What happened to the rain? Less than a year after the drought was declared over, precipitation has been relatively scarce in the Sacramento area and Northern California so far this season. This week’s cold snap is accompanied by a round of dry weather that’s expected to last at least another 10 days. It’s too soon to panic about a prolonged dry spell, however.
Throughout California, access to water and how it is distributed is a perennial issue. Water conflicts are often nuanced and take on a life of their own. In some cases, a local conflict can have statewide implications — the City of Marina, a small city along the shores of Monterey Bay, finds itself in such a conflict. In 2009, the California State Water Resources Control Board ordered the private, for-profit California American Water Company to end its illegal water diversions from the Carmel River.
The state’s water conservation districts don’t need the approval of property owners or voters to charge their customers fees to fund programs aimed at protecting groundwater, the California Supreme Court ruled on Monday. But the justices in a unanimous decision also said the districts cannot charge cities disproportionately more than farmers for conservation efforts. The decision ensures the water districts have a source of funding to undertake projects to replenish ground water — a key irrigation source for farmers that became even more vital during California’s historic drought.
Biologists assumed baby winter-run Chinook salmon hung out in the Sacramento River where they hatched until they grew large enough to make the trip downstream to the Pacific Ocean. A recently released scientific study challenges that assumption – and may have implications in how fisheries agencies manage Sacramento Valley waterways to protect the critically endangered fish.
Anthony Cupaiuolo has been skiing the Sierra Nevada backcountry near Lake Tahoe since 1997. But over the last decade, he’s noticed some changes. “Outside of last year, which really sticks out as an anomaly, we haven’t seen [snow] coverage down at lower elevations nearly as much as we would in the late ’90s and early 2000s,” said Cupaiuolo, who usually skis at least 80 days every winter, with a majority of them spent in the backcountry.
Now that summer is over and rain has returned to California, it appears that the dramatic 2017 fire season is finally behind us. The effects of fire season can linger, however, with the possibilities of erosion and polluted runoff from burned areas. Napa County has even issued suggestions for how to protect waterways in burned landscapes. Not all news is bad when it comes to the interactions between fire and water, however. These two seemingly opposite elements can actually work in tandem under the right circumstances, to the benefit of people as well as the environment.
Phase two of construction at Oroville Dam — with work on both spillways — might prove more challenging than the first feat, the contractor’s project director said in a media call Thursday. Jeff Petersen, project director for Kiewit Infrastructure West Co., said finishing work for the 3,000-foot main spillway including concrete finishing, joint sealing, drain work and clean up, should be done by the end of the year.
State lawmakers opposed to Gov. Jerry Brown’s Delta tunnel plan are stepping up calls for greater transparency into the project’s finances, as the proposed water delivery system suffered a series of setbacks this fall. At a Thursday town hall in the Delta town of Walnut Grove, lawmakers representing the region called on the Brown administration to drop the tunnel plan in the absence of greater cost certainty.
The last few months have seen a growing number of climate concerns – from historically devastating floods to record forest fires – with many regions still assessing the damage. Beyond recovery, planning and paying for more resilient infrastructure also remains an enormous challenge, and no quick and easy solutions seem to be on the way from Washington or elsewhere.
At Big Break Regional Shoreline, nestled in Northern California’s San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta, Michael Moran, supervising naturalist for East Bay Regional Park District, leads about 30 people out along a path into the park. The group consists of various stakeholders from the Metropolitan Water District (met), a regional wholesaler that supplies water to 19 million people across 26 public agencies in Southern California, hundreds of miles away. Big Break is one stop on a tour of the Delta, an educational trip for those involved with the met.
