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Water Planners Brace For 6th Year of Drought

/in /by /Inland News Today (Riverside)

Southern California water suppliers are bracing for a possible sixth year of drought. It’s a new ‘water year’ that began this month and officials will outline their plans Monday to meet the region’s water needs. Although the region’s water-saving efforts and last winter’s rain and snow in Northern California helped improve local stored reserves, extreme drought persists in much of the region. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is maintaining a Water Supply Alert calling for continued awareness and reinforced conservation throughout the district’s 5,200-square-mile service area.

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Opinion: San Francisco To State On Water-Use Cutbacks: How Low Can We Go?

/in /by /San Francisco Chronicleby Harlan L. Kelly Jr. and Nicole Sandkulla

Do you think you could reduce your water use by 40 percent? What if we asked for even more than that? This is the type of rationing we can expect during a severe drought if a new proposal from the State Water Resources Control Board is implemented. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is the retail water provider for San Francisco and the water provider for 26 wholesale customers in San Mateo, Santa Clara and Alameda counties. Today, 85 percent of the water we deliver to our customers comes from the Tuolumne River.

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OPINION: San Francisco’s Turn to Cut Back Water Use To Help Fish

/in /by /San Francisco Chronicleby Spreck Rosekrans

The contentious struggle to restore threatened fisheries in the San Francisco Bay-Delta and the Central Valley has focused mostly on reducing the amount of water exported from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to farms and Southern California cities. That’s now changed. The State Water Resources Control Board has asked San Francisco and other communities that withdraw water from rivers that feed into the delta from the south to be part of the solution. Declaring that “the Bay-Delta is in ecological crisis,” the state water board has proposed leaving 40 percent of the natural flow of these rivers untouched.

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More Water In California Reservoirs, But Drought Persists

/in /by /The Sacramento Beeby Dale Kasler

California’s major reservoirs are holding 69 percent more water than a year ago, the U.S. government announced Friday, but regulators warned that drought conditions continue to plague the state. In its annual inventory of water in storage, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said the six key reservoirs owned by the federal government’s Central Valley Project held a combined 4.9 million acre-feet of water as of Oct. 1, the beginning of the “water year” that runs through next September. That figure compared with 2.9 million acre-feet a year earlier.

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BLOG: Meet the Minds: Kelly Twomey Sanders On Water In A Changing Climate

/in /by /Water Deeply (New York)by Eline Gordts

California’s drought has helped the public see what many researchers have known for a long time: Water and energy are deeply intertwined. Kelly Twomey Sanders has been exploring this energy-water nexus in depth. She joined the Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Southern California in 2014 after having completed her PhD at the University of Texas. Sanders is working to identify the technical, market and regulatory interventions that can help reduce water-related disruptions to energy services in the context of a changing climate.

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AM Alert: Water board discusses drinking wastewater

/in /by /The Sacramento Beeby Taryn Luna

Let’s talk about drinking (treated) pee.

California is in the midst of a multi-year drought and just last week forecasters admitted to having no idea if the upcoming wet season will actually bring any rain. With water scarcity a major concern in California and beyond, recycling wastewater to drinkable standards is evolving from idea to reality.

The state commissioned a panel of experts through the State Water Resources Control Board to determine if it’s possible to develop standards for recycling wastewater into a drinkable source. Short answer: It’s doable, but we need to conduct more public health research first.

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BLOG: Water contractors sue federal government for $350 million

/in /by /The Associated Press (As Published by: The Daily Progress - Charlottesville, Va.)

Seventeen California water districts have filed a lawsuit for $350 million against the federal government for not delivering water to contractors in the drought year of 2014.

The Fresno Bee reports (http://bit.ly/2dUTACL ) that the districts in the San Joaquin Valley and the city of Fresno filed the suit Wednesday in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C.

Attorney Craig Parton, who is representing the contractors, says the claim seeks to recover the fair market value of Friant Division water not delivered to the contractors even though there were sufficient supplies in Millerton Lake that year.

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How California Is Learning to Love Drinking Recycled Water

/in /by /Water Deeply (New York)by Tara Lohan

Would you rather drink a cup of recycled wastewater or advanced purified water?

Actually, that’s a trick question – both terms are often used to talk about the same thing. But when it comes to public acceptance of the practice, the language you use makes a big difference. And so does education about how the process works.

Those are some of the things that have helped shift attitudes in California around potable reuse (drinking wastewater that has been purified for drinking). But it’s been a long road to get there and a few bumps remain.

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California and National Drought Summary for October 4, 2016

/in /by /Sierra Sun Times

The current U.S. Drought Monitor period was dry through much of the Midwest and Plains states. Dryness also dominated much of Idaho, the interior regions of Washington and Oregon, much of California and Nevada, and the Southeast. A slow-moving system brought with it soaking rains from eastern Illinois into the Mid-Atlantic. Some areas of the Mid-Atlantic into Virginia and North Carolina recorded over 5 inches of rain with this event.

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Happy 10th Birthday to California’s Most Ambitious Water Project

/in /by /Water Deeply (New York)by Tom Philp

There were high hopes for a new era in California water. Environmental groups, agriculture, the state, the feds and big urban districts like Metropolitan all signed on the dotted line. They all agreed to plan for a new and comprehensive way to manage the water system and ecosystem of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

The effort was to be known as the Bay Delta Conservation Plan. Until, of course, it later became known as California WaterFix and California EcoRestore. Ten years. A quarter of a billion dollars in planning.

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