Water is flowing through two of three hydropower turbines in a blockish building at the base of Flaming Gorge Dam, so I can feel the floor buzzing — vibrations pulsating through my body — as Billy Elbrock leads me past the blue-and-yellow Westinghouse generators. The warehouse-like space is adorned with an American flag, and with the 1965 logo of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
The Fallbrook Public Utility District declared three FPUD-owned parcels to be surplus property.
The 5-0 FPUD board vote April 25 makes the findings that the properties are surplus land but does not authorize any sale. An interested public agency will have the first priority to purchase the property. If no public agency expresses interest or if good faith negotiations do not determine a mutually agreeable sales price and terms, the land can be sold on the public market.
Local residents spoke out at a packed standing room only town hall meeting last week about a proposal by the Fallbrook Public Utility District and Rainbow Municipal Water District to switch water suppliers, a change that they are reportng would save ratepayers millions of dollars.
Following years of escalating water costs from the San Diego County Water Authority, averaging 8% per year, FPUD and Rainbow are seeking to change water suppliers – through a process known as detachment – from the Water Authority.
After California saw extended periods of dry weather in the middle of winter, a series of late-season storms swept the Golden State in April and May, dusting the Sierra Nevada with fresh snow.
Did those spring snow showers help bolster the dwindling snowpack that historically provides about a third of the state’s water supply?
The short answer is that every little bit helps, but the snow did not come close to making up for almost no precipitation in January through March, normally the height of California’s wet season, said David Rizzardo, chief of hydrology for California’s Department of Water Resources.
Despite official calls to increase conservation amid worsening drought, urban water use across California increased by nearly 19% in March, according to the State Water Resources Control Board.
The startling conservation figure was among a number of grim assessments water officials offered reporters Tuesday in a California drought outlook. Others included critically low reservoir levels and major shifts in the water cycle due to climate change.
The Sacramento is California’s largest river. It arises near the lower slopes of Mt. Shasta, in the northernmost part of the state, and runs some four hundred miles south, draining the upper corridor of the Central Valley, bending through downtown Sacramento, and, eventually, reaching the Pacific Ocean, by way of the San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. Erik Vink, the executive director of the Delta Protection Commission, a state conservation agency, described the Sacramento to me as “California’s first superhighway.” By the eighteen-fifties, daily steamboats ferried passengers between San Francisco and Sacramento in as little as six hours.
California officials are poised to decide the fate of a controversial desalination plant planned along its southern coast, in a vote that comes as the American west battles an increasingly perilous drought.
California water use leapt 19% in March, amid one of the driest months on record. After more than a decade of debate, the California coastal commission on Thursday will finally vote on a proposal for a $1.4bn desalination plant in Huntington Beach, south of Los Angeles.
Nearly 4 million Angelenos will be reduced to two-day-a-week watering restrictions on June 1 under drought rules released by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power on Tuesday.
The highly anticipated announcement came two weeks after the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California called for the strictest-ever water cuts in the region due to worsening drought conditions and reduced supplies from the California State Water Project. The MWD action left many to wonder just how the rules would be applied in L.A.
Colorado didn’t see enough snow this winter to fully recover from the ongoing megadrought and now what snow the state did see is melting too quickly, experts say.
“If we continue on at the rate we’re at we’re looking at probably a complete meltout by the end of May or beginning of June,” Becky Bolinger, of the Colorado Climate Center, told The Denver Post.
That’s too soon. By several weeks, she said. So drought conditions are likely to worsen, exacerbating what officials are anticipating could be the worst wildfire year in Colorado’s history.
The pendulum of Northern California weather is getting ready to swing once again, from rain, hail, thunderstorms and snow showers at the start of this week to sunny and much warmer than average temperatures by the weekend.
Temperatures near Sacramento are expected to soar from a forecast high of 65 degrees Tuesday to 92 degrees by Saturday, staying in the upper 80s to low 90s early next week, according to the National Weather Service.
Daytime highs near South Lake Tahoe will jump from the mid-30s Tuesday to the mid-70s this coming weekend. Both are roughly 10 degrees hotter than normal for this time of year.
