A battle remains underway in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley Delta.
For decades, Delta residents and the state have been unable to agree on a plan to transport water from the rainy but rural northern part of the state down to the heavily populated, dry southern half.
In mountain peaks across the West, it’s their job to make it snow.
No, they’re not wizards, even if the work they do seems like magic.
Tensions seem to be cooling slightly between the San Diego County Water Authority and those that want to leave it.
Two small North County farming communities survived a second round of attempts by the Water Authority to wage a legal war against their divorce from the regional water supplier.
For nearly a month, millions of people across the American Southwest have sizzled, sweated and sweltered under a heat wave that refuses to let up.
Day after day, residents from Fresno to Phoenix have endured triple-digit temperatures and hot, restless nights that have offered little relief.
Helix Water District received recognition from The Climate Registry as a Water-Energy Leader Gold organization after the district reduced its electric use by 15% and greenhouse gas emissions by 40%.
The Climate Registry is a nonprofit organization that helps companies, governments, and institutions reduce their emissions. Its Water-Energy Nexus Registry is sponsored by the California Environmental Protection Agency and allows utilities and cities to measure, track, and mitigate greenhouse gas emissions associated with California’s water system.
July has been so hot thus far that scientists calculate that this month will be the hottest globally on record and likely the warmest human civilization has seen, even though there are several days left to sweat through.
The World Meteorological Organization and the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service on Thursday proclaimed July’s heat is beyond record-smashing.
Another week, another catastrophic, record-setting, history-making flood, this time in Kentucky.
Preliminary assessments indicate rainfall in Graves County last week likely set a new record for most precipitation in a 24-hour period, with 11.28 inches of rain. This would make it yet another “1,000-year” flood event, which had, according to historical projections, less than a 0.1 percent chance of occurring in any given year. One of the towns that experienced flash flooding was Mayfield, a community still rebuilding from a 2021 tornado that killed 57 people.
This was just one of the 11 flash flood emergencies in as many days in the United States, according to Weather Channel meteorologist Heather Zons. These events have claimed multiple lives: 2-year-old Mattie Shiels, 9-month-old brother, Conrad, and their mother, Katie Seley drowned after getting swept away by flash flooding in Pennsylvania, during an event that killed at least four others. In New York earlier this month, 43-year-old Pamela Nugent was swept away trying to evacuate a flooded area; 63-year-old Stephen Davoll drowned in his home in Vermont.
In a typical year, California mountains are largely snow-free at this stage in the summer, with some exceptions at higher elevations. This, however, has not been a typical year. In the last couple of weeks of July, large swaths of the Sierra continued to be covered in snow, making for tricky and in some cases treacherous hiking conditions.
Twenty-two attorneys general urged a federal court Wednesday to reject a proposed $10.3 billion settlement over contamination of U.S. public drinking water systems with potentially dangerous chemicals, saying it lets manufacturer 3M Co. off too easily.
The deal announced in June doesn’t give individual water suppliers enough time to determine how much money they would get and whether it would cover their costs of removing the compounds known collectively as PFAS, said the officials with 19 states, Washington, D.C., and two territories. In some cases the agreement could shift liability from the company to providers, they said.
“While I appreciate the effort that went into it, the proposed settlement in its current form does not adequately account for the pernicious damage that 3M has done in so many of our communities,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta, leader of the multistate coalition.
Pasadena is expected to change how water bills are calculated, leading to higher bills for some customers. The new rate structure and rates to be determined soon will allow the utility to meet its revenue requirement.
