VACAVILLE (CBS13) — Some Northern California residents who will experience power outages Wednesday are also being asked to conserve water. The city of Vacaville and El Dorado County announced Tuesday that the PG&E Public Safety Power Outage may also affect water service to neighborhoods.
The National Weather Service office in San Diego warned residents that the first major Santa Ana wind event of the season will begin Wednesday night and continue through Friday. The weather service issued a fire weather watch amid a forecast of single-digit humidity and gusty winds of up to 60 mph.
SOUTH COUNTY — For the first time in 11 years, the Sweetwater Authority has started to flush out all 400 miles of its pipelines across South County. Commonly referred to as flushing, because built-up sediments are “flushed out,” the system-wide cleaning is a promise the water agency made to its ratepayers last year as it put together a plan to increase rates over the next five years.
Cities, counties and regional water districts throughout the Sacramento Valley and Bay Area are urging users to cut down on water use during Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s public safety power shutoff, which has blacked out hundreds of thousands of customers since the early morning hours of Wednesday.
Fairfield authorities are urging residents to conserve water use after the city experienced a treatment plant issue that it is attributing to the PG&E shutoff.
Next month, the Northern California community of Paradise and will commemorate a somber anniversary: On Nov. 8, 2018, the town burned to the ground. Nearly 11,000 properties were erased in the deadliest, most destructive wildfire in state history, which took 85 lives.
Now, as California braces for peak fire season, the most extensive post-fire cleanup it has ever taken on is nearly complete. Crews have hauled off more than 3.6 million tons of debris — twice what was removed from the World Trade Center site after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, in New York City.
A recent news release posted on the Voice of OC website was clouded by mischaracterizations of the Claude “Bud” Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plant, which provides an important source of drinking water for San Diego County and reduces our region’s reliance on the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay-Delta.
The plant is the result of a historic public-private partnership between the San Diego County Water Authority and Poseidon Water to ensure supply reliability for more than 3 million residents across the region. It helped to ensure that the Water Authority had sufficient water to meet demand during the last drought, and we are confident it will help us weather the next drought … and the one after that.
It was a Sunday tradition at Bethany Slavic Missionary Church. After morning services, Florin Ciuriuc joined the line of worshipers waiting to fill their jugs with gallons of free drinking water from a well on the property, a practice church leaders had encouraged.
“I take it for my office every week,” said Ciuriuc, a 50-year-old Romanian immigrant and a founding member of the largely Russian-speaking church, which claims 7,000 congregants.
For E. Joaquin Esquivel, California has made great strides in fighting climate change and transitioning to a cleaner energy sector.
Now, he said, it’s water’s turn.
“Water, I think, is ready for that moment,” said Esquivel, the chairman of the California State Water Resources Control Board who took over from longtime chair Felicia Marcus in February.
The board has a broad mandate to oversee water resources and drinking water for the protection of the environment, public health, and other uses. That includes managing water rights and dealing with rural water issues, the latter of which is the topic of an Oct. 8 webinar on which Esquivel is speaking.
The wildfires that raged last year from Paradise to Malibu made for California’s deadliest, most destructive fire season on record.
But the eruption of blazes marked another distinction for California, as one of the worst for the climate. In 2018, fires released more than 45 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — the most in a decade and trailing only slightly behind 2008, when the state was also stricken by two of the largest wildfires in modern history.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recognized the San Diego County Water Authority with a 2019 WaterSense Excellence Award for advancing water efficiency through its Qualified Water Efficient Landscape program, known as QWEL. The Water Authority received one of 25 WaterSense awards at the national WaterSmart Innovations Conference in Las Vegas.
