As Pure Water Oceanside prepares to go online early next year, the facility is gaining worldwide attention for the advanced water technology that will soon create 32% of Oceanside’s water supply.
As water supply continues to raise alarm bells across the American West, Sen. Mark Kelly introduced a bill that would allow central Arizona’s Colorado River Indian tribes to give portions Colorado River shares to other parts of the state.
The Colorado River Indian Tribes are a single tribal nation made up of more than 4000 Chemehuevi, Mojave, Hopi and Navajo members who live along the river in California and Arizona.
An ambitious project to restore tidal wetlands on almost 1,200 acres of delta farmland has just completed its first phase, and the hoped-for transformation already is flourishing: River otters, rare seabirds and a single black bear have all returned to once-drained-out pastureland called Dutch Slough — results that hold promise for similar efforts toward many California environmental goals, including storage of greenhouse gases.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland will visit Las Vegas to discuss the worsening drought during a five-day swing in Western states this week to highlight programs in the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package, officials said Monday. The secretary will be in Las Vegas on Dec. 12, according to a Department of Interior release. Details of the trip are yet to be announced.
More than 140 water districts in the central San Joaquin Valley have yet to apply for state water debt relief, leaving thousands of customers susceptible to water shutoffs after the state’s moratorium expires on Dec. 31. The deadline to apply is Monday at 5 p.m. California residents who fell behind on paying their water bills during the pandemic are protected from having their water shut off through the end of the year.
Desperation over water scarcity has produced any number of schemes to relieve the crisis. But few are as chuckle-headed as a plan to pump groundwater from beneath the Mojave Desert and transport it 200 miles to urban Southern California.
This is the Cadiz water project, which has been percolating along since the turn of the century.
Arizona and the West could see their water supplies drop by as much as 30% by the middle of the century as warmer temperatures lead to less snowfall, reducing runoff into rivers and reservoirs, changing vegetation cover and altering wildlife habitat.
Those are the findings of a team of researchers led by Erica R. Siirila-Woodburn and Alan M. Rhoades at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who published a paper looking at the likelihood of a “low-to-no snow” future. Their analysis, published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth and Environment, also estimates when and where to expect the effects of a low-to-no snow climate disaster.
Hosing off the driveway. Watering lawns within 48 hours of a rainstorm. Washing a car without a shut-off nozzle.
Any of those wasteful practices could soon be illegal in drought-stricken California, with fines of up to $500 for violators.
Seven months after Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a drought emergency for most counties in California, his administration is moving forward with something water conservation experts said should have happened long ago — crafting statewide rules to ban the egregious wasting of water.
Today, the California Department of Water Resources initiated a $100 million funding program to restore capacity to portions of the California Aqueduct, San Luis Canal, Delta-Mendota Canal, and Friant-Kern Canal lost to land subsidence occurring during the last several decades.
“Fixing these canals is an important foundational piece to ensure a reliable and climate resilient water supply for California,” said DWR Director Karla Nemeth. “It enables us to move water during very wet conditions, which will be essential to adapting to more extreme weather. Restoring capacity in our existing infrastructure provides a critical link in diversifying water supplies by supporting groundwater replenishment throughout the Central Valley and water recycling projects in Southern California. It’s a prudent investment in our water future.”
Federal authorities have moved to reverse a Trump administration decision that cleared the way for Cadiz Inc. to pipe water across public land in the California desert.
The request filed in federal court Friday, which must still be granted, could deal a blow to the company’s decades-long effort to pump groundwater from beneath its desert property 200 miles east of Los Angeles and sell it to urban Southern California. The project is fiercely opposed by conservationists, who say it will dry up desert springs and seeps relied upon by Indigenous tribes and rare wildlife. Cadiz insists its plans won’t harm springs in the area.
