Ample rainfall helped put a dent in California’s drought, but it also created more fuel for wildfires, officials said.
Fire departments are gearing up for a long summer with training exercises and are encouraging people to be fire safe. “With lots of rain this winter, the grass grew a lot, and we became a dry tinderbox,” Chief Mike Butler of the Dobbins/Oregon House Fire Protection District said.
As temperatures race toward the triple digits, City Council members voted unanimously to reduce water conservation goals but maintain a twice-weekly watering restriction.
The Department of Utilities presented a plan to drop conservation goals from 28 percent over 2013 levels down to 10 percent and increase watering to three days a week but found little support from the council. Instead, the council embraced an alternative suggestion from Councilman Jeff Harris that would keep the city’s water shortage level at stage two –acknowledging ongoing drought conditions – but lower the conservation target to 20 percent.
Thousands of Southern California residents were left without power Tuesday as a brutal heat wave continued to bake the region, utility company officials said.
Some 5,500 customers — including residences and businesses — scattered across Los Angeles were affected as of 2 p.m. Most would probably have power restored by the evening, Department of Water and Power officials said. Though the cause of the outages are being investigated, the heat wave that has sent temperatures skyrocketing into the triple digits and put record demand on the power grid — including because of increased use of air conditioners — was certainly a factor, said DWP spokeswoman Vonda Paige.
The winter of 2015 capped four years of drought that resulted in an unprecedented water deficit in Sierra Nevada snowpack. Much of California’s water comes from snowmelt.
Researchers at UCLA say in a new study, that this winter’s strong El Niño didn’t make up for that deficit. They found that even if the state gets above-average precipitation, it will take until 2019 to recover. Scientists used NASA satellite and snow survey data to assess snowpack. This gave them a better and more accurate picture of snow in higher elevations.
Cash-strapped cities are contending with aging, leak-prone water systems that waste trillions of gallons a year and result in damaging breaks.
Firefighters on Tuesday continued to battle twin blazes burning dangerously close to each other in the mountains above Duarte and Azusa, as hundreds of residents were forced to flee and dozens of horses were evacuated.
More than 1,000 firefighters deployed to tame the Reservoir and Fish fires, burning about 1.5 miles apart in Angeles National Forest. The fires are now being managed as a single conflagration called the San Gabriel Complex fire, authorities said. They could connect if winds become gusty. Late Tuesday, fire officials said the blazes had burned 4,900 acres, downgrading earlier estimates on the fires’ size. The blazes are 10% contained.
When forecasters last year warned of a massive El Niño, some Californians held out hope that a single extremely wet year could bust the state’s severe drought.
But a study published Tuesday in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, offered support for the argument that state hydrologists have been making for months: It will take several years to recover from the four-year water shortage. Specifically, researchers studied the Sierra Nevada and found that the lackluster snowpack there, year after year, created a sizable water deficit that the state may not recoup until 2019.
Farms and golf courses rank among the biggest water users in the Coachella Valley, but detailed information about how much water each of those businesses use is kept secret by the area’s largest water agency.
That would change under a bill now before the California Legislature. The bill would clarify previous legislation by specifying that while residential customers’ data may be kept confidential, the public is entitled to information about how much water and energy is used by businesses and institutions.
Every spring, snow begins to melt throughout the Rocky Mountains, flowing down from high peaks and into the streams and rivers that form the mighty Colorado River Basin, sustaining entire cities and ecosystems from Wyoming to Arizona. But as spring becomes summer, the melting snow slows to a trickle and, as summer turns to fall, all but stops.
Scientists have known for a long time that flow in rivers is sustained by contributions from both snowmelt runoff and groundwater.
California’s drought has revealed that when it comes to water, not every community is equal.
