At the other Half Brewery Company in Brooklyn on a frigid morning in January 2017, hundreds of people waited in line at dawn to buy the latest India pale ale, although the brewery wouldn’t open until 10 a.m. Across the United States, craft beer enthusiasts wait like this for hours, or even camp out, to purchase six-packs of a limited-edition offering from a favorite brewery, even though each bottle may cost as much as a bottle of fine wine.
Already short of funding, Gov. Jerry Brown’s Delta tunnels project is being challenged in court by a bloc of San Joaquin Valley farmers insisting they shouldn’t be forced to help foot the $17.1 billion price tag. The valley farmers, located mainly in Kern and Kings counties, voiced their objections in a Sacramento court filing opposing the Brown administration’s plan to issue bonds to pay for the tunnels.
The San Diego County Water Authority extended by 10 years a multibillion-dollar deal it has to buy water from the Imperial Irrigation District. That deal remains the largest water purchase of its kind in the United States. The Water Authority began talking about the deal in 1995, shortly after a major drought hit the state. The Water Authority pays Imperial County farmers to stop using some of the Colorado River water they have rights to and, in turn, San Diego gets long-term access to enough water for roughly 1.6 million city folk.
The snowpack in the Tahoe Basin is “grim” right now, but at this point one cold storm could quickly turnaround everything, according to one expert. The snowpack in the Tahoe Basin is 35 percent of median, said Jeff Anderson, water supply specialist with the Nevada Natural Resources Conservation Service. Rainfall totals are 113 percent, he added.
States, federal and Mexican officials hailed a binational agreement this fall that they said could lead to a radical shift in how the region prepares for and responds to drought. But three months later, they appear no closer to a drought contingency plan, as negotiations have pitted states and water districts against one another, as the U.S. tries to hammer out details of the plan.
Rep. Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) has sent a letter to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, urging him to recover $84.8 million in taxpayer money that was identified in a recent inspector general report detailing how the funds were misspent, according to information released Friday by Huffman’s office. The funds were to benefit a select few California water districts participating in the “WaterFix” planning process, according to a report titled “The Bureau of Reclamation Was Not Transparent in Its Participation in the [San Francisco] Bay Delta Conservation Plan.”
Both sieges began in darkness with fierce winds that made the flames impossible to stop. Hurricane-force gusts pushed the flames over highways that should have been barriers and into neighborhoods so quickly that officials said they were helpless to protect the homes in their path. The wine country fires that ravaged Northern California in October and the firestorm in Southern California this month have capped the most destructive year for fires in state history.
This is how dry it has been so far this season: California’s chances of having a normal “water year” have fallen to around 33 percent in much of the state, according to a federal scientist. Michael Dettinger, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, said those dismal odds are based on the amount of rain and snow that has fallen so far this year – and the history of how much precipitation California traditionally gets in the remaining months of the rainy season.
Friday is the deadline for San Diego residents and business owners to apply for a rebate from the city for removing grass and replacing it with drought tolerant landscaping. The turf rebate program was very popular in the height of the drought. In past years, the money was used up immediately. This year, the city opened applications for rebates for two weeks in October and had 120 takers, said Brian Hojnacki, a management analyst with the city’s Public Utilities Department.
A new $4.7 billion proposal from the Sites Project Authority to build up to 11 new dams and two reservoirs in the Sacramento Valley presents a threat to the salmon on the Trinity and Klamath Rivers, and years of decisions to provide them water. The new proposed Sites and Holthouse Reservoirs in Northern California could store up to 1.8 million acre feet of water, making them almost half the size of Shasta Reservoir and twice the size of Folsom Reservoir.
