With the wettest winter in five years having taken the hard edges off the historic drought and a key Sierra snowpack reading Wednesday expected to show big gains, Californians can look forward to substantial relief from mandatory statewide water restrictions.
Independent filmmaker, Franck Tabouring is trying to save the Salton Sea in his own way. Tabouring has created a short film filled with thought provoking images called, “The Useless Sea.”
“You’ll be surprised but I’ve talked to many people who’ve growed up in California have lived there their entire lives, and when I mention, ‘Have you heard of the Salton Sea?” They’ve never heard of it,” said Tabouring. Tabouring personally discovered the Salton Sea while scouting desert locations for another film project.
A desalination plant proposed near San Juan Creek could produce as much as 15 million gallons of drinking water daily and create a reliable source for South County-area reserves in the wake of an earthquake or drought, officials said.
South Coast Water District officials said plans for the $90 million plant – studied for more than a decade – are moving forward despite the fact the district would be the sole agency building it. The plant – with a 2019 opening date – would likely provide 75 percent of the district’s water needs, district general manager Andrew Brunhart said.
With the wettest winter in five years having taken the hard edges off the historic drought and a key Sierra snowpack reading Wednesday expected to show big gains, Californians can look forward to substantial relief from mandatory statewide water restrictions.
Assemblymember Chris Holden’s Water Efficient Landscaping Bill, AB 2525, passed the Assembly Water, Parks, and Wildlife Committee with a 9-3 vote. AB 2525 creates the California Water Efficient Landscaping (WEL) Program that encourages Californians to upgrade their landscape and irrigation equipment for more efficient ones. It also prioritizes participation of families that qualify for the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program.
A month that’s been called miraculous for California’s water supply is marching toward the finale of the rainy season, but as it was heading out the door, storms in Tahoe dumped half a foot of snow on ski resorts Monday night into Tuesday.
Without other definitive wet systems on the horizon, the powder — which continued to lightly fall into Tuesday evening — is likely March’s last hurrah, forecasters said.
The rain storms and blizzards that were supposed to come with El Niño were conspicuously non-biblical in California this winter, leaving the state in an ecological limbo that has regulators thinking about easing water-use restrictions in some places but not in others.
While the weather cheered ski resorts hit hard by the historic drought and brought some reservoirs to their highest points in years, in the end it dropped less snow than average in the Sierra, where more than a third of the state’s water comes from.
As part of its continued efforts to promote outdoor water-use efficiency, Olivenhain Municipal Water District is hosting a free landscape workshop on Tuesday, April 5, to assist residents in saving money on their water bills while maintaining a healthy landscape.
The workshop will be held from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at the Encinitas Community Center, 1140 Oakcrest Park Drive in Encinitas.
The San Diego County Water Authority will have $8.9 million in legal fees paid following its successful lawsuit against the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California over water rates.
The Los Angeles-based MWD now owes the San Diego authority more than $243 million, including damages, costs, interest and attorneys’ fees. “We are pleased that almost all of the attorneys’ fees and court costs incurred by the water authority to defend our water ratepayers will be recovered,” said Mark Weston, chair of the authority’s board of directors.
In this timely study, as they describe it, Hatchett et al. (2015) strove to determine whether the hydro-climatic conditions that occurred during the 2012-2015 (hereafter current) California-Nevada drought were “within the range of natural variability documented by paleo-proxy indicators,” which they hoped could lead to the “disentanglement of the relative roles of natural versus anthropogenic forcing factors as causative agents.” So what did they do? And what did they learn?
