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What’s Different About California’s Fires This Year?

/in , /by /The New York Timesby Henry Fountain

California is burning, with at least 16 big wildfires statewide. The largest, in and around the northern city of Redding, has killed at least six people and burned more than a thousand homes and other structures. Fires are nothing new in the state this time of year. It’s fire season, after all, as it is elsewhere in the West. But something feels different this time, perhaps because, following the Santa Rosa fire last October, this is the second year in a row in which fire has destroyed large parts of a city.

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Proposal To Increase Delta Water Flows Causes Contention Between Farmers, Fisheries

/in , /by /Capital Public Radio (Sacramento)by Nadine Sebai

Following nine years of research, a California agency has proposed to increase water flows in the San Francisco Bay-Delta Estuary. But the decision is causing contention between farmers and fisheries. The California State Water Resources Control Board says the proposal will prevent an ecological crisis, including the total collapse of fisheries. About 70,000 fall-run Chinook salmon adults returned to the San Joaquin Basin in 1984, but that number fell to just 8,000 in 2014.

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OPINION: Water Tunnels Approval Is Pure Government Arrogance

/in , /by /Ventura County Starby Tom Elias

The way environmental activists in California’s Delta region tell it, there is no part of government in this state more arrogant than the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. The huge MWD, supplier of water to the majority of the state’s populace, is certainly acting the part as it pushes for a project Gov. Jerry Brown is trying to make an irreversible fait accompli before he leaves office at the end of this year.

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Hot July Is Fueling California’s Summer Wildfires

/in , /by /The Mercury News (San Jose)by Lisa M. Krieger

The calendar says it’s the first of August. But an unforgiving early wave of heat means that California’s landscape feels as dry as September, igniting a deadly wildfire season up and down the state. Hot and dry as a powder keg, recent weather has accelerated the normal drying of western landscapes, turning vegetation into kindling, say weather experts. Even nights are warm. “Fuels are really really dry. It’s closer to what we should get by late summer or early fall,” said professor Craig Clements, director of the Fire Weather Research Lab at San Jose State University.

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How Climate Change Is Making Disasters Like The Carr Fire More Likely

/in , /by /The Washington Postby Angela Fritz

Firefighters are waging war against 17 wildfires that cover 200,000 acres in California this week. Front-line dispatches suggest that, at least at times, they’ve lost the battle. The bodies of two children were found under a wet blanket with the remains of their great-grandmother hovering over them. Three firefighters and one bulldozer operator are dead. More than 700 homes have burned to the ground. Crews have struggled, at least in part, because they have never seen fires behave like this before.

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Simulating The Weather Created By Fire In New Study

/in , /by /KUER 90.1 (Utah)by Erik Newman

A recent study is helping researchers understand the role of wind in the largest forest fires. Megafires are large, hard-to-manage burns with big economic costs. “These big fires are really hard to deal with,” said Natasha Stavros with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.

 

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Improving Long Term Forecasts To Predict Unusual California Precipitation

/in , /by /WeatherNationby Ali Stevens

Last spring, Governor Jerry Brown declared an end to California’s historic drought that caused over $5 billion in damage to agriculture as well as substantial impacts to fisheries, infrastructure, human health, and vegetation. The drought was not only severe, but it also spanned the winters of 2015-16 and 2016-17, which had unusual and unexpected precipitation that affected the drought’s evolution.

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The Hoover Dam Changed America—And It Might Do It Again

/in , /by /Popular Mechanics (New York)by David Grossman

The Hoover Dam is one of the crown jewels of American infrastructure. It was one of the most ambitious projects of the early 20th century, requiring millions of cubic feet of concrete and tens of millions of pounds of steel to build a dam that could provide electricity to 1.3 million people. Millions of people visit the dam every year. It’s even been immortalized in song.

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California Says This Chemical Causes Cancer. So Why Is It Being Sprayed Into Drinking Water?

/in , /by /The Sacramento Beeby Ryan Sabalow

A year ago, the active ingredient in Roundup, the nation’s most widely used weed-killing herbicide, was added to California’s official list of chemicals known to cause cancer. The state’s warning about glyphosate followed a similar caution issued by the World Health Organization and coincided with hundreds of lawsuits across the country focused on the herbicide. The first very jury trial to involve Roundup recently started in San Francisco —the plaintiff is a groundskeeper who believes he developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma by using the weedkiller on the job.

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Hot Weather, Land Abuses Fueling Algal Blooms In Western Waters

/in , /by /Water Deeply (New York)by Matt Weiser

The West is known for summer wildfires. Now it seems Western summers will be distinguished by another kind of flare-up: algae blooms. This summer has witnessed an explosion of algae problems in Western water bodies. Usually marked by a bright green mat of floating scum, the blooms are unsightly and unpleasant for water lovers. More concerning are potentially toxic cyanobacteria often produced by the algae, which can be deadly to pets and livestock and cause illnesses in people. These harmful algal blooms have popped up in freshwater lakes and streams for years.

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