It’s too soon to declare an end to California’s five-year drought despite the heaviest rain in three decades falling early in the wet season, officials said. The Sierra Nevada snowpack, which provides roughly one-third of California’s water supply, measures at 72 percent of normal for water content, according to the state’s Department of Water Resources’ electronic monitors.
The California Department of Water Resources will conduct its first media-oriented manual snow survey of Water Year 2017 at 11 a.m. on Jan. 3 at Phillips Station, just off Highway 50 near Sierra-at-Tahoe Road approximately 90 miles east of Sacramento. Electronic readings of the Sierra Nevada mountain snowpack on Tuesday peg its statewide water content at 10.5 inches, 72 percent of the December 27 average. The Phillips snow course, which has been measured each winter since 1941, is one of dozens that will be traversed during a 10-day period around Jan.
Over the objections of California Sen. Barbara Boxer, this month the U.S. Senate passed a new water infrastructure bill that will open the tap of federal money for projects that increase California’s water supply. It’s a good start, but it won’t be enough to solve the Golden State’s water woes. Critics have focused on the bill’s impact on Northern California salmon, the Delta smelt and other endangered species fisheries — impacts that the bill’s supporters strongly reject.
The Sierra Nevada snowpack remains almost 30 percent below average for this time of year despite a boost from the weekend storm, state water officials reported Tuesday, as agencies begin snow surveys by hand throughout the mountain range. Electronic measurements show the snowpack’s statewide water content at 10.5 inches, which is 72 percent of normal for Tuesday. Staff at the California Department of Water Resources and other state, federal or private agencies will snowshoe or walk to about 20 key monitoring stations throughout the Sierra over a 10-day period starting this week for the first manual snow survey of the 2016-17 winter.
Thanks to a series of rain storms, water is once again flowing from a dam into Lake Elsinore after years of drying up.
Peggy Cockerill made her morning walk around the lake and noticed something she’d never seen before – the flow of water back into Lake Elsinore. “I’m hoping it’s coming back,” she said. “I have been visiting my daughter here for over three years and this is the first time I’ve seen water.” It’s the first time water has flowed into the lake since 2011.
The largest estuary on the West Coast of the Americas lies at California’s heart. It’s a place of constant change, affected by daily tides, sea-level rise, water diversions that serve 25 million residents and a growing population closing in around it. Yet most of those people have no idea the Delta is the subject of one of the largest habitat restoration projects ever proposed in the U.S. Known as Eco Restore, it is a companion to another proposal called California WaterFix, which calls for reforming water diversions by building two giant tunnels.
Sen. Barbara Boxer was almost out the door of the U.S. Senate a few weeks ago when she broke ranks with Dianne Feinstein, her fellow Democrat and Capitol Hill colleague, on a massive water-projects bill that included key provisions for California. Boxer echoed environmental groups and backed Bay Area interests in opposing the bill, calling it a “last-minute backroom deal” that would destroy the Endangered Species Act and benefit “big agribusiness.” She lost the battle.
After years of working on water, environment and agriculture issues in California, it remains a mystery to me why the appointed State Water Resources Control Board and several other environmental boards and commissions so often don’t understand the pushback from ordinary Californians on their regulatory agenda. The latest example is occurring during the public comment period on the plan to vastly increase unimpaired water flows from eastern and southern tributaries into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
Amazing as it is, we’ve all made it through another year. Time to take stock of 2016. Or, as I like to put it, “Where the heck did those 12 months go?” Twenty-sixteen started off with a bang, so to speak, for me. I was solicited for prostitution after dropping my car at the repair shop early one Monday morning in the very first week of the year. I suppose you could look at that like, “Things can only improve from here!”
The $10 billion Congressional water bill approved in December which transfers federal control of some water supplies in California to water authorities at the state level and provides funds for some badly needed structures is being applauded by farmers both north and south. President Obama signed the bill Dec. 16. Sweeping victories by Republicans in the November elections which gave them majorities in the U.S. House and Senate as well as the presidency have brought dramatic changes in the ways California’s water resources – much of them stored or conveyed in federally financed structures – will be allocated.
