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Jerry Couchman: State Water Policies Are Endangering Our Farmers, Again

/in /by /The Modesto Bee

In 1994 an immigrant from Thailand purchased 720 acres near Bakersfield. He intended to grow vegetables and began preparing to plant his crops. At that point, federal and state agents descended by air and ground to arrest him and hauled away the equipment. They said he was destroying the environment of the endangered kangaroo rat, and could not farm its natural habitat. In Northern California and Oregon, environmentalists are destroying dams on the Klamath River for fish. They denied farmers water for irrigation, reducing farming and all related businesses.

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Record California Rains Could Drive Up Vegetable Prices

/in /by /The Weather Network

Record rains are a double-edged sword for California’s Salinas Valley: While the recent deluge virtually ended the state’s historic drought, it also created muddy, unworkable fields – sending prices for everything from kale to cauliflower soaring. The famed agricultural region just south of Silicon Valley is usually a springtime sea of green vegetables. But this year, there are patches of brown unplanted dirt in “America’s salad bowl,” which supplies more than 60 percent of the country’s leaf lettuce and almost half of its broccoli.

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Editorial: Oroville Is A Model Of How NOT To Deal With A Flood Emergency

/in /by /The Mercury News (San Jose)

A case in point is how the state Department of Water Resources has handled Lake Oroville for years. It continues despite considerable public and political pressure since the spillway collapse. Two developments last week perfectly illustrate the point. One involves awarding a nine-figure bid to a company to fix the spillway without any detail about what the company is actually doing. The other involves an independent review of what went wrong, which takes on added weight because the promised review by the government is nonexistent so far.

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Water Under Oroville Spillway Probably Caused February Collapse, State Consultants Say

/in /by /Los Angeles Timesby Bettina Boxall

Official reports released Monday say the catastrophic damage to Oroville Dam’s main spillway probably stemmed from swift water flows under the concrete chute, which was cracked and of uneven thickness. The observations, contained in consultants’ reports prepared for the state Department of Water Resources, echo much of an independent assessment made for UC Berkeley’s Center for Catastrophic Risk Management. An official verdict on the cause is not due until the fall, when a separate forensics team investigating the February spillway break will submit its report.

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USGS Finds Vast Reserves of Salty Water Underground

/in /by /Phys.orgby Devika G. Bansal

A new nationwide study has unearthed the huge hidden potential of tapping into salty aquifers as a way to relieve the growing pressure on freshwater supplies across the United States. Digging into data from the country’s 60 major aquifers, the U.S. Geological Survey reports that the amount of brackish – or slightly salty – groundwater is more than 35 times the amount of fresh groundwater used in the United States each year.

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OPINION: Local Control A Key Element In Water Use Efficiency

/in /by /The Desert Sun (Palm Springs)by Peter Nelson

While California is breathing a sigh of relief and rightfully celebrating an epic water year, efforts in Sacramento threaten to make seismic changes in the way our water has been managed in the Coachella Valley and across the state. Last week, the governor released a report outlining steps for long-term water conservation by residential and business water users. The Coachella Valley Water District worked alongside state agencies to provide input into that framework – we wanted to ensure that the unique circumstances of our community were reflected in the proposed legislation.

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Water Authority Members Meet More In Private Than Public

/in /by /The San Diego Union-Tribuneby James DeHaven Quoted: Mark Muir and Mike Lee

Members of the San Diego County Water Authority met behind closed doors more than 100 times last year — four times as often as they met in public. State law limits the scope and frequency of such unnoticed, unrecorded meetings so as to prevent officials from hiding their activities from the public, which pays for them. Yet payroll documents, the only records available to describe the get-togethers, show three groups of authority board members met behind closed doors on a monthly basis in 2016.

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San Diego Says Cuts to Flood Channel Clearing Won’t Increase Risk

/in /by /The San Diego Union-Tribuneby David Garrick

Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s proposal to spend significantly less clearing clogged drainage channels has raised concerns about higher flood risk in San Diego, but Faulconer’s staff says there’s no reason to worry. The city can prudently spend as much as $1.4 million less on clearing flood channels during the fiscal year that begins July 1 because staff has become more efficient at obtaining environmental permits and completing the work, said Kris McFadden, director of the city’s Transportation and Storm Water Department.

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Plans For Major New Reservoir In Santa Clara County Moving Forward

/in /by /The Mercury Newsby Paul Rogers

Hoping to boost water supplies during future droughts, Silicon Valley’s largest water provider is working on a plan to build a new $800 million dam and reservoir in the remote hills of eastern Santa Clara County, just off Pacheco Pass. The idea, still in the early stages, could result in the construction of one of the largest reservoirs in the Bay Area — a lake that would be twice the size of Crystal Springs Reservoir along Interstate 280 in San Mateo County — and the first new reservoir built in Santa Clara County since 1957, when Uvas Reservoir near Morgan Hill opened.

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Hydropower Plant Next to Joshua Tree National Park Wouldn’t Hurt The Environment, Feds Say

/in /by /The Desert Sun (Palm Springs) by Sammy Roth

Federal officials have concluded that infrastructure for a proposed hydropower project — which would tap billions of gallons of groundwater in the California desert, just outside Joshua Tree National Park — wouldn’t be especially harmful to the environment. The Bureau of Land Management issued a “finding of no significant impact” Thursday for power lines and water pipelines that would enable Eagle Crest Energy Company to build a massive hydroelectric power plant in the Eagle Mountain area, which is surrounded on three sides by the national park. That finding clears the way for the agency to approve the project infrastructure in a few months, after a final protest period.

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