Trying to stave off dangerously low levels of water in Lake Mead, officials in California, Arizona and Nevada have reached an agreement to significantly reduce the amount they take from the Colorado River.
The problem took on new urgency this summer when the federal government declared a first-ever water shortage in the 86-year-old reservoir near Las Vegas.
NBC 7’s Omari Fleming spoke to Goldy Herbon with the San Diego Water Authority about the impact Tuesday’s storm had on our drought conditions.
NBC 7’s Omari Fleming (R) spoke to Goldy Herbon with the San Diego Water Authority about the impact the Tuesday, Dec. 14 storm had on our drought conditions. (Screenshot Courtesy NBC7 San Diego)
The San Diego County Water Authority has earned Climate Registered gold status from The Climate Registry for verifying and publicly reporting its greenhouse gas emissions. The effort fosters transparency for the agency’s climate mitigation initiatives and will help the Water Authority track and validate emissions reductions in the future.
The Climate Registry operates North America’s largest voluntary registry for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The Water Authority’s 2019 and 2020 inventories were verified and published in The Climate Registry’s public database in November, earning the agency gold status for both years.
A plan to build a new $2.3 billion reservoir in southern Santa Clara Couty passed a significant milestone on Wednesday when a key state agency ruled that it continues to qualify for nearly half a billion dollars in state funding.
Vicki McDowell woke up on a Saturday morning in May, thinking about what she would make her son for breakfast. He was visiting from Hayward, and she wanted to whip up something special. Biscuits and gravy. Fried potatoes. Eggs.
She walked to the kitchen sink to wash her hands. Turned on the faucet. Nothing happened. Worried, she tried the bathroom sink. Still nothing. She flushed the toilet. It gurgled.
In the verdant San Joaquin Valley, one of the nation’s most productive farming regions, domestic wells like McDowell’s are drying up at an alarming pace as a frenzy of new well construction and heavy agricultural pumping sends the underground water supply to new lows during one of the most severe droughts on record.
A recent new round of heavy rain and snow following a dry November soaked a thirsty California landscape – but it wasn’t enough to significantly improve the state’s water levels, according to data from the California Department of Water Resources.
The Soquel Creek Water District in California held a groundbreaking ceremony last week, commemorating the start of construction on its Advanced Water Purification Center – the core of the district’s Pure Water Soquel Groundwater Replenishment and Seawater Contamination Prevention Project.
State water agencies in Arizona, California and Nevada announced a $200 million investment in Colorado River conservation projects on Wednesday, in a last-ditch effort to keep the basin’s biggest reservoir from dwindling to dangerously low levels.
The cross-border collaboration, which also includes the Department of the Interior, will aim to add 500,000 acre-feet of additional water to Lake Mead — the Colorado River’s largest reservoir — in 2022 and 2023, by facilitating initiatives that promote water conservation in the Lower Colorado River Basin, according to the partners.
That additional water, which is enough to provide for 1.5 million households each year, would boost the reservoir’s level by 16 feet, a news release from the agencies said.
The San Diego County Water Authority has stepped up to provide additional water supplies to drought-ravaged areas in three Southern California counties.
Under an agreement with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, San Diego will provide water from an underground storage facility in Kern County to serve parts of northern Los Angeles County, Ventura County and San Bernardino County.
The just-passed atmospheric river gave California a lot of precious, badly needed water. But how well did our all-important reservoir systems do? For California, water storage, above and underground are the key to California’s economic fate.
As of midnight Monday, California’s major reservoirs keep getting more water from the weekend’s storm as the runoff finds its way into them.
