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A long-awaited draft environmental review document for California American Water’s Monterey Peninsula desalination project will not be released Wednesday as originally scheduled, and the release of the critical report will be delayed until next month. According to a California Public Utilities Commission statement sent to The Herald on Tuesday, the draft desal project environmental impact report, as well as an environmental impact statement, is still in the works and is now expected to be published in January.

Data and data management are persistent concerns for the Delta and California water more generally. Data Wars: A New Hope, a shadow puppet play on the subject, was shown at the 2016 Bay-Delta Science Conference in Sacramento. The challenge of the Conference’s theme, “Science for Solutions: Linking Data and Decisions,” is illustrated by characters such as a lonesome marsh wren and a striped bass with a Boston accent.

Parts of the Bay Area are still drying out from last week’s big soaker. The numbers are in and it turns out area reservoirs got a nice boost from all that rain. One of the larger reservoirs in the Santa Clara valley, Lexington, in the mountains above Los Gatos is now at just over 40 percent of capacity. That’s a roughly 5 percent increase over a week ago. It represents a good start for the year.

 

Saving the Delta requires sacrifice by all, not just residents of this region. I hope someone drilled that idea into the State Water Resources Control Board. The board, whose Sisyphean job is to ensure California’s water is used fairly, brought its road show to Stockton last Friday for a public hearing on its dubious Water Quality Control Plan.To save dying fisheries, and to make the Delta healthier, the board proposes to bump up flows on three rivers that feed the San Joaquin River: the Stanislaus, Tuolumne and Merced.