The Colorado River is essential for life in the southwest U.S. and northwest Mexico. It provides water for over 35 million people and over 5 million acres of farmland. Close to 18 million of those residents live in the greater Los Angeles area, the second most populated city in the country.
The Trump administration on Wednesday delayed implementation of an Obama-era clean water rule by another two years to give the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers more time to do away with it. The move follows a Supreme Court ruling last week that said legal challenges to the Waters of the U.S. rule should be decided in federal district courts. That will result in the lifting of a stay issued by an appeals court blocking the 2015 rule from going into effect.
Amid record-setting heat in the state’s south, California’s water managers will measure the Sierra Nevada snowpack, which supplies water to millions. Department of Water Resources officials will trek to the mountains Thursday to check the snow depth, one gauge of the state’s water supply. Electronic sensors show snow levels are about one-third of normal. At the peak of California’s recently ended five-year drought, Gov. Jerry Brown ordered 25 percent water conservation in cities and towns and declared a drought emergency.
A year after record rainfall swamped Northern California, filling our reservoirs and ending the state’s crippling yearslong drought, this winter is proving quite lackluster for storm activity. In Santa Rosa, just 5.98 inches of rain have fallen since the start of the year compared to 18.96 inches of rain last January, the wettest on record for the Santa Rosa Plain.
In the world of California water, nothing is a sure thing. But when you’re Governor Jerry Brown, even one step forward can seem like two steps back. The seventeen billion-dollar plan to build two tunnels under the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta (“Delta”) in California, currently known as California WaterFix (“CA WaterFix”), has been a concern for environmentalists and Central Valley landowners since the plan was initiated in 2005. But in the past two years, the Delta plan has experienced a rollercoaster ride of successes and setbacks.
After extensive fieldwork, site observation and geologic mapping, a team of scientists hired by Cadiz Inc. concluded that a proposed water transfer project in a remote part of San Bernadino County desert won’t harm one of the largest wildlife water sources in the Mojave Desert. Cadiz commissioned a peer-reviewed geologic investigation “to address lingering questions as to whether the project could impact Bonanza Spring under any circumstance. That question has now been answered definitively no,” Cadiz CEO Scott Slater said, in a statement.
Cachuma Lake has not spilled since 2011, and Santa Barbara is still facing significant drought conditions, the city’s top water manager told the City Council on Tuesday. Joshua Haggmark, the city’s water resources manager, said the city has adequate water supplies through 2020, largely because of water conservation. “It’s really extraordinary how much water conservation is going on right now,” Haggmark said.
Although California is experiencing a drier than normal winter so far, San Diego County has enough water to meet demand in 2018 and into next year, said local water officials. San Diego County has enough water to meet its needs due to a number of factors, said Jeff Stephenson, principal water resources specialist with the San Diego County Water Authority, the region’s water wholesaler.
It’s a repeat of the unusually hot, dry and windy weather that helped fuel huge brush fires in December. Since the end of last February, downtown Los Angeles has seen just 2.26 inches of rain — an anemic amount over an 11-month period. Los Angeles has seen just 28% of its average precipitation since October — with most of it coming from the rainstorm that caused the deadly mudslides in Santa Barbara County.
A broken water main flooded parts of Coronado Tuesday forcing hours-long closures of multiple streets, according to city officials. The flow of debris and water rushed dangerously close to businesses and transformer boxes. Coronado Mayor Richard Bailey tweeted that the flooding was due to a large 16-inch water main that broke on B Avenue. A sinkhole measuring approximately 200 square feet opened up.
