The City of San Diego’s public utilities team including water treatment plant employees continues to work to provide its customers with high-quality drinking water during the coronavirus pandemic.
This week, crews are installing a carbon fiber lining inside Pipeline 5 in North San Diego County between Fallbrook and Escondido. The work is essential to maintain the 96-inch pipeline that delivers untreated water from Lake Skinner in southwest Riverside County to the Lower Otay Water Treatment Plant in southern San Diego County.
The work began at the end of March when Pipeline 5 was shut down for the installation of two internal steel bulkheads. The bulkheads allow the rest of the pipeline to stay in service while work is performed in an isolated section.
“Ensuring that water supplies continue to be reliable for all of the region’s 3.3 million residents and businesses is our priority,” said Jim Fisher, director of operations and maintenance at the Water Authority. “We are performing this essential repair to one of our largest pipelines to make sure that there are no interruptions in service to our member agencies.”
Voluntary agreements in California have been touted as an innovative and flexible way to improve environmental conditions in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and the rivers that feed it. The goal is to provide river flows and habitat for fish while still allowing enough water to be diverted for farms and cities in a way that satisfies state regulators. But no one said this would be easy.
California’s Central Valley — one of the richest agricultural regions in the world — is sinking. During a recent intense drought, from 2012 to 2016, parts of the valley sank as much as 60 centimeters per year. “It isn’t like an earthquake; it doesn’t happen, boom,” says Claudia Faunt, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. But it is evidence of a slow-motion disaster, the result of the region’s insatiable thirst for groundwater.
Spring storms that included five consecutive days of soaking rain last week knocked out drought conditions in Southern California, according to this week’s U.S. Drought Monitor report.
A two-decade-long dry spell that has parched much of the western United States is turning into one of the deepest megadroughts in the region in more than 1,200 years, a new study found.
And about half of this historic drought can be blamed on man-made global warming, according to a study in Thursday’s journal Science.
Scientists looked at a nine-state area from Oregon and Wyoming down through California and New Mexico, plus a sliver of southwestern Montana and parts of northern Mexico. They used thousands of tree rings to compare a drought that started in 2000 and is still going — despite a wet 2019 — to four past megadroughts since the year 800.
Over the past several weeks, the COVID-19 pandemic has created images Americans never expected to see in this country: Empty supermarket shelves and people lined up outside of markets waiting to enter to purchase food.
In an effort to save costs and reduce the impacts of declining untreated water sales, the Ramona Municipal Water District (RMWD) recently approved of implementing a three-phase strategy for converting from an untreated water system to treated, and in some cases, recycled water systems.
Plummeting tax revenue during the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer to propose sharp spending cuts in response to a projected $250 million budget gap.
More than 100 members of Congress, including 15 senators, are pressing the House and Senate leadership to include language in the next COVID-19 funding package prohibiting utilities from disconnecting customers who may not be able to pay their bills now or immediately after the crisis that has closed businesses and thrown millions out of work.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
