Low water levels at one of the City of San Diego’s reservoirs have halted some water activities. According to an announcement by the city on Thursday, the boat launch ramp at El Capitan Reservoir in Lakeside has been closed due to low water levels.
However, available water activities include shore fishing, canoeing, car toppers, kayaking and float tubes, the city said.
The Colorado River’s massive reservoirs are now so depleted that another dry year could send them plunging to dangerously low levels, a group of prominent scholars warns in a new analysis.
The researchers are urging the Trump administration to intervene and impose substantial cutbacks in water use across the seven states that rely on the river — California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.
Ramona Copley has lived in her Encinitas home since 1976, sharing it with her husband, David, who died last year. Their grown daughters live nearby. Today, her 16-year-old Chihuahua mix Cookey is her constant companion. Before David’s death, the couple had been planning the relandscaping of their front and backyards. They let the lawns die and David installed brick planters and concrete. They got rid of a cypress and ants destroyed white birch trees, Ramona said. Once he was in hospice and then passed, the landscaping project obviously was put on hold.
Within months, Ramona Copley, in her 80s and retired from being a seamstress for the San Diego Chargers, began to reignite the ideas that she and her late husband had put together. She had help from her stepdaughter Michelle in choosing plants that would be drought tolerant, hired a gardener after taking several bids and, in one month, had a front landscape anchored by three, four-trunk king palms that she’d been fixated on to provide shade over a dry creekbed and a variety of variegated agaves, mat rushes and dymondia lining it.
Ross Franson stood on the road between two fields, where nothing grows under the Fresno County sun.
As a teen, Franson hauled a water tank to spray down the dust on roads like this — rolling past rows of almond and pistachio trees, the CD on his Discman skipping with every bump.
For more than a century, PG&E’s Potter Valley Project has funneled water from one Northern California river to another. Now, the century-old system has become the center of a political firestorm, cast by the Trump administration as a battle of “fish over people.”
Earlier this summer, PG&E submitted its final proposal to federal regulators: Dismantle the project’s two dams, drain its reservoir and retire the diversion tunnel that has long carried Eel River water into the Russian River watershed. The company would replace the infrastructure with a smaller facility that sharply curtails diversions in order to restore the Eel River’s struggling salmon populations. Supporters along the Eel see a long, overdue chance to undo generations of ecological damage. On the Russian River side, critics warn of heightened wildfire danger, worsening water shortages and severe economic strain for farms and communities that rely on the supply.
Gov. Gavin Newsom and some of California’s major water agencies hit a setback this week when a proposal to fast-track plans for a 45-mile water tunnel beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta died in the state Legislature.
Newsom has been trying to streamline legal and environmental review of the proposed water tunnel through budget measures that also would give the state authority to issue bonds to pay for the project.
The Rancho Bernardo Community Council has added its support to a local effort to get the water level in Lake Hodges raised by 13 feet above its current maximum to decrease the potential for wildfire.
A majority of the council agreed at its Sept. 4 meeting to send a letter to the San Diego County Water Authority board expressing strong support for not only restoring the Lake Hodges Dam, but maintaining the lake at a 293-foot operating level “to reduce wildfire risk.”
Water is becoming a scarce resource as Texas continues to grow, and it’s prompting concerns among state officials and industry leaders over what happens when the next drought occurs.
The regional economy is expanding, but growth trends are beginning to collide with stark realities about natural resources that are already strained.
Dismantling San Diego’s biggest water broker could be what local boundary referees recommend later this year in the face of ever-rising water rates.
That’s just one of a menu of options that San Diego’s Local Agency Formation Commission, known as LAFCO, will analyze in what’s known as a municipal service review of the San Diego County Water Authority. Reviews like this can inspire further action by the commission, endowed with legislative powers to break up or consolidate cities and government services.
San Diego residents will soon be getting letters in the mail about a program that city officials say could save them thousands of dollars in pipe repair costs.
While the city is responsible for maintaining water and sewage systems in neighborhoods, the actual service lines that run to individual homes are the homeowner’s responsibility — a fact many residents only realize when problems arise.
