Groundwater levels are dropping and domestic wells throughout the San Joaquin Valley are going dry as California’s third year of drought grinds on.
That includes entire towns, such as East Orosi and Tooleville in Tulare County, which both went dry last week.
It’s bad. But it may get worse.
As models predict another La Niña for the coming winter, which could lead to another dry year, leaders of water agencies and other groups from across California and the western United States met Tuesday to discuss how best to get commerce and industry to use less water.
While residential water use has declined, commercial and industrial users need retrofits, new equipment and new ways of doing business when it comes how much liquid “gold” they consume.
Blazes have burned thousands of acres, cued mandatory evacuations and threatened some of the state’s oldest and most impressive trees, but far fewer acres have burned in California wildfires through the first few weeks of summer than at the same point last year.
The tides may turn in the coming weeks as conditions stay hot and grow drier, but the numbers to date suggest the state may have averted a particularly nasty start to this wildfire season.
Environmental agencies on the local, state and federal levels are commending the efforts of two tidal habitat restoration projects in Solano County.
The California Department of Water Resources is aiming to preserve smelt and other fish populations in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta by improving food sources and habitat conditions in the Suisun Marsh, specifically by restoring Bradmoor Island and Arnold Slough.
City of San Diego residents reached out to us two weeks ago saying their water “tastes like dirt.”
CBS 8 worked to get an answer from the city. We were told the change in the water’s taste and smell was expected to be gone within a few days.
Residents in North Park said their water is still tasting and smelling strange.
An explosion at the Hoover Dam has prompted an emergency response from a Nevada fire crew, authorities said Tuesday morning.
“We have a crew on the way where we have a report of a fire,” said Lisa LaPlant, a spokesperson for Boulder City.
Boulder City officials said on Twitter that the city fire department was heading toward the incident about 10:30 a.m. after video circulated on social media showing an explosion near the dam.
More extreme water cuts are all but certain in the Southwest starting next year – including new water cuts for California – according to the latest government forecast for the Colorado River and Lake Mead, the country’s largest reservoir.
Lake Mead, which provides water to roughly 25 million people in Arizona, Nevada, California and Mexico, is losing water at an alarming rate amid an extraordinary, multi-year drought made worse by the climate crisis.
Santa Monica, California, used to rely heavily on water imported from the northern part of the state. But now less than half the coastal city’s water is imported, which spared the community from the state’s mandatory outdoor water restrictions that began at the beginning of June.
“That doesn’t mean we’re just sitting around doing nothing,” said Santa Monica’s water resources manager, Sunny Wang. “We’re looking at increasing our conservation efforts.”
One morning in the summer of 2018, Kelly Stober woke up and started to get ready for work. But when she turned on the faucet in her shower, no water came out.
Stober lives in a rural neighborhood a few miles east of downtown Sonoma. Like her neighbors, she relies on a well for drinking water, household uses, and irrigation. And her well, sunk 800 feet into the ground, had run dry.
Solvang commercial, industrial and institutional water system customers will face steep financial penalties if they don’t immediately cut back their water usage at least 20%.
City Council members on July 11 unanimously adopted a drought ordinance update that clarifies rate tier penalties in relation to declared drought stages. The city has been in a Stage 2 drought stage since August 2021.
