California’s Superintendent of schools, Tom Torlakson, visited schools in San Diego Thursday to talk about water quality issues and to congratulate a couple of teachers of the year. NBC 7 Investigates uncovered lead contamination in drinking water at some local schools, and now the topic is top of mind for many. NBC 7’s Liberty Zabala reports.
The long debate over Poseidon Water’s proposed ocean desalination plant in Huntington Beach continued this week as the California State Lands Commission released a draft of a supplemental environmental impact report analyzing planned additions to the facility that are meant to reduce potential harm to marine life and increase the plant’s efficiency. The supplement to a 2010 EIR addresses the possible environmental effects of a screen and diffuser added to the intake and outflow pipes, respectively, that would be used by the $1-billion desalination facility proposed at Newland Street and Pacific Coast Highway.
In the wake of the recent drought, desalination of ocean water continues to be a central topic in California water debates. Some coastal communities were particularly hard hit by the drought, including a large swath of the central coast that is among the last regions in the state still suffering from drought conditions. Desalination seems to hold the potential for limitless, drought-proof supplies, but the reality is far more complex.
California’s historic winter ended the drought in many parts of the state and piled up record levels of snowpack in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. With so much precipitation, surface water infrastructure – our network of dams, reservoirs and levees – has been called into action like never before, and in some cases has struggled to handle the influx of flows.
If you’re expecting a quick and easy answer on what caused the spillway failure at Oroville Dam, think again. The leader of the independent forensics team studying the Oroville crisis said Thursday that the crack in the dam’s main flood-control spillway likely was caused by a combination of problems. “We do anticipate there will be multiple contributory factors, no single factor,” said dam safety consultant John France in a conference call with reporters.
Officials say they have installed a new emergency siren at a Northern California dam whose damaged spillway forced evacuations earlier this year. The state Department of Water Resources says it will conduct the first test of the new siren at Oroville Dam on Friday. Monthly tests in July and August will follow. The previous siren was lost during water releases in February. Construction crews have begun demolishing the destroyed portion of the main spillway at the dam, which is the nation’s tallest.
Southern California Edison’s plan to store 3.6 million pounds of nuclear waste at the shuttered San Onofre Nuclear Generation Station has citizen activist Ray Lutz on edge. “It’s only 100 feet from the seawall to the edge of where the deposit is,” Lutz said. The permit from the California Coastal Commission for the storage is for 20 years. But Lutz contends that the permit is practically permanent because there’s no long-term nuclear waste storage site in the United States. “They don’t know if it will be removed in 2051 or even for many decades after that,” Lutz said.
Solana Beach is on its way to becoming the first jurisdiction in San Diego to move toward an energy alternative to SDG&E, striving for the promise of cheaper electricity rates, greater local control and a higher percentage of renewable energy. In a historic 4-1 vote on Wednesday, May 24, the Solana Beach City Council launched into the exploratory phase of a three-phase plan to shift Solana Beach’s 7,800 energy customers out of SDG&E’s monopoly and into city-run community choice aggregation (CCA).
The scientific community agrees: Climate change is real, it’s driven by human activity, and it’s getting worse. Californians understand this better than most. Having just emerged from a record-breaking drought, likely exacerbated by climate change, we are acutely attuned to the perils of a warming planet. Ratification of the Paris Climate Agreement offered California a basis for hope. The U.S. was finally acknowledging that climate change is a global problem that demands a global solution. Nearly 200 nations signed on to the Paris Agreement, pledging to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and fight climate change on a global scale.
Responding to record rainfall that revitalized California’s reservoirs and the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, Mountain View City Council members agreed last Tuesday night to drop the last of the city’s drought restrictions. In a unanimous vote at the May 23 meeting, council members rescinded Mountain View’s “stage 1” water use restrictions, which the city imposed in 2014 in order to rein in outdoor irrigation and other water uses to preserve the region’s dwindling water supply.
