New wildfires ravaged bone-dry California during a scorching Labor Day weekend that saw a dramatic airlift of more than 200 people trapped by flames and ended with the state’s largest utility turning off power to 172,000 customers to try to prevent its power lines and other equipment from sparking more fires.
Emphasizing the “unprecedented” bipartisan cooperation between local and state governments, Border Patrol and the International Boundary & Water Commission, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler announced short-term projects Wednesday to plug the international sewage flow across the U.S.-Mexico border.
Last month as a heat wave slammed California, state regulators sent an email to a group of energy executives pleading for help. “Please consider this an urgent inquiry on behalf of the state,” the message said.
San Diego County’s Local Agency Formation Commission requires a deposit to process applications to LAFCO for jurisdictional changes, and the Fallbrook Public Utility District will be providing an additional deposit to process the application for FPUD to detach from the San Diego County Water Authority and annex into the Eastern Municipal Water District.
A 5-0 FPUD board vote, Monday, Aug. 24, authorized an additional $62,220 deposit to LAFCO. The deposit is expected to cover an additional 510 hours of LAFCO staff time at LAFCO’s rate of $122 per hour.
Monday at midnight marked the deadline for California lawmakers to pass bills out of the Legislature. But in a session replete with the COVID-19 pandemic, racial justice and wildfires, numerous bills were left to die on the cutting room floor.
Among them was the majority of the environmental agenda in what some legislators, environmentalists and public health advocates labeled a disappointment.
Rosa Villegas woke up at two in the morning on a late August Monday to make her way to the lettuce fields in California’s south Salinas Valley, where she was scheduled to start bagging heads of romaine at 4 a.m. The sky overhead wasn’t its usual dark, star-dotted self as she walked to her car. Instead, it glowed a sickly red, colored by the fires burning on the flanks of the Santa Lucia mountains, just a few miles west.
In a rare California appearance for President Donald Trump’s appointed Environmental Protection Agency leader, Andrew Wheeler promised the region millions in funding this budget cycle for some quick-er fixes to the age old Tijuana River sewage crisis.
Federal investments in Tijuana River Valley infrastructure to address ongoing problems with sewage runoff could mean an end to beach closures that have plagued the South Bay in recent years, officials announced today in San Diego.
From Yemen to India, and parts of Central America to the African Sahel, about a quarter of the world’s people face extreme water shortages that are fueling conflict, social unrest and migration, water experts said on Wednesday.
With the world’s population rising and climate change bringing more erratic rainfall, including severe droughts, competition for scarcer water is growing, they said, with serious consequences.
San Diego water managers are working with local researchers to understand how atmospheric rivers bring water to the region.
The moisture-laden storm systems bring rain to Southern California, but too much rain can be damaging.
Scripps Institution of Oceanography researchers are working to better understand atmospheric rivers, or ARs, so they can predict when and where the weather systems will hit.
