The Poseidon desalination plant in Carlsbad — by far the San Diego region’s most expensive supply of water — is about to get even more costly.
Under pressure from state environmental regulators, the company is now scrambling to complete an estimated $159-million overhaul of its system for pulling ocean water from the Agua Hedionda Lagoon up to its $1-billion reverse-osmosis facility perched atop a nearby hill.
The San Diego County Water Authority is taking strategic steps to minimize 2023 rate increases for its 24 member agencies and their customers while ensuring a safe, reliable, and affordable water supply as drought grips California for a third consecutive year.
Water Authority staff proposed increasing 2023 rates and charges for member agencies by 5.2% for treated water and 3.7% for untreated water. The increases are attributable to historically high inflation, significant energy cost increases from SDG&E, and continued cost increases by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.
Alex Cardenas. J.B. Hamby. Jim Hanks. Javier Gonzalez. Norma Sierra Galindo.
There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of them. But with the Colorado River in crisis, they’re arguably five of the most powerful people in the American West.
The window to avoid even more painful cuts on the Colorado River just closed.
The federal Bureau of Reclamation is asking states to conserve 2 to 4 million acre-feet of water, just to keep Lake Powell and Lake Mead out of critically low territory in 2023.
And we’ll need a plan to do so by mid-August when shortage levels and other important operating details for the next water year are set.
A stubborn La Niña climate pattern in the tropical Pacific is likely to persist through the summer and may hang on into 2023, forecasters say.
La Niña has been implicated not only in the unrelenting drought in the U.S. Southwest, but also in drought and flooding in various parts of the world, including ongoing drought and famine in the Horn of Africa.
As a historic drought grips southern California, one district is getting tough on water usage violators by reducing their supply directly from the source so that sprinklers and outdoor hoses no longer work.
The Las Virgenes Municipal Water District in Calabasas, north of Los Angeles, places metal disks with a small hole into the main water supply lines to offending homes. Flow per minute drops from around 30 gallons to just one gallon – enough for cooking, washing dishes and showers, but not gardening.
If you take a boat ride to Catalina Island, you’ll notice it’s surrounded by the ocean.
“We’re about 4,000 people on a year-round basis, but we get up to a million visitors a year, and so of course that impacts a lot of our infrastructure because we have these visitors and thank God we do because we’re an entirely tourist-based community,” said Avalon Mayor Anni Marshall.
As California toils through a third consecutive drought year, many Sacramento Valley farmers, well known for supporting waterfowl that stop along the Pacific Flyway, are being left high and dry.
The farmers are facing water-supply challenges that are worse this season than in previous dry years.
“This drought is hitting Northern California really hard and in some unprecedented ways,” said Ellen Hanak, director of water policy for the Public Policy Institute of California, speaking last week on drought at a meeting of the California State Board of Food and Agriculture.
You’ve got a smartphone. Maybe a smart watch. Or even a smart doorbell.
In the coming months and years as California struggles with worsening droughts, millions of Bay Area residents will soon be getting a smart water meter.
The way the story goes, the one Fort Collins resident Aaron Million first told more than a decade ago, the whole thing started with one of those ah-ha moments, a split-second grasp of some sliver of grand opportunity.
Million, who in the mid-2000s, was pursuing a master’s degree in agriculture and resource economics at Colorado State University, was holed up in the library on a Sunday night. At some point, Million’s attention wandered to a collection of early 1900s Colorado state maps. Million fixated on a 41-mile stretch of the Green River that briefly swerves in and out of the Northwest corner of the state.
