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Calls to Rethink the Colorado River’s Iconic Dams Grow Louder

With two major reservoirs on the Colorado River, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, sitting half empty, will a new hydrologic reality be enough to push for big management changes? One conservation group hopes so.

How to solve the problem is a source of political and legal wrangling that’s been going on for years among the seven U.S. states that share the river and Mexico. And it’s exacerbated by climate change: rising temperatures are expected to further shrink runoff in the basin, tightening the belt even more.

Water Deeply Is Expanding to Cover Water Issues Across the West

For the past two years we’ve covered water issues throughout California. With this focus we strove to bring a new kind of journalistic rigor and depth to the coverage of the state’s drought, floods, environmental issues, innovation and more. We can’t thank this community enough and we are excited to let you know that we are expanding our coverage. Beginning now, Water Deeply is bringing that same rigor and depth of coverage to water issues across the American West. Water doesn’t obey state lines, and neither should its coverage.

San Diego Unified Found Lead at a School – and Told One Parent

Last fall, months before San Diego Unified School District began testing all schools’ drinking water for lead, it did a special round of tests a Sunset View Elementary in Point Loma. The district found lead but didn’t tell parents. Rather, it told one parent – the one who’d requested a lead test. The lead was coming from a key device known as a backflow preventer. All the water the school uses passes through the device before it reaches sinks, faucets and fountains at the 480-student school.

Controversial California Water Project Has New Life In Trump Era

Cadiz Inc., which for decades has sought the federal government’s green light to pump groundwater from the Mojave Desert and pipe it to Southern California, has seen the project’s prospects brighten under the Trump administration. In April, a potential backer of the project was nominated by President Donald Trump to a high-ranking Interior Department post. In late March, the department’s Bureau of Land Management rescinded two legal directives the Obama administration used in a 2015 decision to block Cadiz from building the 43-mile pipeline.

‘Lethal Arrogance’? Oroville Dam Crisis Sprang From Pat Brown’s Towering Ambition

America’s tallest dam was built from earth, stone and concrete – and the towering ambition of Gov. Pat Brown. Sixty years before a crisis at Oroville Dam sent thousands fleeing for their lives in February, the late governor brought an almost evangelical zeal to erecting the structure that would hold back the Feather River to deliver water to the parched southern half of the state. Hundreds of pages of state archives, oral history interviews and other documents reveal a portrait of a man hell-bent on building Oroville and the rest of the State Water Project.

How They Voted, May 14

The Carlsbad City Council met in closed session Tuesday to discuss litigation. In open session, the council held a hearing and approved a plan to demolish three office/commercial buildings and build 33 residential condos on three floors at 800 Grand Ave. A resolution to start the process for by-district council elections was approved 3-2. The council discussed transparency in how it appoints people to the Historic Preservation and the Planning commissions, which differs from the way appointments are made to other boards and commissions. The council agreed to add information explaining the process to applicants.

New Diamond Valley Lake Recreation Plans Moving Forward

It has been many years, but for the cities of Hemet and San Jacinto the dream of creating an area surrounding Diamond Valley Lake into a major regional recreation park is finally taking shape with a memorandum of intent signed by the five major entities involved. The long-sought MOI now signed by the city of Hemet, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, Valley-Wide Recreation and Park District, Riverside County Regional Park & Open Space District and Eastern Municipal Water District was revealed Tuesday, April 25, at the Hemet City Council meeting.

OPINION: Lois Henry: Groundwater Repayment Coming Due Early For Some Valley Farmers

Fixing our groundwater deficit will be painful. No way around it. And growers in the massive Semitropic Water Storage District are learning that sooner than most.Though the state has set a series of short- and long-term deadlines to restore the depleted water table, Semitropic is so far in the hole it got special legislation passed in September allowing it to ramp up its own timeline — and landowner fees. It’s holding a vote on Wednesday to slap a $500-per-acre surcharge on any “new” ground developed for farming and is proposing to use satellite imagery to determine exact water consumption by crop.

Are Floating Solar Panels Energy’s New Frontier?

When you’re trying to generate a lot more solar power, you’re limited by the size and heft of those big solar panels. Where can you put them? The answer so far has been the desert, or on rooftops. There have even been efforts to put panels on top of landfill sites. Solar entrepreneur Troy Helming of the San Francisco-based solar company Pristine Sun has a new idea: floating on water.

OPINION: The Value Of Water Independence

Twenty years ago, the elected officials who served on the boards of the Orange County Sanitation District and Orange County Water District had a visionary idea to recycle treated wastewater to drinking water standards and percolate that water into our underground aquifer where it could eventually be used again for drinking water. The project — which would be known as the Groundwater Replenishment System — was not without opposition, much of it surrounding the cost of the project and the water it would produce.