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The City’s Two Paths To Clean Power

/in , /by /Voice Of San Diegoby Ry Rivard Mentioned: San Diego County Water Authority

One way or another, the city is about to rearrange a bunch of electrons. Right now, much of San Diego’s electricity comes from local power plants that burn natural gas to create electricity. City officials want to ditch that power and replace it with green energy to meet their goal of using only clean power by 2035. Don’t expect to see windmills or solar farms popping up all over the city just yet, though. So far, it’s unclear where all the new power will come from.

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Rain Light But It Was Most In San Diego In 6 Weeks

/in , /by /The San Diego Union-Tribuneby Robert Krier

The scattered showers that slickened roads across San Diego County Wednesday morning, though light as expected, brought the most rain the region has seen since mid March. Next up is a drying and warming trend. Temperatures, well below normal Tuesday and Wednesday, on Thursday should be near normal for early May. By Saturday, building high pressure should raise the highs to around 90 degrees in the inland valleys, the mid 70s at the coast and over 100 in the desert.

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Pressure Mounts To Solve California’s Toxic Farmland Drainage Problem

/in , /by /Water Deeply (New York)by Matt Weiser

Many Americans know the name Kesterson as the California site where thousands of birds and fish were discovered with gruesome deformities in 1983, a result of exposure to selenium-poisoned farm runoff. Thirty-five years later, it is one of the oldest unresolved water problems in the state. Selenium, a naturally occurring element, is essential to people and animals alike in small doses. But selenium continues pouring off many San Joaquin Valley farms in larger quantities, which can be toxic.

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Three-Eyed Fish And Two-Headed Turtles? The Stench Of This River Spanning U.S.-Mexico Border Is Legendary

/in , /by /Los Angeles Timesby Brittny Majia

The river is so foul that rumors swirl about two-headed turtles and three-eyed fish. If you fall in, locals joke, you might sprout a third arm. So go the stories about the New River, whose putrid green water runs like a primordial stew from Mexico’s sprawling city of Mexicali through California’s Imperial Valley. The river, with skull-and-crossbone signs warning about the danger it poses, reminds Calexico resident Carlos Fernandez of a scene in “The Simpsons Movie” where Homer Simpson disposes of pig feces by dumping them into a lake.

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Rain Helps In Short Term, But Fire Risk Remains High

/in , /by /San Diego Union-Tribuneby Robert Krier

Rain this week, coming after an exceptionally dry winter and April, should give a boost to backyard gardeners and provide a brief reprieve from what has become an almost omnipresent wildfire danger in the San Diego County.

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To Manage California’s Groundwater, Think More About Surface Water

/in , /by /Water Deeply (New York)by Ian Evans

California’s 2014 legislation, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) was significant in that it was the state’s first major groundwater regulation. But Michael Kiparsky the founding director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, says that it was also significant in another way. “It breaks with what had been decades of a legal fiction that groundwater and surface water were not part of a single hydrologic system,” he says. While rivers, lakes and other surface waters are often thought of – and regulated – separately from the groundwater below, the two are connected.

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Here Are Poseidon’s Final Steps To Building A Desalination Plant

/in , /by /The Orange County Registerby Martin Wisckol

Twenty years and $50 million into the process, officials with desalination plant purveyor Poseidon are optimistic they will get their final two permits — possibly by year’s end. Here are the key steps ahead for the plant in Huntington Beach: Term sheet. This non-binding working agreement lays the groundwork for an eventual contract for Poseidon to sell its water to the Orange County Water District. The district is currently updating its 2015 term sheet and may have a draft to present to the OCWD board in June. Federal financing. A Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act loan would reduce the cost of loans.

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OPINION: California Is Dammed Enough Already

/in , /by /Los Angeles Times

Environmental consequences aside, it would seem to make a certain amount of sense to dam a river in order to store and distribute water where and when it is most needed. But what if there’s no river? Or more to the point, what if every river that can be dammed already has been dammed, and the water in those rivers has already been tapped? The value of new, giant dams is extremely limited and costly without new giant rivers to fill them, and California has no such new rivers.

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What To Know About The Poseidon Desalination Plant And Its Pros And Cons For Southern California Water

/in , /by /The Orange County Registerby Martin Wisckol

The day of reckoning is drawing near for Huntington Beach’s long-planned desalination plant, which would help quench Orange County’s thirst with sea water and free up imported water for the rest of the Southern California. Twenty years and $50 million into the process, officials with plant purveyor Poseidon are optimistic they will get their final two permits — possibly by year’s end. They tout the project as a drought-proof source of water that will provide a stable supplement to the more volatile groundwater and imported sources in a future filled with aquatic uncertainties.

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An Engineer in Operator Territory: Treat Every Encounter Like An Interview

/in , /by /Source (California-Nevada Section AWWA)by Jim Fisher

I have spent my entire career in the operations side of water utilities. I began as a part time student engineer in the City of San Diego’s Water Department’s Production Division and am now Director of Operations and Maintenance at the San Diego County Water Authority responsible for a staff of 85 and an annual budget of $19 million. Each step along the way has provided new opportunities to expand my operational knowledge and build the lasting relationships that are critical to job success and career development when you’re an engineer in an operations environment.

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