Though recent rains have helped, the city of Carlsbad is still striving to conserve water. The rains have helped, but conservation is still needed, according to the Carlsbad City Manager’s office.
Camarillo’s North Pleasant Valley Groundwater Desalter began producing drinking water earlier this month, diminishing the city’s reliance on imported water.
The reverse-osmosis desalter, located at 2727 Somis Road, converts unusable brackish groundwater into 1 million gallons of high-quality potable water per day, city staff said in a news release. The plant will be producing about 4 million gallons per day when it is operating at full capacity in two months.
A recent report showed that there is not enough groundwater in a sub-basin surrounding Buckeye to provide the area with a 100-year supply.
That could be a trend seen across the West as a study from ASU found that California’s megadrought has excellent groundwater depletion.
California’s Central Valley covers 20,000 square miles and is a vast agricultural region with a value of approximately $17 billion per year in crops.
Though the recent barrage of winter storms has certainly improved California’s drought conditions, state water leaders are making moves to prepare for the inevitable dry season soon to come.
On Friday, the California Department of Water Resources kickstarted a partnership between state agencies, local governments, scientists and community members in a new task force, called the Drought Resilience Interagency and Partners Collaborative.
Now that the shock of a series of January storms has worn off, Los Angeles County officials face a herculean chore: Five reservoirs along south-facing San Gabriel Mountain slopes are filled with so much debris and soupy mud that they pose a flood risk to the communities below.
Flowers are blooming in the desert. Flooding and sewage spills have largely receded. Dams continue to collect runoff. But the drought is still far from over.
San Diego recently weathered a monthlong series of storms that also blanketed much of the West with badly needed snow. Still, the possibility of state-mandated water restrictions looms over the region this year, especially if dry conditions return to the Sierra Nevada.
Residents and local officials in San Diego are now taking stock of the situation as the deluges appear to be giving way to sunnier skies. While urban areas are still riddled with potholes and beach closures, rains have revived parched natural landscapes.
Quick action by the San Diego County Water Authority and its partner agencies is helping maintain water service in Tijuana after problems with the Mexican border city’s aqueduct began in December.
Emergency water delivery from a cross-border pipeline in Otay Mesa began the first week of January and is scheduled to continue until the end of February.
Early January was an unusually wild ride of atmospheric rivers. Nine sizable systems produced a train of storms beginning about New Years and lasting for several weeks across almost all of California. After three years of drought, the storms reminded us that California has flood problems similar in magnitude to its drought problems, and that floods and droughts can occur in synchrony.
Underground storage may be a key for Western states navigating water shortages and extreme weather.
Aquifers under the ground have served as a reliable source of water for years. During rainy years, the aquifers would fill up naturally, helping areas get by in the dry years.
The snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains, which has continued to increase throughout January as a result of storms battering much of the state since the New Year, might help California combat its ongoing drought.
As of January 20, the Sierra snowpack state-wide was at 240 percent of the average for this time of year. The South Sierra stations, located between the San Joaquin and Mono counties through to Kern county, reported snowpacks at 283 percent of the January 20 average.
