When Don Cameron first intentionally flooded his central California farm in 2011, pumping excess stormwater onto his fields, fellow growers told him he was crazy.
Today, California water experts see Cameron as a pioneer. His experiment to control flooding and replenish the ground water has become a model that policy makers say others should emulate.
An appeals court in Sacramento on Thursday upheld a California environmental agency’s standards for limiting the presence of the chemical perchlorate in the state’s drinking water.
In the appeal brought by plaintiff California Manufacturers and Technology Association, Judge Elena Duarte ruled the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment properly considered iodide uptake inhibition and established its public health goal “at the level at which no known or anticipated adverse effects on health occur, with an adequate margin of safety.”
Sixth Avenue used to cut through miles of farmland. Now, the road has disappeared under muddy water, its path marked by sodden telephone poles that protrude from the swelling lake. Water laps just below the windows of a lone farmhouse that sits alongside the submerged route.
Records keep piling up across Utah this winter.
Snowpack reached a new high after Thursday night’s storms. The snow water equivalent in Utah, or the amount of water the snow will release when its melts, sits at 26 inches as of Friday morning. That ties with the previous known record of 26 inches set on April 13, 1983, according to Utah Snow Survey data. And with the snow still falling, Friday is likely a new snowpack record.
Santa Monica has been using a pioneering water recycling facility since November to capture rain and store it underground for future use. As Southern California has been experiencing seemingly constant rainfall, the city has been capturing stormwater, urban runoff, and municipal wastewater and purifying it for potable reuse. This first-of-its-kind facility is located beneath a parking lot and features a 1.5-million-gallon stormwater harvesting tank and a one-million-gallon-per-day advanced water treatment facility. The recycled water can be used for irrigation, toilet flushing in buildings that have dual plumbing, and to recharge groundwater aquifers.
Oceanside declared a local emergency this week in hopes of getting state and possibly federal money to cover the repair costs for sinkholes, landslides, flooding and a sewage spill caused by the recent series of storms.
With an exceptionally rainy season for California, much of the state is free from drought, including most of San Diego County, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
The San Diego County Water Authority (SDCWA) last week started a months-long public process to refine its next two-year budget and draft a preliminary proposed rate increase for 2024. The average rates charged by the Water Authority are currently projected to rise by approximately 14% next year, though agency staff and board members are assessing strategies to lower the number.
Since the beginning of 2023, California has seen a record-setting amount of snow across the state, especially in the Sierra Nevada, setting up the state to close in on the records for the highest snow water equivalent, which was reached just over a decade ago.
Snow water equivalent is the amount of water that would result from melting the snowpack, according to the UC Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Lab.
During a winter of blizzards, floods and drought-ending downpours, it’s easy to forget that California suffers from chronic water scarcity — the long-term decline of the state’s total available fresh water. This rainy season’s inundation isn’t going to change that.
How is this possible, given the unrelenting series of atmospheric river systems that have dumped near-record snowfall over the Sierra and replenished the state’s reservoirs?
