Count the San Diego County Water Authority (SDCWA) among the many factions that recognize the significant, positive impact that the local brewing industry has on the county. Enough that the governmental organization has declared February as San Diego Brewing Month in an effort to spotlight local brewing companies and coffee roasters, both of which benefit—as do their end customers—from having clean, healthy and reliable water resources.
A storm that’s far brawnier than the one that hit San Diego County on Thursday will blow ashore Saturday, dropping an inch or more of rain in San Diego, 1.50 inches across inland valleys and up to two inches in the mountains, says the National Weather Service. Strong gusts of wind are expected in East County, especially along the eastern stretch of Interstate 8. Wind speeds could reach 45 mph to 50 mph. The leading edge of the system will produce scattered showers late Friday night and on Saturday morning. Forecasters say the brunt of the storm will hit on Saturday afternoon and evening.
A legal effort to get oil companies to pay for damage linked to climate change is getting a boost this week from California. Imperial Beach and Marin and San Mateo counties filed suit, hoping to force oil companies to pay for climate change impacts caused by their products. The municipalities argue the companies knew about the climate change their products would cause. The state is asking the court to keep the legal challenges in state court, where they stand a better chance of winning. More than a dozen suits around the country argue the energy firms spent years denying climate change impacts they knew would happen.
High levels of lead were found in drinking water on the campus of an elementary school in Mira Mesa and on Friday, parents will get more information from school officials on what’s being done to fix the issue. Principal Tobie Pace sent a letter to students’ homes detailing that lead levels higher than the standard set by the school district were found in the drinking water at Hickman Elementary School on Montongo Street. More than 400 children attend the school in grades transitional Kindergarten to 5th grade.
A group of Northern California lawmakers seeking more sway over a mammoth $17 billion water project introduced a proposal Friday that would require new construction contracts to be reviewed by the Legislature. The Legislative Delta Caucus says because of the scope of the California WaterFix, the project should require more scrutiny from both the public and lawmakers now that former Gov. Jerry Brown has left office. Brown fiercely advocated for the expensive public works project that he and supporters believe will both update the state’s aging water delivery infrastructure and protect it against sea level rise and other effects of climate change.
Despite a last-minute frenzy of deal-making, the federal government announced that it will begin taking “protective actions” on the Colorado River, where a long-running drought has put the water supply for 40 million people at risk. The seven states that use the river had been trying to broker their own solution, a collective water-sharing deal, with a Jan. 31 deadline to get it done. While most states had agreed, California and Arizona couldn’t finalize the agreement in time.
Officials will trek into the mountains on Thursday to measure California’s snowpack again, in the hopes that recent storms have added to the state’s water supply. The California Department of Water Resources will perform the second survey of the season in the Sierra Nevada. Winter snow provides drinking water for much of the state as it melts in the spring and summer and flows into reservoirs for storage. The Sierra snowpack was 67 percent of normal in this winter’s first manual measurement earlier this month. The amount of snow is measured monthly through the winter at more than 260 locations to help water managers plan for how much they can deliver to customers later in the year.
The Department of Water Resources conducted California’s second manual snow survey of the year Thursday at Phillips Station, which offered some good news for the state. DWR water resource engineer John King announced that snow water content doubled since the start of the month at the survey site near Echo Summit. “The snow depth today is 50 inches and the snow-water equivalent is 18 inches, which results in 98 percent of average to date and 71 percent of the April 1 average at this location,” King said. “This is a significant increase since the last survey, where we had just measured 25.5 inches of depth and 9 inches of snow-water equivalent.”
Arizona lawmakers passed a historic Colorado River drought deal Thursday afternoon, about seven hours before a midnight deadline set by the federal government. Gov. Doug Ducey promptly signed the legislation, clearing the way for Arizona to join in the three-state Drought Contingency Plan together with California and Nevada. “There’s a lot more work to be done to ensure that Arizona is prepared for a drier water future,” Ducey said as he signed. A crowd of policy advisers and lawmakers applauded in the old state Capitol building. He said the deal represented “the culmination of years of discussions” and called it a “historic bipartisan achievement.”
The Bureau of Reclamation, the Interior Department’s Western water bureaucracy that saw its dam-building heyday in the 1960s, has risen in stature once again in the Trump administration. Reclamation has flexed its muscles on Colorado River drought management plans, setting a deadline for today for states to act and threatening to step in if they don’t. And it has been the administration’s key player in trying to fulfill President Trump’s campaign promise to deliver more water to California farmers, squeezing the state and forging ahead on a dam project California says it doesn’t want and is illegal. To key water players, the bureau is more active now than it has been in decades.
