The California Department of Water Resources on Wednesday announced an increase in its projected statewide water allocations for 2024 — following a series of storms that deluged the Golden State over the past two months.
The San Diego County Water Authority hopes to leverage last year’s wet winter to switch to a cheaper water supply and sell their more expensive water. Those savings would be passed onto its member agencies in smoothed future rates.
Concerns that California might remain in a “snow drought” this winter have eased after a series of storms this month blanketed the Sierra Nevada with a near-average amount of snow for this time of year.
After a dry start to winter, California’s rainy season is finally well under way. December downpours sent water racing through streets in coastal Ventura County and the city of Santa Barbara. Flash floods hit San Diego in late January, and back-to-back atmospheric river-fueled storms arrived earlier this month, causing wind damage in Northern California and hundreds of mudslides in Los Angeles.
In the past few decades, we have witnessed the pendulum swinging back and forth in California between managing drought, to questions about how we will handle too much water. While the weather might be fickle, one thing is certain, climate change will make extreme weather more common and will require residents to invest in their stormwater infrastructure.
A stormwater tax is one step closer to making its way on the November ballot after a San Diego City Council committee voted unanimously Wednesday to direct staff to take a closer look at what this measure would look like.
Some of the thorniest debates over water in California revolve around the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, where pumps send water flowing to farms and cities, and where populations of native fish have been declining.
At the dawn of the new year in 1997, the Truckee River transformed. The winter season had thus far been great for snow, but when a subtropical storm from near the Hawaiian Islands rolled in, it carried with it unseasonably warm rain. The warm rainfall combined with snowmelt to swell the rivers, with the Truckee burying much of downtown Reno under water.
The sixth major storm to hit San Diego County since November unleashed heavy rain across much of the region before dawn Wednesday, further saturating slide-prone coastal bluffs and bringing urban waterways to life once again, the National Weather Service said.
The Biden administration wants to guarantee access to clean water throughout the country and one way it wants to do that is by removing lead pipes.
