After decades of inaction, the federal government has gotten serious about cleaning up PFAS, a class of compounds known as “forever chemicals” that have been linked to health problems and inhabit the bloodstream of nearly every American.
Strong Santa Ana winds — weather that rarely occurs in June — sent temperatures soaring more than 20 degrees above normal Tuesday across San Diego County, smashing or tying records from the coast to the foothills.
“The numbers were amazing,” said Mark Moede, a forecaster at the National Weather Service.
San Diego International Airport hit 93 degrees, which is 24 degrees above normal. Chula Vista reached 92 and Encinitas hit 90.
The Rancho Santa Fe Association board unanimously supported nominating Frank Creede to fill the vacancy on the Santa Fe Irrigation District board, representing Division 1. As the Santa Fe Irrigation (SFID) board failed to appoint a new director to fill the seat vacated by Ken Dunford last month, the appointment now moves on to the San Diego County Board of Supervisors to decide.
The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting shelter-in-place protocols and safety concerns disrupted rural communities and markets for agricultural products. Around California, county Farm Bureaus responded with innovative solutions intended to help their members ensure safety of themselves, their families and their employees, and to promote and sell crops and commodities in new and rapidly changing conditions.
Here are three examples among many, showing how county Farm Bureaus in California have supported their members and their communities.
In California, farms have not been immune to COVID-19. A Farm Bureau Federation survey recently found that more than half of farms across the state have lost customers or sales due to pandemic. Small family farms are especially vulnerable.
Much like solving a mystery, making informed water management decisions in California involves finding and investigating all necessary information. With data scattered across multiple locations, the process of accessing and analyzing the information can be an arduous task.
There is no tougher playground than California’s water world.
Just take a look at the zingers flying back and forth between water districts on one another’s groundwater sustainability plans posted on the Department of Water Resources’ website.
“It’s like a giant game of dodgeball,” said Dana Munn, General Manager of Shafter-Wasco Irrigation District.
Water suppliers in San Diego County say future COVID-19 federal and state stimulus packages should include funding for shovel-ready projects that would create jobs in the region.
In a letter to members of California’s congressional delegation, a group of 13 agencies, including the San Diego County Water Authority and 10 of its member agencies, and the cities of Del Mar, Oceanside and Poway, say the region’s water utilities have dozens of infrastructure projects that could be launched with an infusion of state and federal stimulus funding.
The first slide of Daybreak Power’s first-ever presentation to potential investors quotes Paul Allen, the legendary co-founder of Microsoft, asking what he calls the most exciting question imaginable: “What should exist? … What do we need that we don’t have?”.
The answer I reached in the years leading up to co-founding Daybreak in 2018 is this: A bunch of big-honkin’ pumped storage hydropower projects, for the simple reason that we’re going to need a ton of cost-effective, proven, long-duration energy storage if we, as a society, are to have any hope of integrating high levels of intermittent wind and solar power, and thereby slash greenhouse gas emissions to put the brakes on catastrophic climate change.
Plus, we can create a lot of jobs and maybe make some money on it!
Joyce Patry, a former MBA classmate, and I founded Daybreak in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, as an early-stage developer of these massive infrastructure projects.
Despite extremely limited resources, we pulled together some engineering and cost-configuration studies that had previously been conducted on potential pumped storage sites at US Bureau of Reclamation dams around the West. In late 2018 we filed a FERC preliminary permit application for the 1540MW Next Generation Pumped Storage project near Hoover Dam/Lake Mead, and followed that up with a July 2019 application for the 2210MW Navajo Energy Storage Station near Glen Canyon Dam/Lake Powell on the border of Utah and Arizona.
Scientist have found an unexpected ally in the fight against COVID-19 — a tool so powerful, it might help zero in on coronavirus outbreaks before they happen.
It’s your poop.
The science of sewer surveillance, also called wastewater epidemiology, is being harnessed by the largest university in the county to help stay on top of COVID-19 cases among students.
And while San Diego is not actively using feces to try and predict COVID-19 hot spots, the city is participating in several studies to better understand this potential monitoring technique.
