Water utilities across the country struggle with aging infrastructure that results in water loss from leaks. The cost to rehabilitate or replace pipe often is greater than the cost of repairing leaks. Utilities tend to wait for customer-generated work orders before acting. This typically occurs when a leak surfaces after a long-standing period of water loss and possible infrastructure damage has occurred.
It is a telling illustration of the precarious state of United States dams that the near-collapse in February 2017 of Oroville Dam, the nation’s tallest, occurred in California, considered one of the nation’s leading states in dam safety management.
It could also mean limited use of toilets and taps, an inconvenience that water and sewer districts across the state are scrambling to address before a blackout comes and nature calls.
November 8, 2018 was a dry day in Butte County, California. The state was in its sixth consecutive year of drought, and the county had not had a rainfall event producing more than a half inch of rain for seven months. The dry summer had parched the spring vegetation, and the strong northeasterly winds of autumn were gusting at 35 miles per hour and rising, creating red flag conditions: Any planned or unplanned fires could quickly get out of control.
A study led by Scripps Institution of Oceanography suggests that a new pattern of wet and dry extremes is emerging in California with extreme precipitation caused by streams of moisture in the sky known as atmospheric rivers.
Bob Wieckowski stands alone. He was the only state senator to vote against Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to clean up dirty drinking water in the California’s poorest communities, which passed the Senate in a 38-1 vote on Monday.
Seismologist Lucy Jones hikes through a dirt trail into a canyon, past a riverbed, and through some brush in Altadena. She kneels down and points at a thick layer of greenish-grey clay, snaking through the sloping terrain among rocks and dirt.
“This is the fault! Isn’t it amazing?”
The biggest freshwater rivers on Earth don’t flow along the planet’s surface. Instead, they surge and whip through the atmosphere thousands of feet above our heads, carrying 2½ times the amount of water that gushes through the Amazon River at any given time. They’re called atmospheric rivers, or, more aptly, rivers in the sky. These rivers are capable of burying Sacramento under 30 feet of water.
The Helix Water District says it remains committed to the East County Advanced Water Purification Project, a multimillion-dollar, multi-agency recycled water project facilitated by the Padre Dam Municipal Water District in Santee.
For the better part of a day this April, San Diego’s main drinking water treatment plant wasn’t doing everything it was supposed to do to kill viruses and a nasty parasite known as Giardia before reaching taps across parts of the city, North County, East County and South Bay.
