Nebraska is suing Colorado over the amount of water it draws from the South Platte River, the latest in a long history of water rights disputes between the states that have been left increasingly dry by climate change.
Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen and state Attorney General Mike Hilgers held a news conference Wednesday to announce the lawsuit, which was filed with the U.S. Supreme Court.
Some National Weather Service offices in California are among those hit hardest by meteorologist vacancies, according to new data from an employee union — heightening concerns as the state contends with another potentially devastating fire season and the ongoing threat of extreme weather.
The staffing shortages have forced some offices to outsource overnight operations to neighboring offices or reduce how often they issue forecast products that help keep decision-makers and first responders abreast of potentially hazardous weather conditions.
Patrick Golling yanked the pull cord, and the Honda engine roared to life. Seconds after it began sucking water out of his father’s pool, a powerful stream erupted from an agricultural irrigation nozzle fixed atop a bright red pole a few feet away, connected with a fire hose.
In a minute flat, the system meticulously jerked across the landscape, drenching the ravine in 50 gallons of water. The demonstration on a hot July afternoon left the blackened sticks below the property — once trees before the Palisades fire ripped through — dripping with chlorinated water.
At first read, a water recycling plan coming out of California sounds tough to swallow.
That’s because the Groundwater Replenishment System in Orange County intends to mass-produce drinking water from purified sewage to combat shortages in dry regions, according to The Guardian. It builds on similar work already being done that churns out clean water by the millions of gallons.
We are told that water scarcity in the arid American West is inevitable and that the great water projects of the past century were the product of misguided hubris. Environmentalists call for Westerners to shrink their agricultural sector and ration their urban water use and, increasingly, demolish the dams and reservoirs that enabled a civilization they have now declared is unsustainable.
They are wrong. In the far West, California’s chronic water scarcity — as well as many of the threats to aquatic ecosystems in that state — are caused by mismanagement. There is plenty of water.
When thimble-sized mussels were first detected last year in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, biologists quickly rang the alarm over how severely this invasive species could threaten the state’s water supply systems.
Now, nine months after the mollusks’ appearance near Stockton, officials are in a race to rein in golden mussels as their larvae spread through the state’s network of pumps, pipes and canals, reports CalMatters’ Rachel Becker.
After Meta broke ground on a $750 million data center on the edge of Newton County, Ga., the water taps in Beverly and Jeff Morris’s home went dry.
The couple’s house, which uses well water, is 1,000 feet from Meta’s new data center. Months after construction began in 2018, the Morrises’ dishwasher, ice maker, washing machine and toilet all stopped working, said Beverly Morris, now 71. Within a year, the water pressure had slowed to a trickle. Soon, nothing came out of the bathroom and kitchen taps.
After the thirtieth consecutive month without rain, the townsfolk of San Francisco de Conchos in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua gather to plead for divine intervention.
On the shores of Lake Toronto, the reservoir behind the state’s most important dam – called La Boquilla, a priest leads local farmers on horseback and their families in prayer, the stony ground beneath their feet once part of the lakebed before the waters receded to today’s critically low levels.
In the contentious talks over how states will split the shrinking Colorado River, negotiators are reaching consensus on one point: Just go with the “natural flow.”
The concept is a somewhat simple one. Instead of negotiating future cuts across the entire seven-state region, the process would rely on recent water records — the amount of water flowing from the Colorado River headwaters in the Upper Basin to a point in Arizona marking the boundary of the Lower Basin states.
If there is anything that might constitute an overwhelming institutional consensus in California, it’s that we are experiencing climate change, and that one of the consequences will be more rain, less snow, and more so-called whiplash between very wet years and very dry years.
In an average year these days, 30 million acre feet of water flows through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. But nearly half of that water comes down in the form of a melting Sierra snowpack which in an average year holds 15 million acre feet of water. This snowmelt fills the reservoirs and feeds the rivers from April through June. With climate change, so we’re told, the volume of runoff won’t change. But we’ll get almost all of it in the three months of winter. Do we have a system to handle winter flows into the delta that are twice today’s volume?
