Are we going to decide to kill fish tonight? It was a question Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell brought to the Senate floor last Friday as she implored colleagues to vote no on a controversial water bill that would increase water flow to San Joaquin farmers and away from fish habitat in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. And if they start messing with water flows in northern California, what’s to stop them from doing it in Washington?
Another rainstorm pounded much of the state Thursday, causing minor havoc in some areas but putting another dent in California’s five-year drought.The storm was expected to continue into Friday, bringing rain in low-lying areas and snow to the Sierra Nevada. Rain gauges and reservoirs were filling up as California continued to experience one of the strongest starts to the rain season in years. Fresh data showed California is making progress against the drought.
The drying out starts … now. The storm that swamped the Bay Area and prompted flash flood warnings, inundated roads and triggered rock and mud slides from Sonoma County into Monterey County has moved south. After a few showers late Thursday and early Friday, the region is in for what appears to be at least a week of non-rain.
Droughts sparked deadly wildfires, killed tens of millions of trees and damaged crops and livestock in large regions of the U.S. in 2016. Major regional droughts hit the U.S. this year in the Southeast, California and New England—and all developed differently.
That’s not Police Chief Martin Brody of Amity Islands from the 1975 movie Jaws. Wrong coast. Wrong century. Curt Schmutte, a consultant to the Metropolitan Municipal Water District of Southern California, recently saw a shark warning on a sign at a bait shop along the Sacramento River – easily a good 30 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean. Wait. What? “If the governor builds those tunnels,” the bait shop cashier explained to Curt, “we’ll have great white sharks in the Delta.” OK. Rewind.
Giant ‘rivers in the sky’ – that can carry up to 15 times the amount of water in the Mississippi River – can virtually wipe out species when they dump vast amounts of rain over a short period, causing some of the world’s worst floods, according to new research.And the problem is set to get worse because of climate change, scientists warned. They found that 97 to 100 per cent of wild Olympia oysters in north San Francisco Bay died in 2011 after the region was hit by dramatic rainfall caused by atmospheric rivers.
Welcomed by farm and water leaders as a balanced solution, significant federal legislation authorizing $558 million worth of drought-relief actions for California heads to the president after passage in Congress. The bipartisan drought legislation, part of the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act, or WIIN, invests in California water storage and desalination projects, and includes a number of short-term provisions intended to increase flexibility of the state’s water system in response to drought.
Assemblyman Jim Frazier announced Wednesday an effort to combat recently approved federal legislation that would maximize water exports from the Delta to Southern California agriculture. “As a defender of the Delta, I plan to introduce legislation to further protect the Delta and those who rely on all it has to offer,” Frazier said in a news release issued Wednesday. “I completely disapprove of the last-minute language included in the federal water legislation allowing unsustainable water exports south of the Delta.”
The most severe drought in living memory did a number on California’s blue oaks. A new study by UC Berkeley researchers shows how even centuries-old trees struggled when landscape water disappeared between 2012 and 2015. Some showed stress by producing miniature leaves, some by shedding leaves, and some simply died.
The Sierra Nevada is getting soaked this year, and Lake Tahoe is one of the biggest beneficiaries.The sixth-largest lake in the United States, which straddles California and Nevada, reached its natural rim after weekend storms dumped 12.5 billion gallons of water into the lake. A trickle is now flowing through the dam and into the Truckee River. This is a huge milestone for a body of water that has flirted with record-low levels amid an ongoing drought.
