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Work is underway right now at the Oroville Dam spillway, but many questions remain. How much will it cost? Will repairs be complete in time for the rainy season? Will life under the shadow of the dam return to normal?The best answer is that it’s a work in progress. So far, an estimate for repairs has reached $500 million, said Erin Mellon, communications and outreach adviser for the state Natural Resources Agency. The hope is that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will help pay for 75 percent of eligible emergency response and repairs, Mellon said.

 

Fighting wildfires in America cost federal agencies almost $2 billion last year including more than half the budget of the U.S. Forest Service. Wildland fires are growing worse in a time of drought and climate change, and the biggest and most destructive fires can’t be stopped. They are a force of nature: imagine trying to stop a hurricane. Yet the government has to try, because more than a 100 million Americans now live in — or near — forests and grasslands that can erupt in flames. This is what’s left of a neighborhood in the Kern River Valley.

Now that California has come through the worst of its recent five-year drought, it’s time to take stock of what went wrong and right. Moulton Niguel Water District, which serves 170,000 people in Orange County with water, wastewater and recycled water services, insists it didn’t just survive the drought, but thrived. The district saw per capita water use fall and saw an improvement in the water efficiency of its customers. Moulton Niguel changed its outreach strategy to use more electronic communication with customers and is now piloting a program that allows customers to monitor their usage through a mobile app.

It’s no secret that the past few years of the California drought forced homeowners to take certain steps to ensure they were able to save water and money. With the droughts declared over, the state’s homeowners associations (HOAs) are now telling residents that they have a limited amount of time to get their lawns back into pristine condition, or the repercussions may begin again.

 

Agriculture accounts for roughly 80 percent of the water used by people in California. “Roughly” because, unlike urban water districts, farm-water suppliers reveal little about how much of the state’s most precious resource goes into irrigation ditches and fields. That lack of basic public information from a behemoth water consumer was one reason the state passed a 2007 law requiring irrigation districts to start coughing up a modicum of so-called “farm-gate” data. The state form, to be filed with the Department of Water Resources, asks a bare handful of essential questions, on a single page.