The trees are dying. The forests are not.This distinction is getting lost in all the angst over the tree die-off in the central Sierra, coastal ranges and other forests of California. Players ranging from the Forest Service to CalFire to Sen. Dianne Feinstein and other public officials are ignoring this key fact in their rush to do something, anything, about the dying trees.
Red flag warnings are in effect through Monday afternoon, as soaring temperatures and the first major Santa Ana winds of the season are expected to sweep through an already parched Southern California. “I’d say the tinder box would be Southern California itself,” said David Sweet, a metereologist with the National Weather Service. “All areas in Ventura County and Los Angeles County are being subjected to gusty winds, high temperatures and low humidities.”
Drive through rural Tulare County and you’ll hear it soon enough, a roar from one of the hundreds of agricultural pumps pulling water from beneath the soil to keep the nut and fruit orchards and vast fields of corn and alfalfa lush and green under the scorching San Joaquin Valley sun. Well water is keeping agriculture alive in Tulare County – and much of the rest of the San Joaquin Valley – through five years of California’s historic drought.
In bone-dry California we are counting the days until October when the rainy season should begin. When wells run dry in the Central Valley, fires rage in Big Sur and pine forests in the Sierra Nevada die off, you can’t help but wonder where all the water has gone. But what if we asked a slightly different question: where should the water be? To answer this it helps to know that soil hydrologists classify fresh water as either blue or green. According to Henry Lin, Professor of Hydropedology / Soil Hydrology at Penn State University,
San Diego’s fountains are flowing again, after the state eased drought restrictions that were in place for more than a year. As of Aug. 1 in the city of San Diego, water restrictions dropped from Level 2 to Level 1, signaling a shift from mandatory to voluntary water restrictions in many cases. The only restriction on fountains is that they use recirculating water, a near-universal design that dates back to electrical pumps more than a century ago. Other water agencies have taken similar actions. Level 2 restrictions lasted from Nov. 1, 2014, to June 30, 2016, said Luis Generoso, the city’s water conservation program manager.
Sacramentans continued to conserve water last month, although their total consumption grew compared with a year earlier.The Sacramento Regional Water Authority said Thursday that water consumption fell by 18 percent in August compared with August 2013, the baseline used by state drought regulators. The conservation rate was below the 22 percent savings achieved in August 2014. That suggests Sacramentans have become somewhat less diligent about conserving water after the state rescinded its mandatory savings program. Nonetheless, water officials pronounced themselves pleased with the results.
California’s goal of ensuring universal access to safe drinking water, as mandated in the 2012 Human Right to Water Bill, will come a step closer to being met if Gov. Jerry Brown signs a new measure into law that halts the creation of new small, unsustainable – and in many cases dangerous – water districts in the state.
The bill, SB1263, passed through the state assembly and senate in August. It aims to guarantee the safety and reliability of drinking water statewide by encouraging new developments to tie into existing water districts rather than create their own.
Not many simple statements can be made about the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, except these: It’s hard to overstate the importance of the region’s resources to California – or the complexity of sharing those resources.
Two out of three Californians depend upon water from the Delta, but nearly every discussion of Delta water centers on fish. That is because the Delta is the largest estuary on the West Coast, a vital migratory corridor and home to several endangered species. Protecting native fish directly affects how much water can be delivered to farms and cities.
San Dieguito Water District representative Mark Muir was Thursday elected chairman of the San Diego County Water Authority Board of Directors. Muir, an Encinitas councilman, succeeds Mark Weston, who chaired the 36-seat SDCWA board for two years during the height of the drought. “While supply conditions have improved this year, our region still faces many important water-related issues and challenges,” Muir said.
