Late last year, the Sweetwater Authority water agency made a startling announcement: There were elevated levels of toxic industrial chemicals in the reservoir supplying much of southern San Diego County’s drinking water. Agency officials said they discovered the chemicals in October during a federally mandated round of testing at the Sweetwater Reservoir in Bonita.
After months of reporting by ABC 10News, the City of San Diego’s Public Utilities Department has implemented significant changes to address customer service issues and billing problems.”We’ve been able to make major strides in improving the customer experience for San Diegans,” said Lisa Celaya, City of San Diego’s Executive Assistant Director.
New Jersey’s attorney general said Tuesday chemical manufacturer 3M agreed to pay up $450 million to resolve lawsuits over natural resource contamination stemming from PFAS — commonly referred to as “forever chemicals.” The settlement is subject to court approval and a public comment period, Attorney General Matt Platkin’s office said. St. Paul, Minnesota-based 3M is expected to pay $285 million this year, with additional amounts payable over the next 25 years.
Gov. Gavin Newsom is proposing to fast-track a project to reroute more water around the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to farmers and cities as part of his revised budget blueprint set to be unveiled on Wednesday. “We’re done with barriers — our state needs to complete this project as soon as possible, so that we can better store and manage water to prepare for a hotter, drier future,” Newsom said in a statement provided to POLITICO. “Let’s get this built.”
Most of the water that courses through the Rio Grande to reach parched farmlands along the border gets its start here, where the Rio Grande is replenished through Mexico’s Rio Conchos. This pocket of the border is known as La Junta de los Rios, where the two rivers meet and irrigate what’s believed to be the oldest continually cultivated farmland in Texas.
California’s climate is changing faster than our infrastructure can keep up. In the past five years, we’ve seen atmospheric rivers cause catastrophic flooding, prolonged drought has devastated agricultural communities and perpetuated a lack of access to safe drinking water, and inconsistent snowpack makes it difficult for water managers to plan for the future. This is our new norm. Yet, much of California’s water infrastructure was built for a climate reality that no longer exists.
Lake Murray is one of several local reservoirs that may see their hours of operation get slashed starting next year because of budget issues in the city of San Diego. To cover the city’s $258 million deficit in its budget, the San Diego City Council is considering reducing the hours of both Lake Murray and Miramar Lake from seven days a week to just two – Saturday and Sunday.
As tense negotiations about the future of the Colorado River are stuck at a standstill, the people in charge are retreating further into the shadows. A group of negotiators — one from each of the seven states that use Colorado River water — will not be speaking at a major water law conference in June. Those representatives have appeared together on a panel at the conference for the last few years, and rarely appear together in public otherwise.
San Diego’s notoriously bad customer service and billing for sewer and water customers is dramatically improving thanks to new software, more employees and shifting priorities. Hours-long customer-service hold times have shrunk to a record-low 69 seconds on average, while significantly fewer customers are getting hit with surprise cumulative bills as high as $2,000.
As you drive through the Central Valley, it is hard to miss the iconic California Aqueduct, which moves millions of gallons of irrigation water through a large canal in the middle of the state. The canal is visible because it’s open on top — a fact that also allows a sizable percent of the water to evaporate, as the region now faces increasingly high temperatures for much of the year. A few years ago, scientists began asking: What if we covered the canal with solar panels?
