The Poway City Council unanimously voted Tuesday to move to Level 2 drought restrictions.
The decision follows an executive order in March by Gov. Gavin Newsom calling for increased water conservation after the driest first quarter in California’s history. The state is in the third year of significant drought.
Responding to California’s extreme drought, state water regulators have ordered many farmers, agricultural water districts and cities to stop diverting water from rivers and streams along the San Joaquin River.
Starting Wednesday, the State Water Resources Control Board is making “significant, very deep cuts” for water users, primarily in the San Joaquin River watershed, said Erik Ekdahl, deputy director of the state water board’s water rights division.
You’d think that, given how dangerously low Lake Mead is getting, we’d have a good idea of what life might look like without that water.
Yet few major players are modeling for a future without Colorado River water – or even a future in which we are asked to live on markedly less of it.
Ironically, the deeper the lake plunges, the more reluctant water managers seem to be about fleshing out the worst-case scenario.
A “dangerous and deadly heat wave” is on the way for the Southwest through the weekend, the Phoenix National Weather Service warns.
More than 30 million people are under heat alerts, and more than 50 daily high-temperature records could be broken through the weekend – including in Death Valley, California, one of the hottest places on earth.
Landscape designer Paul Robbins had more than water conservation in mind when he removed the muddy turf and bamboo behind his Pasadena rental and created a welcoming, low-water landscape.
“Our garden is very family-friendly,” says Robbins, gesturing toward the Victorian box tree where his 5-year-old daughter Zara likes to swing.
The San Diego County Water Authority has set a June 23 hearing for proposed SDCWA rates and charges for calendar year 2023.
A May 26 unanimous vote of the CWA board set the June 23 hearing date along with the proposed rates and charges. If those rates and charges are approved, the June 23 action will also allocate the pro-rata share of fixed charges to each CWA member agency.
Coastal Southern California increased water usage by more than 25% for the month of April, lagging behind most other parts of the state in conservation and appearing to dismiss dire warnings of supply shortages.
According to data released Tuesday by the State Water Resources Control Board, cities and towns in the South Coast hydrologic region — an area that includes Los Angeles and more than half the state’s population — used 25.6% more water in April than in April 2020, the first year of the current drought.
In response to prolonged drought across the West and ahead of the scorching summer months, California is asking its urban water suppliers to voluntarily report water consumption data sooner — so the state can better assess whether its water conservation goals are being met.
Years of low rainfall and snowpack coupled with more intense heat waves have fueled the state’s historic, multiyear drought conditions, rapidly draining its reservoirs.
Dangerous and potentially deadly heat will settle over the Southwestern United States for the next several days, with temperatures in some locations expected to break records and exceed 110 degrees.
More than 22 million people in California, Nevada and Arizona are under some sort of heat-related alert through at least part of the weekend, the National Weather Service said. A heat wave is defined as a period of abnormally and uncomfortably hot and unusually humid weather that lasts for two or more days.
As California continues to implement policies that are negatively impacting the agriculture and energy sectors, we must ask ourselves…who is looking out for California’s minority and disadvantaged communities?
The latest example is California’s Central Valley, particularly Kern County. Kern is a dynamic county that has a long history of welcoming people from other parts of the United States and immigrants from other countries.
