Looks Like A Winter Wonderland In The Middle Of Spring

/in , /by /The Sacramento Beeby Gabby Ferreira

“It was surreal.” As an unseasonal winter storm blanketed Yosemite with snow Sunday, people took to social media to share their awe. Photos from the Yosemite Conservancy’s webcam show El Capitan shrouded in fog and a dusting of snow atop Half Dome. Videos and photos posted to social media show thick snowflakes coming down and conditions that look out of place for late spring. “Sometimes Mother Nature has a plan of her own. Like snowmen in May in your hiking vacation in Yosemite!” said one Instagram user, who posted a photo of her child making a snowman near Tenaya Lodge.

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Want To Know If California Can Make Zero Emissions By 2045? Here’s What To Watch

/in , /by /Utility Dive (Washington, D.C.)by Herman K. Trabish

California plans to reach 60% renewables by 2030 and a zero emissions economy by 2045 as its investor-owned utilities (IOUs) face wildfires and bankruptcy, new and unproven electricity providers proliferate and customers demand a decentralized energy system. What could go wrong? The key to success is eliminating natural gas as an electricity resource, stakeholders told Utility Dive. To do that, the state must make one fundamental change at the local level and another at the transmission system level.

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They Grow The Nation’s Food, But They Can’t Drink The Water

/in , /by /The New York Timesby Jose A. Del Real

Water is a currency in California, and the low-income farmworkers who pick the Central Valley’s crops know it better than anyone. They labor in the region’s endless orchards, made possible by sophisticated irrigation systems, but at home their faucets spew toxic water tainted by arsenic and fertilizer chemicals. “Clean water flows toward power and money,” said Susana De Anda, a longtime water-rights organizer in the region. She is the daughter of lechugueros who worked in lettuce fields and helped make California one of the agricultural capitals of the world. “Homes, schools and clinics are supposed to be the safest places to go. But not in our world.”

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Interior Department Pulls Support From Klamath Dam Removal Project

/in , /by /Jefferson Public Radio (Redding, Calif.)by Liam Moriarty

The Trump Administration has withdrawn the previous administration’s support for the removal of four dams on the Klamath River in Southern Oregon and Northern California. Recently-appointed Interior Secretary David Bernhardt has rescinded a letter of support that Obama-era Interior Secretary Sally Jewell wrote in 2016. Jewell’s letter threw the agency’s weight behind the plan to take out four Klamath River dams to help threatened salmon and other fish. Matt Cox is with the Klamath River Renewal Corporation, the non-profit formed to implement the dam removal agreement. He says rescinding Jewell’s letter has no legal effect.

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Public Water Now Appeals Monterey County’s Cal Am Desal Approval

/in , /by /Monterey Heraldby Jim Johnson

Public Water Now is challenging the Monterey County Planning Commission’s approval of a combined development permit for California American Water’s proposed desalination plant project. On Thursday, the organization best known for backing a public takeover of Cal Am’s local water system filed an appeal to the Board of Supervisors of the Planning Commission’s narrow approval of a permit for the 6.4-million-gallon-per-day desal plant north of Marina and associated infrastructure. The appeal argues the desal project proposal fails to properly address several key details, including groundwater rights, and calls for the county to require a supplemental environmental review before considering the proposal.

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Final 100 Miles Of The Colorado Highlight How Badly The River Is Overtaxed

/in , /by /Cronkite News (Phoenix)by Luke Runyon

From above, tracing the Colorado River along the Arizona-California line in an airplane, it’s easy to see how it happened. As the river bends and weaves through the Southwest, its contents are slowly drained away. Concrete canals send water to millions of people in Phoenix and Tucson, Los Angeles and San Diego. Farms, ribbons of green contrasted against the desert’s shades of brown, line the waterway. Farther downstream, near Yuma, the river splits into threads, like a frayed piece of yarn. A massive multistate plumbing system sends river water to irrigate the hundreds of thousands of farm acres in Southern California and Arizona, hubs for winter vegetables, alfalfa, cotton and cattle.

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OPINION: A New Water Tax? California Has A $21 Billion Surplus, Use That Instead

/in , /by /The Daily Press (Victorville, Calif.)by Jon Coupal and Phillip Chen

California has a record $21.5 billion surplus. That’s the good news. The bad news is that we have all that money because you are being overtaxed. Earlier this month, Gov. Gavin Newsom released his revised budget proposal, the largest in California history. At a staggering $214 billion dollars, the budget is larger than that of most nations and every other state. The budget also includes a new $140 million tax on water customers to help all Californians have access to clean water.

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OPINION: When You Dream Of California, Does Water Come To Mind? It Should

/in , /by /WBUR-FM (Boston)by Meghna Chakrabarti

On a summer day in the San Joaquin Valley, 101 in the shade, I merge onto Highway 99 past downtown Fresno and steer through the vibrations of heat. I’m headed to the valley’s deep south, to a little farmworker town in a far corner of Kern County called Lost Hills. This is where the biggest farmer in America—the one whose mad plantings of almonds and pistachios have triggered California’s nut rush—keeps on growing, no matter drought or flood. He doesn’t live in Lost Hills. He lives in Beverly Hills. How has he managed to outwit nature for so long?

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