Water will stop flowing from Oroville Dam’s badly damaged spillway on Friday, in the hopes it’s the last time it will be used before the next rainy season. Even with a heavy snowpack waiting to melt in the mountains above Lake Oroville, state officials say they’ve drained the reservoir down to the point where they can manage its level through the dam’s primary powerplant outlet. The lake was at 74 percent of its total capacity Wednesday.
As the revolving door swings in Washington, D.C., David L. Bernhardt is an understandable choice to be second in command in the Trump administration’s Interior Department, a post with a direct hand in California water. Bernhardt is, according to those who know him, highly intelligent and a skilled lawyer. Given his pedigree in and out of government, Bernhardt certainly understands the complexities of California water policy and politics. But because of his clients, Bernhardt is hardly the ideal choice for this state. The Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee is scheduled to convene a confirmation hearing for Bernhardt on Thursday.
Yes, fellow citizens, there is something that both major political parties agree on: the need for infrastructure investment to get the country’s water systems, highways and other major public facilities rebuilt in order to avoid major failures in the near future. Our politicians are not the only ones working to accomplish this. A growing number of water districts and companies are hard at work on major water supply and wastewater initiatives.
A prominent open government attorney has sent a letter to the San Diego County Water Authority demanding the agency open up meetings previously held outside the public’s view. Attorney Cory Briggs on Tuesday called on the water authority to remedy “a pattern of violations” of California’s open meeting law, which limits the scope and frequency of unnoticed, unrecorded meetings. The idea is to prevent officials from conducting government business outside the view of the public.
Today the Poway Unified School District is testing water for lead at 12 campuses. The district sent a letter to parents to notify them of the testing, which will run through mid-June. The affected campuses include: Chaparral, Garden Road, Midland, Painted Rock, Pomerado, Tierra Bonita, and Valley Elementary schools, Meadowbrook and Twin Peaks middle schools, Abraxas and Poway high schools, and the CTE/Adult Education campus. The PUSD will also be requesting lead testing for its remaining schools served by the City of San Diego and Olivenhain Municipal Water District.
California’s largest lake, the Salton Sea, is an accident. It was created in 1905 when a levee broke on an irrigation canal, flooding a giant desert playa. Today it has become a sticking point in negotiations between three states over the future of the Colorado River. The three states – California, Arizona and Nevada – are in the midst of negotiating a drought contingency plan (DCP). It would commit each state to reducing diversions from the Colorado River in order to prevent Lake Mead from shrinking to disastrously low levels.
Following the formal end of California’s drought state of emergency in April, the Glendale City Council eased water-use restrictions during a meeting last week, although Glendale Water & Power customers must still adhere to the city’s own water-conservation policies.
In 2015, Gov. Jerry Brown issued mandatory water-use restrictions across the state. The Glendale City Council quickly adopted an ordinance that limited watering to just two days a week, known as phase three of conservation.
The San Diego Unified School District is trying to calm concerns of parents at Alice Birney Elementary School in University Heights after high levels of lead were found in the drinking water. At the same time, it was suggested that parents have their children tested for exposure to lead by their family doctors.
The drinking fountain near the lunch area of Birney Elementary School was one of the sources sampled in the district’s effort to test all schools for lead levels in drinking water.
Don’t put away your skis yet. A light, late-spring storm is moving into the Sierra, freshening the slopes and keeping the Tahoe snowpack chilled. Snow flurries are in the forecast today with the storm fully developing Tuesday and dropping one to four inches as low as 6,500 feet. “The cold front associated with the low pressure system will drop south toward Nevada on Tuesday,” said Evan LaGuardia, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Reno. “It’s not as strong as what we saw a couple weeks ago but it will prevent the snow from melting.”
The drought is officially over in California, but our water crisis is not. Eyewitness News investigates the proposed solutions to help our water supply for the long haul. “What’s interesting from last year is we were simultaneously in a drought emergency and we were in a flood emergency, and so it was kind of an interesting thing for Californians to try to wrap their head around,” Harry Starkey, district manager for the West Kern Water District said. Starkey said California will always have its dry years, and then we are going to have some wet years.
