The City of San Diego’s Pure Water Demonstration Facility public tour is now available as a virtual tour. A new video provides an up-close look at the technology behind the water purification plant. In-person tours are on hold due to the coronavirus pandemic and will resume once it is safe to do so. Since opening in June 2011, nearly 19,000 people have toured the one-million-gallon-per-day facility in person.
There’s nothing quite like an infrastructure disaster to get the American public’s attention, whether it is the discovery of a drinking water system with dangerous levels of lead in Flint, Michigan, or a near-catastrophic dam failure in Oroville, California.
Twice a week, mathematics professor Andrea Bruder squats in the sewage tunnels below South Hall, a mostly freshman dorm at Colorado College. She wears head-to-toe protective gear and holds a plastic ladle in one hand and a to-go coffee cup in the other. Bruder hovers above an opening in a large metal pipe and patiently waits for a student to flush.
Conceptually it makes a lot of sense to farmers and oil producers alike: Use the latest filtration technology to turn one of Kern’s most troublesome waste streams — oilfield produced water — into a safe irrigation source.
For decades it’s been done on a relatively small scale near Bakersfield, and recent studies confirm it doesn’t threaten crop safety. So why aren’t more local oil producers giving farmers the briny water that comes up from the ground along with oil?
The first large-scale study of the risks that countries face from dependence on water, energy and land resources has found that globalisation may be decreasing, rather than increasing, the security of global supply chains.
With more than 4 million acres burned this year – shattering a state record – California’s wildfire season came with a wicked ferocity, along with the climate-induced crises of crippling heatwaves and forced power outages.
It won’t take much, and the Pass Area as we know it may look dramatically different come wet weather this fall and winter. That’s according to public safety officials from various Riverside County agencies who are working to get the word out about the danger of “flood after fire.”
The San Diego County Water Authority is gearing up to construct a 2.1 million-gallon drinking water reservoir on the Valley Center Pipeline to enhance service reliability throughout the region. The Hauck Mesa Storage Reservoir project in northern San Diego County is part of the Water Authority’s Capital Improvement Program. Construction work is scheduled to begin in early 2021 and is estimated to be completed in the winter of 2022.
Radically transformed from its ancient origin as a vast tidal-influenced freshwater marsh, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta ecosystem is in constant flux, influenced by factors within the estuary itself and the massive watersheds that drain though it into the Pacific Ocean. Lately, however, scientists say the rate of change has kicked into overdrive, fueled in part by climate change, and is limiting the ability of science and Delta water managers to keep up. The rapid pace of upheaval demands a new way of conducting science and managing water in the troubled estuary that is central to California’s water conveyance system.
California has an intricate and multifaceted system of water management. The state’s $1.1 billion water market allocates a concentrated supply to the areas that need it most. From farming to landscaping and personal consumption, there is a constant tension in the state’s supply and demand of this life-sustaining resource.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
