California has long struggled with chronic drought and water scarcity—Newsweek spoke to two experts about whether capturing water from fog may be able to help. They were both optimistic about using fog harvesting for California, which is being explored there with several research initiatives and pilot projects, but warned that it probably “can’t produce water for all of the needs and demands of humans and society.”
To understand how San Diego County — with its erratic, unreliable natural water supply — ended up with too much water, you have to look back in time. Over the decades, drought after drought taught San Diego water officials an important lesson: the region can’t rely on just one source or agency to meet its water needs.
A new report released on March 13, 2025, shows that changes to reservoir operations at Lake Oroville and New Bullards Bar Reservoir in California can further reduce flood risk for communities along the Tuba and Feather rivers during extreme atmospheric river storm events and potentially benefit water supply during drier river periods.
The recent rain and snow are much needed for Central California’s water supply.
The latest set of storms is already sparking talk of a “Miracle March.”
Malynndra Tome was helping to map livestock ponds in the Navajo Nation when she saw something that inspired her to act. An elderly woman was filling milk jugs with water at the back of a gas station in the Native American reservation, where about 30% of people live without running water.
We also broke down San Diego’s soaring water rates and discussed Councilmember Marni von Wilpert’s surprising suggestion that the city of San Diego should consider leaving the San Diego County Water Authority.
Eyewitness News was given a rare look inside the engineering marvel, which was the largest public works project in Southern California during the Great Depression, while it’s shut down for its annual maintenance. It’s the final leg of the massive Colorado River Aqueduct: the 13-mile-long San Jacinto tunnel, bringing up to 1,700 cubic feet of water per second underneath one of Southern California’s tallest mountains.
Even with heavy rain coming down this week, San Diego County remains in a drought, highlighting how much more is needed to replenish the region’s water resources. In the past two days alone “we saw really anywhere from one to three inches of rainfall in the valleys, coastal areas, the hills outside of the mountains and then up in the mountains we saw a significant amount of snowfall,” according to Samantha Zuber, meteorologist with the National Weather Service San Diego.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin announced last week that EPA will work with the United States Army Corps of Engineers to review the definition of “waters of the United States.” EPA said it will move quickly to ensure that a revised definition follows the law, reduces red-tape, cuts overall permitting costs, and lowers the cost of doing business in communities across the country while protecting the nation’s navigable waters from pollution.
Representatives of California, Arizona and Nevada are urging the Trump administration to take a different approach in confronting the problems of the water-starved Colorado River. As Trump’s appointees inherit the task of writing new rules for dealing with the river’s chronic water shortages, the three states are raising several concerns they want to see addressed.
