Five years from now, if all goes to plan, Arizona will have conserved 5 million acre-feet of water.
That’s enough to fill about 2.5 million Olympic-sized swimming pools.
Or about 70% of what the state is estimated to use in a year, from all sources.
Or a little less than double Arizona’s annual Colorado River allotment (that is, if we were getting our full allocation, which hasn’t happened in a while).
The drought-stricken Colorado River is in critical condition. Almost two years ago, the federal government declared the first ever shortage on the river, triggering cuts to water supplies in the Southwest. Today, the river remains unsustainably low. The Colorado is the lifeblood of the region. It waters some of the country’s fastest growing cities, nourishes some of our most fertile fields, and powers $1.4 trillion dollars in annual economic activity. The river runs more than 1,400 miles, from headwaters in the Rockies to its delta in northern Mexico where it ends in a trickle.
Floods and their consequences are a reality for many worldwide, including those living in California. This reality is evidenced by pictures of people stranded on roofs surrounded by water, people paddling down water-filled streets in makeshift boats, and farm fields and orchards covered in standing water. However, there is also growing acceptance that floods are natural, recurring events that have positive aspects, especially where they support migratory waterfowl, enhance fisheries, and sustain wetlands and their high diversity of organisms (Mount et al 2023).
The Imperial Irrigation District Board of Directors took a hard look at their On-Farm Efficiency Conservation Program (On-Farm) in the hopes that they can become more efficient at providing water efficiency savings for farmers.
IID Senior Program Manager Ben Brock, along with Water Department Manager Tina Shields, updated the Board of Directors on the lengthy and complicated process that the On-Farm program currently has perform in order to determine how much to pay farmers for the water they conserved during the IID Board of Directors meeting on Wednesday, July 26.
Part-time Windansea resident Brad Owens recently experienced a one-two punch that some others in La Jolla can empathize with. First, his water bills skyrocketed as much as 12-fold, even in a time when he wasn’t in San Diego. Then he learned his sewer rate for the coming year will be based on the water rate from that time, so his sewer bill will be 10 times its normal amount.
But perhaps more frustrating for Owens is the lack of information available about the policies and procedures of the San Diego Public Utilities Department, which handles water issues, and what can be done about unexplained rate spikes.
The Vallecitos Water District Board of Directors recognized students from district area schools for their excellence in the classroom in two separate contests: poster art for fourth graders and an essay competition for scholarships.
Nearly 200 million people in the United States, or 60% of the U.S. population, are under a heat advisory or flood warning or watch and have been since Thursday, according to the National Weather Service.
It’s a summertime sequence that’s become all too familiar in California: Extreme heat forces air conditioners into overdrive, which pushes the state’s power grid to the brink.
In August 2020, a major heat event fueled by the climate crisis forced some of the state’s first rotating power outages in decades, as the ongoing transition to green energy lagged behind demand. Last September, Californians narrowly avoided blackouts as a record-breaking heat wave broiled almost every corner of the state for days.
The Colorado River this spring ran high, fast and so full of sediment pushed downstream from wildfire burn scars that the water treatment plant in Hot Sulphur Springs couldn’t keep up.
The sediment repeatedly clogged the town’s intake valves, forcing town leaders to issue and emergency order in April and call for residents to voluntarily cut back on water use.
As Angelenos wither under another hot summer, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is shrinking a discount program that helped low-income families pay their bills.
The utility has no choice; the subsidies that funded the DWP’s discounted water rates were declared illegal by a Superior Court judge in May. That discount will disappear Thursday, although others will remain in place, the DWP said in a letter to customers.
