A study published in October set out to answer a question of special importance to dry regions like Southern Arizona: How will climate change affect what happens to water recharge in Western states? The short answer, according to University of Arizona researchers, is that in the future there will be about the same or more recharge in the north, and states in the south will see less.
Massive floods hit Houston and devastating hurricanes struck Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. Yet one of the more remarkable stories in the past year is the catastrophe that did not happen: massive flooding in California. California experienced its wettest water year on record in 2016-17. In previous decades, that huge volume of water would have caused lethal floods, particularly in the Central Valley. In part, we were lucky. Reservoirs were empty from drought so they had abundant capacity, and there was sufficient time between big storms so the rainfall didn’t stack up.
With the first phase of repairs to the Oroville Dam spillway completed, residents downstream can breathe a little easier. Hundreds of engineers and laborers worked around the clock to fortify the nation’s tallest dam before winter rains, and the Department of Water Resources should be congratulated for expediting this enormous task. But there is a key part of this repair that is still to be done to ensure that California’s water system is ready to withstand the challenges of extreme weather events predicted for the future.
The State Water Resources Control Board is considering a number of regulations that could impact how and when you use water. The Board may move to permanently prohibit practices that waste potable water, such as: Hosing off sidewalks, driveways and other hardscapes; Washing automobiles with hoses not equipped with a shut-off nozzle; Using non-recirculated water in a fountain or other decorative water feature; Watering lawns in a manner that causes runoff, or within 48 hours after measurable precipitation, and irrigating ornamental turf on public street medians.
Who owns the water pipes beneath your street? Increasingly, it is a private company, a shift from the mostly public ownership of the systems used to provide drinking water and remove waste that has prevailed in the U.S. since the early 1900s.
The South Coast Water District voted to take another step towards building a $100 million plant that converts ocean water into drinking water for its customers by 2021. The five-acre Doheny desalination plant is proposed for district-owned land alongside San Juan Creek in Dana Point. It could initially produce up to 5 million gallons of water per day, providing 75 percent of district needs within five years. Eventually, the plant could yield 15 million gallons of water per day.
More rain is on the way. A lot more rain. “That’s really the theme now,” said National Weather Service Eureka meteorologist William Iwasko on Sunday. “… Nice sunny skies probably are not going to happen this week.” So much rain is expected, a flood watch was issued by the weather service for parts of Humboldt, Trinity and Del Norte counties on Sunday.
When the California drought began to take hold in 2011, a mysterious thing happened: People began cutting back drastically on their water consumption – even before mandatory conservation was ordered by their local water agencies and state government. Newsha Ajami, director of Urban Water Policy with Stanford University’s Water in the West program, started hearing about this from water utilities during the drought. After the drought ended, she and a team of graduate students started to investigate why it happened.
The storms that blew through Northern California this week raised the water level of Lake Oroville about 4 feet, but it’s a long way from where the spillways might need to be used. The lake started rising about noon on Wednesday, according to the Department of Water Resources website, and in the next 48 hours climbed to about 695.5 feet above sea level by noon Friday. That’s 118 feet below the gates that would allow the repaired main spillway to be used, and 206 feet below the lip of the emergency spillway, where repair work is continuing.
It’s been more than half a century since Californians started talking seriously about building a new conveyance system – canals or tunnels – to divert water around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta to south Delta pumps for export to farms and cities in the south. California’s Department of Water Resources’ California Water Plan suggested a “Trans-Delta System” in 1957 to convey water around the Delta. And in the 1960s the idea of a “peripheral canal” emerged.
