The San Diego County Water Authority offered Thursday to end a decade-long rate dispute with the Metropolitan Water District in Los Angeles. Board Chair Jim Madaffer sent a letter to MWD directors outlining a compromise approach to end litigation involving billions of dollars charged to deliver independent water supplies from the Colorado River to San Diego.
The Salton Sea is the largest lake in California at around 970 square km. But it’s not the product of the powers of nature, it’s the product of a major engineering mistake over 110 years ago. Its creation wiped out the town of Salton and it grew to become a popular fishing and leisure spot during the 1950s. It also became an important local wildlife refuge.
It was a week after L.A.’s first major rain of the season, and hundreds of volunteers had gathered to pick up trash along the beach at a monthly cleanup organized by Heal the Bay. Ying, a volunteer herself, was giving them instructions — and helping make the case for a countywide measure on the Nov. 6 ballot that would raise money from property taxes to fund stormwater capture and cleanup.
Local water districts are offering rebates to homeowners that replace their grass with sustainable landscape, as many do all year, but a local water district says fall may be the perfect season to jump on the offers. “You’ve got cooler temperatures, shorter days so it gives a chance for the plants that you plant in the fall to take root before the heat of summer kicks in,” Michelle Curtis with the Helix Water District said.
Josh Hill, a marine biology teacher at Mar Vista High School, lost count of the number of times he’s gotten sick from swimming in the ocean at Imperial Beach. “It’s just kind of sad that we have this awesome natural resource that we don’t get to use,” he said. He and a group of students are raising awareness about water pollution by taking weekly water samples of the ocean and publishing their results online. Every Thursday, Hill and his students collect water from the south end of Seacoast Drive and the Imperial Beach Pier.
Should a bond for both habitat restoration and water-infrastructure projects be paid for by all Californians or just the groups that would directly benefit? That’s up for voters to decide. Proposition 3 would authorize $8.9 billion in state bonds for water-related infrastructure and environmental projects, including $30 million for repairs along the American River. But with interest it could cost Californians more than $17 billion.
President Donald Trump signed a bipartisan infrastructure bill this week that could lead to raising the Shasta Dam and funding other reservoir projects. The plan is to spend $6 billion throughout the country over 10 years. The president says the funding will go toward ports, reducing flood risk, restorying ecosystems and performing upkeep on waterways — “which are in deep, deep trouble, but they won’t be for very long,” Trump added.
Oregon is known by many as a wet place, with persistent rain and forests enveloped in fog. This year is different. In a matter of just six weeks over the summer, one-third of Oregon was instead enveloped by extreme drought. That figure comes from the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS), a branch of NOAA. The results also rank 86 percent of Oregon in severe drought territory, a slightly less severe category.
During the record-breaking 2018 fire season, the typically clear waters of Cameron Falls in Waterton Lakes National Park in southern Alberta flowed black. But it had nothing to do with the extensive fires that torched much of British Columbia and a small part of Waterton. The carbon came from the remnants of another wildfire that had raced 26 kilometres — from one end of the park to the other — in less than eight hours the year before. Heavy rain from a violent thunderstorm in July 2018 flushed the ash, soot and blackened debris that lay on the forest floor into the Cameron River.
Amid California’s list of contentious desalination proposals, the plant slated for Doheny Beach in Dana Point has had remarkably smooth sailing. Key environmentalist groups battling plans in Huntington Beach and El Segundo have largely taken a hands-off approach to the south Orange County project, recognizing Doheny’s innovative environmental technology and dearth of local water options there. Additionally, a draft countywide analysis earlier this month ranked Doheny well above the Huntington Beach plant proposed by the Poseidon company.
