Vallecitos Water District Operations and Maintenance Manager Ed Pedrazzi is the ACWA 2023 “Excellence in Water Leadership” award winner. Pedrazzi received his career honor at the Association of California Water Agencies annual conference on May 9.
The award recognizes individuals who have “made a remarkable and visible contribution to the enhancement, protection, or development of water resources in California,” according to ACWA.
Flying thousands of feet above the Sierra Nevada in a plane equipped with specialized imaging devices, Elizabeth Carey has been scanning the mountains with lasers to precisely map the snow.
The snow blanketing the Sierra lies so deep that the mountain range looks surprisingly swollen and “puffy,” said Carey, who leads the flights as part of a state-funded program.
El Niño almost here, the global shift is likely to stick around until this winter, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced this week. After an unusual three-year La Niña, all signs are pointing to changes in weather patterns for 2023.
The Marin Municipal Water District is poised to adopt one of its largest rate hikes in decades on Tuesday — a move that will increase water costs for customers by about 20% — but staff costs are not the driver, utility officials said.
A water shortage on the Colorado River has put tremendous strain on the states that rely on it as a main water source. The fate of California’s Salton Sea is tied to the future of the river, and a catastrophic drought has only worsened conditions.
For climate advocates, the growing state deficit unveiled in the revised 2023-24 state budget offers some bad news, some good news and a great deal of uncertainty.
The bad news in the budget presented Friday morning by Gov. Gavin Newsom is that, despite lobbying efforts and environmentalists pitching at least two alternative proposals, the $6 billion in cuts to climate spending that Newsom proposed in January are still included.
El Niño conditions — the warming of ocean waters off South America that can alter weather across the globe, including California’s summer temperatures and the amount of rain it might receive next winter — are emerging in the Pacific Ocean for the first time in 4 years.
While El Niños do not automatically guarantee wet weather for California, historically, the stronger they are, the more likely it is that the state will have a rainy winter season. And after the dramatic series of storms this past winter that ended the drought and filled nearly empty reservoirs, another one back-to-back could increase flood risks.
In 2019, Australian skies glowed crimson in one of the country’s worst recorded fire seasons. The infernos blackened some 190,000 square kilometers of land, killing dozens of people along with an estimated 1 billion animals and destroying thousands of structures. The bushfires also unleashed plumes of smoke so voluminous they could be seen from space.
As winter rains caused Monterey County’s rivers to swell past capacity and rush out to the sea, people began asking: Isn’t there a way to catch and reuse all that water? That’s what Monterey is preparing to do through a project financed by the state – in this case turning runoff lost to Monterey Bay into drinking water.
The Lake El Estero Diversion to Sanitary Sewer Project will reroute drainage from the city stormwater system at the lake into existing sanitary sewage pipes along Del Monte Avenue, which lead to Monterey One Water’s regional treatment plant in Marina for recycling into drinking water as part of the Pure Water Monterey project.
Fountain Valley has declared an end to a water supply shortage it had been observing for the past 11 months.
The City Council, at its May 2 meeting, voted unanimously to adopt a resolution restoring the normal water supply conditions for the community.
