The law of the River– the Colorado River, that is – says the farmers come first. That’s how they see it in California, in the Imperial Valley, where farming is big business.
Over the past year we’ve been showing you California’s effort to save the winter run chinook salmon – a fish that has almost been lost to dammed rivers and warming waters.
It’s part of a growing partnership between state and federal wildlife agencies – and a small California tribe that’s been fighting to save those fish for years, and bring them back home.
Representatives of the Imperial Irrigation District (IID) and the Colorado River Board of California testified Tuesday, May 2, during an informational hearing before the California State Assembly’s Water, Parks and Wildlife standing committee.
According to a press release from Imperial Irrigation District, the IID Board Vice President and California’s Colorado River Commissioner JB Hamby and IID Water Department Manager Tina Shields testified at the state capitol on how Southern California is preparing for climate impacts to water supplies.
East County residents are still searching for answers after the Loveland Reservoir was drained and then closed to public access. They haven’t been told when or if they’ll be able to use the area for recreation again.
The Olivenhain Municipal Water District continues to reduce demand for imported drinking water by converting additional customer meters within The Lakes Above Rancho Santa Fe community to recycled water for irrigation. This phase included the installation of four new water meters that will measure an anticipated savings of over nine million gallons of imported drinking water each year.
While Arizona received more rain and snow in recent months, a wet winter will not save the state from the decades-long mega-drought that is gripping the region. Water officials have worked on finding unique solutions, including desalination.
The California Department of Water Resources May 1 conducted the fifth snow survey of the season at Phillips Station. The manual survey recorded 59 inches of snow depth and a snow water equivalent of 30 inches, which is 241% of average for this location on May 1.
The last time there was measurable snow at the Phillips snow course on May 1 was 2020, when only 1.5 inches of snow and .5 inches of snow water equivalent was measured.
DWR’s electronic readings from 130 snow sensors placed throughout the state indicate the statewide snowpack’s snow water equivalent is 49.2 inches, or 254% of average for May 1.
The snow water equivalent measures the amount of water still contained in the snowpack and is a key component of DWR’s water supply run-off forecast.
California water experts and environmental justice advocates are calling for state leaders to mandate that new levees be built with double the federal required protection to withstand the increasingly severe storms caused, in part, by human-caused climate change.
California’s levee protection regulations are not uniform; the state’s seemingly endless dikes and causeways are overseen by a patchwork of widely varying rules. Some communities like Pajaro in Monterey County, which was swamped by floodwaters this year, are protected only against smaller storms that happen every eight years, while levees protecting urban areas of the Central Valley are bolstered against much more powerful storms.
Hundreds of hazardous industrial sites that dot the California coastline – including oil and gas refineries and sewage-treatment plants – are at risk of severe flooding from rising sea levels if the climate crisis worsens, new research shows.
If planet-warming pollution continues to rise unabated, 129 industrial sites are estimated to be at risk of coastal flooding by 2050 according to the study, published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Science & Technology by researchers from University of California at Los Angeles and Berkeley, as well as Climate Central.
