Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto joined state water officials Monday to demand immediate federal action on the Colorado River water crisis as Nevada faces its second year of mandatory water cuts.
Last week, federal officials announced that Nevada would lose about 8% of its water allocation, or 25,000 acre-feet of water, starting January 2023 as a stopgap solution to stabilize water levels at Lake Mead.
California had been a state for scarcely a decade and was home to fewer than 500,000 people when it was hammered in the winter of 1861-62 by the most powerful series of rainstorms in recorded history.
“This event, which was characterized by weeks-long sequences of winter storms, produced widespread catastrophic flooding across virtually all of California’s lowlands — transforming the interior Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys into a temporary but vast inland sea nearly 300 miles in length and inundating much of the now densely populated coastal plain in present-day Los Angeles and Orange counties.”
In the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, buzzing chainsaws interrupt the serenity. Crews are hustling to remove charred trees and other debris that have been washing down the mountainsides in the wake of the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s recorded history, choking rivers and streams.
Heavy equipment operators are moving boulders dislodged by the daily torrential summer rains that have followed the flames.
Rules for thee but not for me?
Residents across the state including those in San Diego County are being urged to reduce their water use in response to a protracted drought, but some big celebrity names are being called out for allegedly not doing their share.
As the unprecedented drought continues to affect California and the San Diego region, homeowners can still balance the need to conserve water as efficiently as possible while preserving valuable landscaping, including trees. Trees can be maintained while following California’s water guidelines.
The Colorado River is the backbone of the West’s water supply. The river provides water to hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland and 40 million people in seven U.S. states (California, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada) and northern Mexico. But overuse, a 23-year “megadrought” and aridification fueled by the climate crisis has left the river stretched far too thin.
Up and down the Colorado River last week, the state, local and tribal leaders in charge of water supplies for more than 40 million people waited to see if the federal government would impose deeper cuts to river allocations.
The Bureau of Reclamation had given states and tribes an Aug. 15 deadline to find ways to conserve 2 to 4 million more acre-feet of water to stabilize the drought-stricken river and its two largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell. Without such a plan, the bureau said, it would act.
Federal officials aren’t ready to give states along the Colorado River a new deadline for water conservation goals.
The seven states that rely on the river blew past an August 16 deadline without a plan to conserve 2 to 4 million acre-feet of water. They were given that task by officials with the Bureau of Reclamation and from within the Interior Department. The agency’s models show that amount is what is necessary to keep the river’s biggest reservoirs — lakes Mead and Powell — from reaching critical levels.
When Contra Costa County supervisors last summer signed off on 125 new homes slated for 30 acres of grazing land in the oak-dotted Tassajara Valley, they were warned water was going to be an issue.
As droughts worsen across the world, investors are turning up the heat on companies wasting water and trying to pick winners from a sparse crowd of specialist listed companies looking to address the problem.
From Kenya to California and nearly half of Europe, a shortage of fresh water has grabbed the attention of policymakers and given millions of citizens a fresh window into the stressed state of the planet.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
