If a desalination facility is built in Dana Point, the South Coast Water District board wants the district to design, build and operate it. Board members on Wednesday unanimously agreed with General Manager Andy Brunhart’s recommendation that the district take ownership of a possible plant instead of partnering with a private company.
It’s a safe bet most people would say they find sound of flowing water to be a soothing, positive experience. This is especially true right now when it comes to a particularly large flow in our Coachella Valley. The Desert Water Agency and Coachella Valley Water District recently reported that a record amount of Colorado River water has been coming into the desert and is being deposited into our aquifer – the primary source of our drinking water.
As expected, an “atmospheric river” delivered moderate to heavy rain to the Bay Area on Thursday. The North Bay and Santa Cruz mountains received a majority of the rainfall, with a handful of locations recording more than 4½ inches, including Ben Lomond, according to the National Weather Service in Monterey. Some locations in the Santa Cruz Mountains recorded 2 inches of rain in six hours.
When 50,000 acre-feet of water went gushing out of the Sacramento River last month, it fast became a test of California’s ability to protect its environmental policies from an increasingly hostile Trump administration. The episode proved humbling. Heeding the calls of big agriculture interests and area congressional Republicans, the administration pumped federally controlled water to Central Valley farms despite protest from the state that the move imperiled the endangered delta smelt. All California could do was temporarily shut its own pumps, which came at the expense of the state’s mostly urban water customers.
For as long as agriculture has existed in the Central Valley, farmers have pumped water from the ground to sustain their livelihood and grow food consumed by much of the nation. This has caused the ground in certain places to sink, sometimes dramatically, eliminating valuable aquifer storage space that can never be restored. The damage by subsidence extends to the California Aqueduct, the 700-mile artificial river that conveys water from Northern California to the valley and beyond as the principal feature of the State Water Project. The recent drought only intensified the problem.
A water main break in Mission Hills erupted early Wednesday morning leaving some without water service for part of the day. A break on an 8-inch diameter water main was reported at 3:45 a.m. Wednesday near the intersection of Fort Stockton Drive and Ibis Street in Mission Hills. It was shut down at about 5 a.m. City of San Diego Public Utilities Department crews quickly capped the line but repairs had to continue into the afternoon.
The global dam industry claims hydropower can build climate resilience, and harmlessly wean us from fossil fuels. But as events in the past 12 months have shown, nothing could be further from the truth. A press release, issued on October 31, read: “Itaipu is a UN Climate Change Partner at the COP23 Climate Conference.” For those who don’t know, the Latin American firm was behind Itaipu Dam, one of the largest megadams in Latin America.
Droughts and floods are both a part of life in California as 2017 has so clearly demonstrated: It took one of the wettest winters on record to pull the state from the depths of a five-year drought. The state has invested funds in bulking up drought and flood protection in the past, but recent events highlighted the necessity of rejuvenating those efforts. As a result, Gov. Jerry Brown recently approved a new general obligation bond measure that would fund projects focused on those problems.
