California’s 11th atmospheric river left the storm-soaked state with a bang Wednesday, bringing flooded roadways, landslides and toppled trees to the southern part of the state as well as drought-busting rainfall that meant the end of water restrictions for nearly 7 million people.
The Fallbrook Public Utility District board approved a 5% increase in the per diem pay board members receive.
The directors had been receiving $121.55 for each meeting. The board’s 5-0 vote Feb. 27 increased that amount to $127.63. Per diem payments are given for each meeting involving FPUD business, but a director may not be paid for more than 10 meetings in a month.
A bipartisan coalition of House lawmakers are forming a “Congressional Colorado River Caucus,” with the goal of collaborating on ways to best address worsening drought conditions across the seven-state basin.
“Together, and working with our colleagues in the Senate, we will collaborate with each other and state and local leaders, putting the interests of our communities above all else,” Rep. Joe Neguse said in a statement on Wednesday.
San Diego County received one of the heaviest soakings of the winter Wednesday from a storm that dropped 2 to 3 inches of rain at the coast and 5-plus inches in the mountains — precipitation that caused a large sinkhole on state Route 78 and numerous traffic accidents.
Caltrans said commuters began to report the sinkhole — described as “massive” by Vista Mayor John Franklin — in the middle of traffic lanes on the westbound side of the North County highway about 8:50 a.m.
EPA’s historic move to regulate “forever chemicals” in drinking water has set the stage for a multi-pronged courtroom slugfest among the agency, water utilities that must comply with the rule and multinational conglomerates that have flooded the environment with the toxicants linked to a long list of health problems, including cancer.
The San Diego County Water Authority has asked for public input over the next two months as it drafts a new two-year budget and sets rates to cover the cost of water-reliability projects that keep San Diego immune from drought.
Agency staff has recommended a $1.85 billion budget for the two-year period beginning July 1, 2023, and ending June 30, 2025.
That represents a 5% increase, but the 2024 rate increase is tentatively set at 14%, though efforts are underway to lower that.
California is no stranger to big swings between wet and dry weather. The “atmospheric river” storms that have battered the state this winter are part of a system that has long interrupted periods of drought with huge bursts of rain — indeed, they provide somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of all precipitation on the West Coast.
The parade of storms that has struck California in recent months has dropped more than 30 trillion gallons of water on the state, refilling reservoirs that had sat empty for years and burying mountain towns in snow.
California’s latest atmospheric rivers are sending rainfall higher into the mountains and onto the state’s crucial snowpack. The rain alone is a problem for low-lying areas already dealing with destructive flooding, but the prospect of rain on the deep mountain snow has triggered widespread flood warnings.
When rain falls on snow, it creates complex flood risks that are hard to forecast. Those risks are also rising with climate change.
The latest in a series of atmospheric river storms soaked California on Tuesday, bringing another deluge of rain to the already-saturated state, while a Nor’easter swirling over New York and New England prompted emergency orders and closed roads.
Several inches of rain was forecast in some areas of California, while as much as 3 feet (0.9 m) of fresh snow was expected in high-mountain elevations where snowdrifts already reach rooftops, according to the National Weather Service.
Glacial temperatures, battering rainfall and historic levels of snow are complicating conditions at ski resorts around Lake Tahoe, leaving crews to work around the clock to dig out chairlifts — usually suspended high above the slopes — that are now buried in snow.
