A bill signed into law Friday by Governor Gavin Newsom will now ban certain businesses from watering its grass in an effort to reduce water usage.
The bill is modeled after the State placed similar rules on commercial, industrial and government agencies from using drinking water for grass deemed “non-functional” in 2022.
With California reservoirs full after a historically wet winter, the Long Beach Utilities Commission has signed off on a plan to buy more imported water at a discount to help other cities clear space to capture more rain during the upcoming winter season.
Long Beach typically pumps over 60% of its customers’ water from local ground aquifers and is able to avoid paying for more expensive water piped in through the State Water Project or the Colorado River.
September was one of the warmest ever in the United States, with records falling in 111 counties, but conditions were moderate in Southern California.
Most of the country baked under record heat in September as large swaths of hot air covered the Midwest and East. The final tally put September 2023 as the seventh warmest in the last 129 years.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) said it was also the third-driest September ever recorded in the lower 48 states.
Health officials reported Sunday that Point Loma has reached the highest concentration of COVID-19 viral load in local wastewater since August 2022.
According to the San Diego Epidemiology and Research for COVID Health Alliance, a partnership between Scripps Research and UC San Diego, scientists measure concentration of the virus at the Point Loma, Encina and South Bay wastewater treatment plants to understand how the virus is evolving and being transmitted.
Twenty years ago, in October 2003, water officials from across the Southwest signed the largest water conservation-and-transfer agreement in U.S. history, the QSA, or Quantification Settlement Agreement. The agreement has provided decades of water security for San Diego County and benefits for numerous partners across the Southwest. In total, that pact supplies more than half of the water that sustains San Diego County’s 3.3 million residents and $268 billion economy.
The Imperial Irrigation District Board of Directors conducted a formal dedication of its newest water conservation and operational reservoir located just east of here on Wednesday, October 11, named after longtime Division 3 Director Lloyd Allen.
One week away from the city of Escondido voting on a potential double-digit water rate increase, council members received a presentation about the rate increase already decided on by San Diego County Water Authority.
“The board ultimately chose to go with a smoothing approach for the rate increases with an effective rate increase of 9.5% for calendar year 2024,” said Tish Berge, deputy general manager for SDCWA.
Berge explained the smoothing approach meant projected future increases wouldn’t be as steep. The county water authority cites several similar factors as the city for needing to raise the rate like inflation and maintaining infrastructure, but they also say they’ve lost money as a result of more frequent rainfall.
September’s stunning rise of the average global temperature is all but certain to make 2023 the warmest year on record, and 2024 is likely to be even hotter, edging close to the “red line” of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above the pre-industrial level that the 2015 Paris climate agreement is striving to avoid.
As of Oct. 10, the daily average Northern Hemisphere temperature had been at a record high for 100 consecutive days.
The San Diego County Board of Supervisors voted 3-0 Wednesday to align county regulations with a court ruling allowing users in the Borrego Springs Subbasin to pump groundwater.
In 2021, a San Diego Superior Court judge ruled that users in the Borrego Springs Subbasin have the right to pump groundwater. In connection with that ruling, a required 70% reduction in groundwater use to comply with the state Sustainable Groundwater Management Act must be achieved by 2040.
In the endless urban sprawl of Southern California, the Tijuana River Valley looks like a serene break of green before the sprawl resumes on the other side of the border.
But the seemingly bucolic area is where representatives from the California Coastal Commission met on Wednesday to see first hand how sewage in the river has made people in adjacent communities sick and affected state lands.
