As California sinks deeper into drought it already has had more than 900 additional wildfires than at this point in 2020, which was a record-breaking year that saw more than 4% of the state’s land scorched by flames.
The danger prompted Gov. Gavin Newsom to propose spending a record $2 billion on wildfire mitigation. That’s double what he had proposed in January.
We’re once again going to be having conversations this summer about water use, and hearing about ever more strict mandates coming down from counties and the state about what we use water for. But is San Francisco’s household water use really the problem?
The drought is bad, and it’s getting worse. A big swath of the Bay Area was just put in the “exceptional” drought tier last week by the U.S. Drought Monitor, and the rest of the Bay Area is in the second-worst or “extreme” drought category, along with about three-quarters of California.
The Marin Municipal Water District is considering banning new water service hookups to homes in response to worsening drought conditions. But the move could hurt future housing development in an area already in dire need of more homes.
The move would come amid historic drought conditions in the area, with county officials declaring a local drought emergency last week in light of a “grim and deteriorating” situation. The National Drought Mitigation Center’s drought monitor recently deemed most of the Bay Area as extreme drought zones for the first time since 2015.
The Arizona Legislature wants to look into the feasibility of pumping water from the Mississippi River to Arizona.
But the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has already studied the idea, and weighed in on the project in 2012.
The agency studied factors such as cost, legal issues, power use and the amount of time the project would take.
A report estimated the project could cost up to $14 billion; the timetable was around 30 years.
As bad as last year’s record-shattering fire season was, the western U.S. starts this year’s in even worse shape.
The soil in the West is record dry for this time of year. In much of the region, plants that fuel fires are also the driest scientists have seen. The vegetation is primed to ignite, especially in the Southwest where dead juniper trees are full of flammable needles.
“It’s like having gasoline out there,” said Brian Steinhardt, forest fire zone manager for Prescott and Coconino national forests in Arizona.
A climate change-fueled megadrought of more than 20 years is making conditions that lead to fire even more dangerous, scientists said. Rainfall in the Rockies and farther west was the second lowest on record in April, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
California’s new drought is worsening. After two severely dry winters, reservoirs are shrinking, fire danger is rising and water supplies are looking more tenuous.
The past two years have been the driest in nearly half a century, since 1976-77. How did the state find itself in a new crisis just as the COVID pandemic is fading? Scientists say California’s parched plight largely comes down to two words: “atmospheric river.”
There’s still snow in Colorado’s mountains near the headwaters of the South Platte River, and Brian Domonkos has strapped on a pair of cross-country skis to come measure it.
He’s the Colorado Snow Survey supervisor, and knowing how much snowpack is left from the winter to runoff into streams, rivers and reservoirs this summer is crucial, especially in a year when much of the West is in extreme drought. As it melts, the snowpack here will become the primary source of water for millions of people in Colorado and across the West.
When hackers penetrated a small water utility in North Carolina three years ago that debilitated its IT systems, operators there refused to “bow” to hackers and fork over ransom money to make the assault stop.
That 2018 cyberattack was part of what experts say is a fast-growing and evolving threat in the water sector and a glaring example of the type of attack — ransomware — that earlier this month shut down the East Coast’s largest fuel supplier, the Colonial pipeline.
In wetter times, these feathery beds of asparagus would produce generations of tender green spears, reaching for the vast San Joaquin Valley sky.
On Monday they were disked into the dry dirt, their long lives cut short by unreliable and expensive water.
“It’s a really sad day,” said Fresno County’s Joe Del Bosque, who has destroyed 100 acres of organic asparagus so he can divert precious water to more valuable melons. “The water is so uncertain this year. We didn’t think we’d have enough to carry it through.”
The scale of the drought hitting the American West is beginning to crystallize as Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona experienced their driest year in terms of precipitation on record, according to the National Center for Environmental Information.
In Utah and California, it was the second-driest winter on record. For Wyoming, it was the third-driest ever. For Colorado, only three winters were ever drier in the 127-year history of record-keeping at the center.
“This is extreme,” said Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute.
