The San Diego County Water Authority is providing training opportunities to military veterans looking for new careers in public service as part of the Skillbridge Program. The program is helping military veterans transition to career-track training opportunities, including work in the water and wastewater industry.
Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order Monday calling for increased water conservation after the driest first quarter in California’s history, but the San Diego region will be largely spared.
Newsom called on local water suppliers to move to their Level 2 drought plans, which anticipate shortages of up to 20% and could include restrictions on watering in many parts of the state.
Even with our recent storm, San Diego County is still well below our average for rain this year. And as bad as the drought conditions are here, in Northern California they are even worse.
As a result, Governor Gavin Newsom just issued an executive order that moves the state into a stricter level of water saving, but he’s allowing each local district to set its own rules.
“We’re going to continue with our water conservation practices,” said Jeff Stephenson, Water Resources Manager with the San Diego County Water Authority. “We’ve ramped up our messaging and then directing people to our conservation programs.”
It rained almost two inches over Monday night in certain parts of the San Diego region, but the drought is not over. In fact, Jeff Stephenson, water resources manager at San Diego County Water Authority, said residents should consider turning off their sprinklers for the next seven days.
Of the six levels of emergency actions taken during a drought, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday moved California from the first to the second level. That means local water suppliers must act like supplies have dipped by at least 10 to 20 percent, as CalMatters explained.
But he isn’t requiring everybody to cut water use by the same amount across the board. This time he’s letting cities and jurisdictions trigger their local plans for action during drought prepared back in 2020.
The storms that rolled across the Bay Area and much of California on Sunday and Monday delivered some of the highest rainfall totals of the calendar year so far, as meteorologists predicted — but that still isn’t much, they said Tuesday.
“On a bigger picture, this is one of the biggest storms we’ve had of 2022,” said Matt Mehle, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. “But we’ve only had a handful of systems actually bring any precipitation to the Bay Area in January and February.”
They don’t look like much — 126 cubes, each holding 16 modules of batteries — simply sitting on an expanse of flat land owned by San Diego Gas & Electric off Route 163.
But it’s no exaggeration to say that California’s hopes of decarbonizing its power system depend on developing a vast number of utility-scale energy storage facilities across the state, such as the one SDG&E opened earlier this month in Kearny Mesa.
As a dry summer looms, California Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered water suppliers across California to step up their local drought responses, but fell short of requiring water rationing or setting a statewide conservation target.
Despite pressure from experts urging a strong mandate, the order leaves the exact conservation measures up to the urban water providers and major water wholesalers that supply the vast majority of Californians. It does not affect agricultural water providers, or the small water systems that are especially vulnerable to drought.
Amid California’s worsening drought conditions, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday called on local water agencies to introduce new water-use restrictions and for state regulators to ban watering decorative grass at businesses and institutions, the governor’s office said in a statement.
In the executive order, the governor asks the California State Water Resources Control Board to consider making it illegal to water non-functional grass at commercial, industrial and institutional buildings. The restriction would not include residential lawns or grass used for recreation such as sports fields and parks, the governor’s office said.
The Glen Canyon Dam may be one step closer to losing its ability to generate hydropower after water managers in Colorado announced last week that they will stop exploring one proposal to prop up the rapidly depleting levels in Lake Powell.
The plan — known as demand management — would compensate farmers and ranchers for voluntarily stopping irrigation on a temporary basis, sending water that would have been used for agriculture to the reservoir.
Colorado is taking a “hard pause” on investigating the viability of demand management, a program that would allow the state to pay water users to temporarily and voluntarily conserve water and store what’s saved in Lake Powell for future use.
“No more energy spent on this right now,” Colorado Water Conservation Board chair Jaclyn Brown said this week. “Until the facts change; until someone brings us new information.”
