Some federal water contractors in California were outraged on April 1 when the Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) drew a hard line at the Delta, giving those north of it a full allotment of irrigation water and those south of it little to none.
This year’s “miracle March” will give all northern California water users 100 percent of their requested Central Valley Project (CVP) allocations while limiting south-of-the-Delta users to 5 percent.
Many California farmers expect to receive full deliveries of irrigation water this year from a vast system of canals and reservoirs run by the federal government, while some in the nation’s most productive farming region will receive a fraction as the state recovers from several years of drought, officials said Friday.
Farms and water customers in the state’s northern Sacramento Valley will get their full water supplies from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. It’s a big improvement over last year, when those farmers received no water and neighboring cities got one-quarter of their contracted amounts.
Should local salmon be pushed to extinction? Should some Bay Area residents pay much higher water bills? Should San Francisco Bay be contaminated with toxic pollutants?
My guess is that Bay Area residents would answer these questions with a resounding “no,” but these scenarios will become reality if the two 30-mile water tunnels proposed by Governor Jerry Brown are built.The tunnels have a new name since they were first proposed in in 2012: the California Water Fix.
The San Diego County Water Authority is offering a Free Program called “Watersmart Landscape Makeover Program”. Listen in as Sharon Lowe, SDCWA, demonstrates some of the easy steps to convert you yard to drought friendly, using native plants and even how to make your own compost.
In the latest sign of California’s improving drought picture, federal officials announced Friday that cities will receive 55 percent of their contracted water amounts this summer — up from 25 percent last year — from the Central Valley Project, California’s largest water delivery system.
Heavy rains in March boosted the amount of water in Northern California’s large reservoirs such as Shasta and Folsom, allowing farmers in the Sacramento Valley and wildlife refuges to receive 100 percent of their contracted amounts, while the Contra Costa Water District also will receive 100 percent, up from 25 percent a year ago.
The Bureau of Reclamation today announced wildly differing amounts of water that drought-strapped farmers in the California delta can expect from federal pumps this year.
All of this means drought conditions will continue clobbering Southern California for the time being. That’s bad news for farmers like Chris Sayer of Petty Ranch in Ventura County. He grows citrus and avocado trees. Lately, the leaves on some plants have started going brown.
“A lot of these leaves look really stressed, you can see how the tips of them are all dried out,” Sayer explained as he walked past an avocado grove.
As if we needed more proof, the Sierra snow survey last week made clear that Californians must continue to conserve water while working to build a more reliable water system.
The snowpack is roughly normal in Northern California. But the situation is worse in Southern California, where El Niño was a bust, delivering half of normal rainfall.
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California made the argument that the district’s email servers are often used for personal business, and are therefore the realm of private communications.
Even though the U-T asked only for official emails on government accounts, the district claimed emails sent by a government employee on an official account saying “what a disaster” would not be relevant to government activities.
Federal officials will say how much water some California farmers can expect to receive this year in one of the nation’s most productive agricultural regions.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s announcement on Friday affects San Joaquin Valley farmers, spanning California’s interior from Stockton to Bakersfield. It is home to about one-third of California’s farmland. Because of drought, many of the farms in the last two years received no water from a vast system of reservoirs and canals.
