The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is opposing a company’s proposal to pump groundwater in the Mojave Desert and sell it to Southern California cities. The L.A. water utility’s board weighed in against the project on Tuesday, recommending to Mayor Eric Garcetti and the City Council that they support a bill in the state Legislature requiring California to review the environmental impacts of the proposal.
After undergoing five years of drought, many Californians may fear a future with less rainfall thanks to climate change. However, research carried out at the University of California, Riverside, suggests precipitation across the state may actually increase over the next hundred years. The paper, published in the journal Nature Communications, looked at several different California climate models and aggregated the results. However, not every model is good at predicting factors like precipitation. So, rather than simply aggregating the findings, Robert Allen, a climatologist at the University of California, Riverside, and the lead author on the paper, was picky.
Drone video released by the California Department of Water Resources shows how repairs are moving along at the Oroville Dam’s main spillway, which crumbled during the extremely wet winter and forced the evacuation of 180,000 people. The video of crews laying down and compacting concrete (set to soothing music) was posted to the department’s YouTube page, where it regularly shares updates on the construction progress. Reconstruction of the main spillway is on track to be completed by Nov. 1, 2017, in time for California’s rainiest months. Since the spillway’s erosion in February, crews have been working to remove and rebuild 2,270 feet of the spillway.
President Donald Trump’s administration gave California land developers and farmers a reason to cheer when the White House last month rolled back controversial regulations for wetlands imposed during the Obama presidency. They may want to hold off on the celebration. A powerful California water agency is poised to adopt its own regulations that could protect more of the state’s wetlands from being plowed, paved over or otherwise damaged. Environmental groups are pressuring the State Water Resources Control Board to push back against Trump’s decision and adopt a wetlands policy that’s even stricter than former President Barack Obama’s.
The California Department of Water Resources announced Friday that it has certified the environmental analysis of the California WaterFix, which has as its core the “twin-tunnels” project through the Delta. DWR Acting Director Cindy Messer said the certification is “an important benchmark in moving California towards a more reliable water supply.” “With this certification, our state is now closer to modernizing our aging water-delivery system in a way that improves reliability and protects the environment,” she added.
Today’s news that Sites Reservoir is likely to be built is proof you can’t keep a good idea down, although clearly you can delay it a heck of a long time. Work on the current version of the reservoir west of Maxwell began more than 20 years ago, when the federal government realized it needed more water to meet the requirements of the Endangered Species Act in California. There was only one large untapped source of surface water in the state, and that was the Sacramento Valley downstream from Shasta Dam.
Deciding how to give people water to drink and grow food — and to do so without damaging the state’s economy or the environment — shouldn’t have been this hard. For the last dozen years and more, California has been entangled in heated debate over updating the state’s water system. But now we’re closing in on a resolution to that question. That, in turn, opens the way to considering future water policy in a very different political landscape.
Gov. Jerry Brown’s cheerleading squad was in high-spirited form Friday with the latest news that his twin tunnels project in the delta inched a step closer to reality. The state Department of Water Resources gave its approval to the tunnels by certifying the environmental reviews for the project. And really, what did you expect? The DWR answers to Brown, and Brown wants to build those four-story tunnels to funnel north state water from the Sacramento River, under the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, to farmers and cities in the south.
Work to strengthen Oroville Dam, shore up downstream levees and other types of flood-prevention projects would be eligible for fast-tracked state approval under new California legislation lawmakers will consider when they return from summer recess next month. The measure by state Sen. Jim Beall, D-San Jose, whose district suffered heavy flood damage in February, would require state agencies to speed up permit processing and approval for certain types of flood-control projects. Current law already allows authorities to exempt or delay permit requirements during emergencies. Yet other high-priority projects still have to go through the normal permitting process.
A project that might make much of the Sacramento River vanish into three giant holes in the ground will not jeopardize the waterway’s ailing salmon and smelt populations, according to new analyses from the federal government. The Delta Tunnels – which would be 35 miles long, cost at least $15 billion to build and be capable of sending much of the state’s biggest river to farmers and urban users – received a stubby thumbs-up from the Trump administration on June 26.
