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More Thunderstorms Due; Lake Oroville Could Keep Rising

/in /by /Chico Enterprise-Recordby By Dan Reidel

Thunder and lightning hit the north valley this week and flashing, booming skies could continue through Saturday evening.

“There’s an unsettled pattern, we do have a large trough of low pressure over the West Coast right now,” said Karl Swanberg, a forecaster with the National Weather Service’s Sacramento office. “These enhanced features, they just rotate around the low pressure, so you get little waves of energy bringing a chance of showers and in your area, thunderstorms.”

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Long-Term Drought Persists In California

/in /by /Capital Public Radio (Sacramento)by By Ed Joyce

The U.S. Drought Monitor released May 5 shows some minor improvement in California drought conditions. But looking ahead to the dry season shows drought persisting for a fifth consecutive year in the Golden State.

In California, some moderate drought was removed in the northern portion of the state. The extreme northwest portion of the state accounts for the 4.27 percent of California where there is no drought. But 96 percent remains abnormally dry, with 89 percent in moderate, 74 percent in severe, 49 percent in extreme and 21 percent in exceptional drought.

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Farmers Innovate to Get More Crop Per Drop

/in /by /The San Diego Union-Tribuneby By Andy Lyall

During your next meal, I encourage you to look down at your plate. More closely. No matter if you live in San Diego or Baltimore, chances are, one or more of the foods on that plate was grown or raised right here in California. With nearly half of American-grown nuts, fruits and vegetables produced in California, the state is on your plate.

But the delicious and diverse array of California food available to us is only half the story.

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BLOG: Unknown, Unregulated, Undrinkable

/in /by /Pacific Standardby Madeleine Thomas

Louie Campos stopped drinking the water from his faucets in Visalia, California, so long ago that it takes him a minute to recall just how many years it has been since he held a glass to the tap and took a swill. By his closest approximation, the plainspoken 43-year-old has ripped through a 24-pack of bottled water a week for the last eight years. Bottled water, he says, is a hidden tax Visalia’s residents must pay to live there.

 

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U-T Attorney Wins $160,000 in Turf Grant Case

/in /by /The San Diego Union-Tribune by By Ricky Young

An attorney for The San Diego Union-Tribune has been awarded more than $160,000 in legal fees for a case in which she successfully argued that information about recipients of turf removal grants should be a matter of public record.

The grants, totaling $340 million, were given out by the Metropolitan Water District and its members agencies throughout Southern California to encourage people to replace lawns with drought-resistant landscape amid drought.

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El Niño Rains Added Fuel to California’s Upcoming Fire Season, Experts Say

/in /by /Los Angeles Times by By Joseph Serna

As he drove east of Fresno to the next Wildfire Awareness Week event in Kern County on Wednesday, Cal Fire Chief Ken Pimlott turned his gaze toward the browning landscape.

“I’m looking at grass that’s 2 feet tall easily, and it’s already dead,” Pimlott said. Meanwhile, far away in the southern and central Sierra Nevada, foliage on 29 million trees infested with bark beetles are turning orange and red and dying, with countless more stretching north toward Sacramento expected to meet a similar fate over the next year.

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San Andreas fault ‘locked, loaded and ready to roll’ with big earthquake, expert says

/in /by /The Los Angeles Timesby Rong-Gong Lin II

Southern California’s section of the San Andreas fault is “locked, loaded and ready to roll,” a leading earthquake scientist said Wednesday at the National Earthquake Conference in Long Beach.

The San Andreas fault is one of California’s most dangerous, and is the state’s longest fault. Yet for Southern California, the last big earthquake to strike the southern San Andreas was in 1857, when a magnitude 7.9 earthquake ruptured an astonishing 185 miles between Monterey County and the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles.

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OPINION: It’s still About the Water: A Piece of My Mind

/in /by /Los Altos Town Crierby By Allyson Johnson

My husband and I took a road trip a few weeks ago, driving from Los Altos down to Bakersfield on Interstate 5 and then east to Sedona, Ariz., returning via Bakersfield and then up Highway 101.

As far as the Pacheco Pass, the landscape was lyrically green with oaks and buckeyes sporting fresh foliage, and wildflowers filling the crevices between the hills with streams of yellow mustard, buttercups and golden poppies. Rock outcroppings were wreathed in ribbons of late-rising fog like the karst peaks in traditional Chinese landscapes.

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Undamming this major U.S. River is Opening a World of Possibility for Native Cultures and Wildlife

/in /by /Fusion (Doral, Fla.)by By Renee Lewis

Flowing over 250 miles to from the high desert of southern Oregon through the Cascades Mountains before emptying out into the Pacific Ocean in northern California, the Klamath River and its Coho and Chinook salmon and steelhead runs were vital to Native American tribes for thousands of years before settlers arrived.

But within decades of their arrival there would be half a dozen dams constructed on the river, effectively blocking salmon and steelhead migrations on what was once the third-highest salmon producing river on the West Coast.

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Inside the Fight to Rehabilitate the Image of California’s Most Infamous Crop

/in /by /Think Progress (Washington, D.C.)by by Natasha Geiling

When things go wrong — especially if they go really, historically wrong — people tend to look for answers. So when California entered the fourth year of one of the worst droughts the state had ever seen, everyone — the media, politicians, scientists — wanted to know what had gone wrong.

In the process, a number of things were set upon the altar of public opinion as scapegoats for the drought: lawns, golf courses, wealthy Californians taking more than their fair share of the state’s dwindling resources, climate change. But none provoked the maelstrom that surrounded the almond, which seemingly transformed overnight from a healthy snack to the evil source of California’s water woes.

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