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Damaged Main Spillway Of Oroville Dam To Reopen Next Week

/in /by /The Sacramento Beeby Dale Kasler

Oroville Dam’s heavily damaged main spillway is expected to resume releasing water a little more than a week from now as levels continue to rise in the reservoir. The state Department of Water Resources announced Wednesday that the battered concrete spillway is likely to begin water releases around March 17. At that point, the level in Lake Oroville is expected to have risen to 865 feet. That’s well below the point at which water would go over the adjacent emergency spillway, but several feet above the comfort level established by DWR acting director Bill Croyle.

 

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When It Rains, Los Angeles Sends Billions Of Gallons Of ‘Free Liquid Gold’ Down The Drain

/in /by /Los Angeles Timesby Bettina Boxall

During one of this winter’s frequent storms, sheets of rainwater spilled from roofs, washed across sidewalks and down gutters into a sprawling network of underground storm drains that empty into the Los Angeles River channel. Normally a thin flow of treated sewage, the river swelled with mocha-colored runoff. For a time it poured into the Pacific Ocean at a rate of nearly 29 million gallons a minute.

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BLOG: Senators Call For Equity and Competitiveness In New Water Bond Allocation

/in /by /Water Education Foundation (Sacramento)by Gary Pitzer

The Senate Natural Resources and Water Committee passed a proposed $3.5 billion water and parks bond measure Tuesday, with members calling for an assurance that if approved by California voters in 2018, the funds would be equitably distributed throughout the state. The bond, Senate Bill 5 by Sen. Pro Tem Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, includes $500 million for flood protection investments that were just added after the recent floods to address the state’s urgent needs.

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San Diego-Los Angeles Fault Could Produce 7.4 Earthquake

/in /by /The San Diego Union-Tribuneby Gary Robbins

The Scripps Institution of Oceanography on Tuesday raised the attention level for two earthquake faults, saying they’re actually a single system that could produce devastating temblors affecting Tijuana to the Los Angeles region. If offshore segments of the Newport-Inglewood and Rose Canyon fault system ruptured, they could generate a magnitude 7.3 quake capable of damaging much of the Southern California coastline, according to the scientists at Scripps, which is part of UC San Diego.

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USGS Updates Forecast Of When A Major Quake Might Strike LA Region

/in /by /89.3 KPCC (Pasadena)by Nick Roman

USGS geologist Kate Scharer led a team that investigated the timing of sand, mud and gravel deposits that were episodically ripped apart by earthquakes along the San Andreas Fault over the last 1,200 years. They found evidence of 10 ground-rupturing earthquakes between 800 A.D. and the last rupture in 1857. “In the area of the Grapevine we had a 100-mile or so stretch where we didn’t have good information on the timing of earthquakes back for the last thousand years or so,” Scharer said.

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Calif. Tribe Wins Appeal In Landmark Water Case

/in /by /USA Todayby Ian James

A federal appeals court sided with the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians on Tuesday in a landmark water case, upholding a ruling that the tribe has federally established rights to groundwater in the Coachella Valley. The decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is likely to set an important precedent for tribes across the country. The three-judge panel upheld a 2015 ruling in which a judge backed the Agua Caliente tribe’s claim that it holds a federally granted “reserved right” to groundwater beneath its reservation in Palm Springs and surrounding areas.

 

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Thousands of Californians Have Contaminated Water Coming From Taps

/in /by /NBC 7 San Diegoby Wendy Fry, Alejandro Alejandre, and Stephen Stock

Some 700,000 Californians are currently being exposed to contaminated water at home or at school, according to the latest data from California’s Water Resources Control Board. NBC 7 discovered more than 3,000 of those residents are living in the San Diego region, often in poorer, rural communities located within areas of Potrero, Pauma Valley and Borrego Springs.

 

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There’s Water, Water Everywhere In California. So Why Isn’t The Drought Over?

/in /by /GOOD (Los Angeles)by Jordan E. Rosenfeld

For the first time in the nearly six years of significant drought in California, a slew of intense winter storms have overfilled reservoirs, flooded roadways, and returned a sense of possibility to the parched regions of the state. Who could blame any Californian for taking an extra-long shower or two when it’s suddenly so abundant? But on Tuesday morning, NASA’s water scientist Jay Famiglietti wrote in a widely shared Los Angeles Times op-ed that even if the drought is technically declared over (which isn’t exactly the case), California will always be short of water.

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OPINION: Cadiz Water Project Poses Grave Threat To California Desert

/in /by /Redlands Daily Factsby Dianne Feinstein

The recent election may have changed the dynamic in Washington, but the facts on the ground in the California desert remain the same: The Cadiz water mining project poses a grave threat to the California desert and should not be approved. Covering about 35,000 acres of prime desert land, the project sits in the heart of the new Mojave Trails National Monument, described by President Obama as an area that “exemplifies the remarkable ecology of the Mojave Desert, where the hearty insistence of life is scratched out from unrelenting heat and dryness.”

 

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NASA Launches Pilot Project To Measure Snow Pack From The Sky

/in /by /Capital Public Radio (Sacramento)by Ezra David Romero

After five years of drought and now all this precipitation there’s so much snow in the Sierra Nevada that state water officials are preparing for a massive runoff year. But the traditional way of calculating the snowpack has a huge margin of error. A new way to measure it could greatly decrease that inconsistency. Every winter and spring a network of snow surveyors manually tally how much snow is in the Sierra Nevada. They do this by measuring snow depth in the same spots every year.

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