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The state has reached a key milestone in its $15.7 billion proposal to build tunnel bypasses around the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta as an environmental group is threatening to sue to stop it.The twin tunnels, both 40 feet in diameter and 35 miles long, would be California’s most ambitious water project since the 1950s and 1960s. The project would enable Sacramento River water to be sent directly to southern and central California farms and cities, bypassing the Delta.

 

 

A new report from a UC Berkeley group researching what caused the Lake Oroville spillway to fail in February is concerned that a green spot on the nation’s tallest dam might mean it is leaking. This is not the first time the “green spot” on the southern end of Oroville Dam has been brought up. It has been asked and answered at community meetings, where state Department of Water Resources officials have said it is caused by rain or is a natural spring.

The main California agency promoting Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed $16 billion water tunnels gave its expected approval to the project Friday. The move by the Department of Water Resources, which is helping shepherd Brown’s tunnels project over the regulatory and financial hurdles it must clear to break ground, endorsed the tunnels as a sound step environmentally. The Democratic governor wants to remake the state’s water system by tapping two 35-mile tunnels, both of them four-stories high, into Northern California’s Sacramento River, augmenting aging pumps to the south.

California Gov. Jerry Brown last week appointed Grant Davis as director of the state’s Department of Water Resources. Davis, 54, general manager of the Sonoma County Water Agency, brings an unusual resume to the job. With a degree in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, he had never worked for a water utility until joining the Sonoma County agency in 2007 as assistant general manager. Previously, he spent a decade as executive director of The Bay Institute in Novato.

At one point, the U.S. Drought Monitor map showed the presence of “exceptional drought”, the worst category designated by researchers, across much of California and a large portion of the areas of northern Texas and Oklahoma. A look at the map today shows neither of those areas has a drought problem at all. “Exceptional drought” has become a rarity across the country. The current U.S. Drought Monitor map shows relatively small areas of “exceptional drought” in a part of North Dakota and a tiny sliver of northeast Montana.