Lake Tahoe is full. As of Thursday, April 20, the lake’s surface elevation was 6,227.69 feet — almost 5 feet above its natural rim. U.S. Water Master Chad Blanchard said his office has been spilling water from Lake Tahoe since Feb. 22 in an effort to prevent the lake’s level from rising too high. It’s the first time since 2006 that excess water has been spilled from the lake.
California’s recent drought was the worst in memory. However, in a relatively quick turnaround, this year the state’s water infrastructure is full and water managers are battling the wettest winter in quite some time. Now, by many accounts, the drought is over for much of the state. The uniquely wet winter of 2016-2017 has highlighted a key issue surrounding our surface water and groundwater storage infrastructure: We could have stored this abundant water, not in new reservoirs, but right under our feet.
Arroyo Grande residents can once again pull out their garden hoses without fear of financial penalty, though they’re still being required to restrict some of their water usage. The city declared an end to its water shortage emergency on Tuesday, following Gov. Jerry Brown’s announcement earlier this month that California is no longer in a drought. The decision removes the city’s water bill penalties, which charge users if they fail to reduce their water usage by a certain amount compared with their property’s historic usage.
California’s brutal five-year drought did more than lead to water shortages and dead lawns. It increased electricity bills statewide by $2.45 billion and boosted levels of smog and greenhouse gases, according to a new study released Wednesday. Why? A big drop-off in hydroelectric power. With little rain or snow between 2012 and 2016, cheap, clean power from dozens of large dams around California was scarce, and cities and utilities had to use more electricity from natural-gas-fired power plants, which is more expensive and pollutes more.
California’s Tulare Lake was once the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi. It was shallow, and it varied in size from year to year and season to season. But it was home to lots of salmon, turtles, otters and even, in the latter half of the 19th century, a few schooners and steamboats. It was also at the heart of a 400,000-acre network of lakes and wetlands (“the river of the lakes,” the painter and naturalist John W. Audubon — John J.’s son — called it in 1849) that in wet years overflowed into the San Joaquin River to the north, making it possible to travel by boat from Bakersfield to San Francisco.
Proposed changes to a plan that is supposed to guide the Delta through the 21st century have advocates on red alert, as they worry that the new language locks in Gov. Jerry Brown’s $15 billion twin tunnels. The revised plan does not explicitly endorse the California Water Fix, as the tunnels proposal is formally known. It does, however, promote building one or more new intakes to pump water from the Delta, with a new underground conveyance system that would be operated in tandem with existing Delta channels. The twin tunnels proposal satisfies all of those criteria.
The Department of Water Resources (DWR) conducts five manual snow surveys at Phillips Station in the Sierra Nevada from around the first of January through May each calendar year. The snowpack’s water content usually peaks around April 1, after which the sun’s higher position in the sky contributes to rapid melting and a diminished snowpack. DWR’s May 1 survey will be the last one of 2017. Frank Gehrke, chief of the California Cooperative Snow Surveys Program, will conduct the survey beginning at 11 a.m. just off Highway 50 near Sierra-at-Tahoe Road, about 90 miles east of Sacramento.
A power industry consulting firm has proposed a design for the Oroville Dam spillways which involves not repairing the current one, but building a new, wider spillway. The designer says the structure’s capacity would handle flows of 300,000 cubic-feet per second. Kenneth Viney, manager of CoastalGen Inc., based in Napa, filed suggestions Monday with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC. He said he first shared his ideas with engineers with the state Department of Water Resources about a month ago and was encouraged by FERC and DWR spokespeople to submit his plans through a FERC filing.
Napa Valley’s annual groundwater checkup yielded the verdict that the water table in the world-famous grapegrowing region is “generally very shallow” and that the basin is “full.” There are problem spots, such as the Petra Drive area northeast of the city of Napa that the county is studying. The Coombsville area still faces groundwater challenges, though the county sees the situation as having stabilized. But overall, the county’s 2016 groundwater report by consultating engineers Luhdorff & Scalmanini to the Napa County Board of Supervisors last week emphasized the positive, especially when it came to the valley floor.
Gov. Jerry Brown’s $17.1 billion plan to build two massive tunnels through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta relies on key changes to the water rights permit held by the Department of Water Resources and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which are seeking to add new water diversion points. Brown’s administration has said construction of the twin Delta tunnels could begin as soon as 2018, clearing the way for a massive alteration in the way water is diverted from the Delta to the Central Valley and Southern California.
