Water is central to nearly everything we value in California. Healthy communities, economies, farms, ecosystems and cultural traditions depend on steady supplies of safe water. Those values are increasingly at risk as California confronts more extreme droughts and floods, rising temperatures, overdrafted groundwater basins, aging infrastructure and other challenges magnified by climate change.
Thousands of students returning to the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York this month are being asked to wear masks in public, register their health status online each day and electronically log classroom visits for contact tracing if a coronavirus outbreak occurs. But the most novel effort at the school to measure and limit virus spread will require little effort and come quite naturally.
Students need only use the bathroom.
At more than 15 dormitories and on-campus apartment buildings, sewage is being tested twice weekly for genetic evidence of virus shed in feces. This provides a kind of early-warning system of an outbreak, limiting the need to test every student for Covid-19. If the disease is found in sewage, individual tests can be administered to identify the source.
In response to the adverse impacts of heatwaves, wildfires, sea level rise and other issues stemming from climate change, the Solana Beach City Council approved a resolution declaring a climate emergency and calling for accelerated action to address the crisis.
“Solana Beach would directly experience these impacts that include warming temperatures, increased wildfires, sea level rise and variable water supply,” Rimga Viskanta, a senior management analyst for the city of Solana Beach, said during the council’s Aug. 26 meeting.
The items discussed at the Aug. 3 meeting of the advisory committee on the Fallbrook/Rainbow detachment created by San Diego County’s Local Agency Formation Commission included whether the reorganization was subject to California Environmental Quality Act review, whether LAFCO can place conditions on the detachment, and the use of consultants to address issues on which parties differ.
A water district serving 25 cities and 1.6 million residents in southeast Los Angeles County, already waging a battle with customers and the state Legislature over its future, has fired nearly two-thirds of its employees in a last-ditch effort to stabilize district finances.
Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, millions of Americans have relied on emergency orders put in place by state and local governments that bar utility companies from shutting off services such as gas, electricity and water. However, many of these orders will expire by the end of September, leaving 34.5 million households without shutoff protections, according to a new report from energy efficiency startup Carbon Switch.
State regulators would have to tell the California legislature about a limited use of chlorpyrifos, a powerful insecticide linked to brain damage in children, under a bill heading to the governor. The measure, SB 86, was approved by the Assembly and Senate Sunday. It would require the state Department of Pesticide Regulation to detail the granular, or non-liquid, use of chlorpyrifos, which accounts for roughly 1% of its total use. The state banned all uses of chlorpyrifos as of 2021 over health concerns.
Health experts say the Salton Sea poses a health risk to the residents who live around it, especially in the age of coronavirus. The lake’s continued evaporation is already making Valley residents sick, and it could make virus patients even sicker. Farmlands in Imperial County use less water from the Colorado River than ever before. Most of the river’s water now goes to cities like San Diego and Los Angeles. That means less irrigation water drains into the Salton Sea. It’s rapidly shrinking.
A lush native garden low on water use but not on style won first place in the City of Escondido’s 2020 WaterSmart Landscape Contest.To encourage customers to reduce outdoor water use, the City of Escondido recognizes its customers whose yards best exhibit the beauty of California-friendly, low-water gardening in the annual competition.
Plans are underway to build a new section of border wall that will cut through the Tijuana River channel — a concrete culvert where toxic sludge runs into the U.S. and where Border Patrol and caravan migrants violently clashed in 2018.
